Before entering through the panel, Kingsley had to find a light. He’d noticed a matchbox on the fireplace mantel in the music room, which he returned for. And in the parlor, he found half a candle, wearing wax and dust on its holder, abandoned on a shelf. He lit the candle and slipped through the panel door and into whatever mad world awaited him behind it.

Kingsley was grateful for the candle, for it surely saved him from tumbling down the steep stone staircase that began immediately on the other side of the door. He descended carefully, moving his hand along the walls to steady himself. The surface beneath his fingers was cool and gritty, rough like bare stone. He counted thirteen steps in all. When he was certain he’d reached the bottom, he felt along the wall for a light switch. While he didn’t find one, he felt something. He brought the stub of yellow candle toward what his hand had discovered.

He saw an old man’s face.

Kingsley recoiled, his breath catching in his throat.

Then he laughed. It wasn’t a face at all, but a black leather face mask. What were they called? Gimp masks. That was it. Not his taste, but he’d seen men wearing them in some of the more hardcore clubs he’d frequented, sometimes for work, sometimes for pleasure. Kingsley lifted the mask off the hook on the wall. It was finely-stitched and well-made, though the leather had dried out and cracked from long neglect. He returned it to the hook.

Kingsley swept his candle ahead of him before moving even an inch forward. He couldn’t see the full expanse of the room, but he saw enough to know that he was in some forgotten place filled with decades-old instruments of torture. The dungeon—for surely that was the only word to call this hidden part of the château—smelled like a cave. Dusty and dank with rot and decay. Kingsley had been in kinky clubs that tried to recreate the medieval dungeons of old. They had the stone walls, the candles, the iron latches. What they lacked was the smell. The scent of the forgotten. The odor of despair.

He stopped to examine a set of wooden and iron stocks, similar to what the Puritans once used to publicly shame offenders. Next to it he saw something like a kneeling bench in a church, no doubt used for spanking and paddling. What else? A rusting suspension rig. And scattered on the floor the remnants of broken canes, leather straps, and a scalpel he almost stepped on with his bare foot. Kingsley picked it up. He saw it had dried blood on it. He flung it from him and wiped his hands on his jeans.

Ten paces from the stocks he found an X-shaped cross, the wooden beams scored with the marks of decades of desperate fingernails. Kingsley touched the scratch marks and remembered leaving marks just like these one long dark night. Not on wooden rails, however, but on the stomach of a beautiful pale-haired monster, petty payback for the cock being shoved down his throat.

In the same cavernous room, Kingsley also found iron brackets nailed deep into the walls, a tall metal cage locked but with no key in sight, and a sort of medical bed with platforms for the legs and cuffs for the ankles. He pictured his red-capped beauty lying naked on the table, strapped here and helpless while he stroked her open pussy, fucked it while she pretended to hate every second of it. He needed one of those tables for his flat back in Paris.

Five paces from the table, Kingsley found a hallway. His candle wasn’t guttering yet, but it would soon. He didn’t have time to linger.

“Where are you, you monster?” Kingsley breathed, shuddering with need as he wandered down the hall. “You should be here. This is where your kind belongs. And mine.” For they were the same, he and his monster. And truly, who was the more depraved—the boy sadist or the grown man who would have knelt to him on this fetid floor? Even now Kingsley was hard, his breaths shallow, his cock aching. Seven years ago, he’d whispered to his master, “There is nothing you could do to me I wouldn’t want…” And in this cold dark dungeon corridor, Kingsley knew those words were still true. More true than ever. Indeed, the only truth he knew. If his monster were only here now…

“I want you,” Kingsley whispered. “I still want you with every cell in my body.”

As if in answer to his longing, the candle’s scalding wax spilled onto Kingsley’s fingers, sending pain shooting through his arm, into his chest, down to his groin.

“Merci,” Kingsley said to his monster, who he wanted to imagine had sent the burning wax as a gift. Nonsense, of course. Stage one insanity. Still, Kingsley couldn’t help but think his monster would have liked it here in this dungeon. And where else in a house like this could you keep a wolf?

Kingsley brushed the wax off his fingers as he went deeper into the corridor. His candle revealed a door in the wall and Kingsley tried to open it. It wasn’t locked, but the hinges were rusted. He put his shoulder against the damp wood and pushed. The door split along the hinges. That wasn’t quite what he’d intended. Ah, well, too late now. He entered the room.

At first, he found nothing that surprised him. In the center of the small room was a narrow brass twin bed, leather straps hanging loose from the bars of the headboard and the footboard. The mattress was bare and foul, with a rust-colored stain in the center. Kingsley didn’t know what was more frightening—that the large stain could be blood? Or something else?

He moved quickly to leave but stopped when he saw the writing on the wall. With a loose bit of stone, someone had scrawled words on every wall. The same words over and over again.

Je déteste mon mari.

I hate my husband.

Kingsley laughed softly. Madame must have been kept in this room once upon a time, and she’d rebelled against her master/husband by decorating the dungeon with these lovely little messages. Cute. He might have done the same if his master had left him unsupervised long enough to cause that kind of trouble.

The words were everywhere, Kingsley saw. On the walls—all four of them. On the floors from corner to corner. On the back of the broken door. Kingsley raised his candle over his head, curious to see if Madame had really written those four words all over the ceiling as well. She had written something there, but not about her husband. Something more chilling.

I don’t like this. I want to go home.

“Christ,” Kingsley said, reading those words.

“What, Kingsley?” Madame had asked him just that night. “What would you have said if your Marcus had answered the phone?”

“I was in the hospital when I called. I would have said, ‘Please come get me. I want to go home.’ ”

“Like a little boy, sick at school, calling his mother,” Madame had said.

Or a new bride, terrified of her new husband and the games he forced her to play…

I don’t like this. I want to go home.

A thousand times Kingsley had cursed the boy who’d owned him. A thousand times he’d screamed and railed and ranted. But never had he said, “I don’t like this.” Not once. Not ever.

Not even now.

“What did he do to you?” Kingsley said to the ceiling, to the ghost of the girl Madame had once been, the girl who’d been kept a prisoner in this vile room by her husband.

Kingsley’s arousal fled. Nausea took its place. Nausea and sadness. He retraced his steps to the panel door, doubling his original pace. He exhaled with relief when he was once again in the parlor, the dungeon locked and hidden behind the looking glass where it belonged. Kingsley hoped it would rot forever.

Kingsley sped quietly up the servants’ steps and past the room were Amel and Leon played. No wonder they’d come to the closed wing of the house to have sex. Amel was a screamer. After seeing the stained bare mattress and those words scrawled in the dungeon, the sound of a woman having a loud and lusty orgasm was sweeter than a sonata to his ears. He’d known there had to be a catch to this place, a dark side, a terrible secret. Down in that foul dungeon he’d found it. But instead of making him fear Madame, he felt the deepest admiration for her. She hadn’t perished in that dismal cell. She hadn’t let her husband break her. She’d survived, escaped, and taken control. No more monsters in the house, and all thanks to her.

There had been a catch, yes, but Madame had caught it. Caught it like a bullet. And now there was nothing in the château but warm and friendly fires, laughing lovers, delicious decadent games, and a beautiful newborn baby with another on the way.

Kingsley found his room again. Polly was still asleep in the bed. He stripped naked as quickly as he could and crawled under the covers, grateful for the warmth of the bed and Polly’s body. She stirred awake and drew him close.

“Where did you go?” she asked, pressing her soft body against his. She didn’t sound accusatory, only curious.

“I went to smoke,” he said. “And I heard the baby crying so I went into his room. Madame was there, and we talked awhile. Sorry.”

“It’s alright,” she said and settled down to sleep again. “What do you think of Madame?”

“I think I want to kill her husband.”

Polly laughed. “Stand in line.”