By the time Colonel Masson arrived in his office at eight a.m. the next morning, Kingsley had already been waiting a full hour.

Kingsley sat behind the colonel’s desk, his feet on top of some very important papers.

The colonel paused in the doorway. “Lieutenant? Your feet are on my desk and you are in my chair,” he said. He didn’t look happy. “Why is that?”

“Because it would please your wife to know I put my feet on your desk, wouldn’t it?”

The colonel did not ask him again to remove his feet from the desk. He shut the door behind him and locked it. “My wife,” the colonel said at last.

“Your wife,” Kingsley repeated.

“You went back to the château.”

“I did.”

“Without permission.”

“I had her permission. Hers is all I need.”

“It’s my house,” the colonel said. “She stole it from me.”

“You don’t actually have a nephew, do you?”

“No,” the colonel said. He slowly sunk down into the chair across from his desk. “But I do have a son.”

Kingsley wasn’t surprised. He hadn’t been expecting that, but he wasn’t shocked either.

“Leon’s your son,” Kingsley said. “But not hers?”

The colonel nodded.

“You were still together with her when you had him,” Kingsley said.

“I can do arithmetic, too, Lieutenant.”

Kingsley stared at the colonel, this tall, handsome, strapping aristocratic man with his iron gray hair and obsidian eyes. A stubborn old fool dying of loneliness and male pride.

“She wanted children of her own,” the colonel said. “I told her ‘no.’ ”

“No? Why?” Kingsley asked, his brow furrowed. What man would deny his own wife a child? “She loves children.”

“Plutarch tells a story,” the colonel said, “of the Athenian general Themistocles who is famous for saying his son was the most powerful person in all of Greece. As he said to his son, ‘The Athenians command the rest of Greece, I command the Athenians, your mother commands me, and you command your mother…’ ”

Colonel Masson glanced up at the ceiling as if he was too ashamed to meet Kingsley’s eyes.

“You couldn’t stand to share her with a child?” Kingsley asked. “Your own child?”

“Her family lost everything in the war. Everything. The Nazis killed her brother, burned the house, the fields. When I say everything, I mean everything. But my family, we were lucky. Her father and mine served side by side as spies. Her father saved my father’s life. I knew I’d marry her before I even saw her. Both families expected it. And then I met her. I’d never seen a more beautiful girl. So innocent, too. I was besotted. Before we even married I paid off all the debts her mother owed and bought her a house, sent her sisters to school. I thought she’d worship me as a god, a savior at least. I thought she did.” The colonel paused, tapped the arm of the chair. “She’s a good actress. Too good. I thought I was enough for her. Couldn’t bear to think of her loving someone more than me, of sharing her body with someone other than me, being commanded by someone other than me.”

“But you have a son,” Kingsley reminded him.

“I had an affair. Meaningless. Lasted two weeks,” he said, “and Leon was the result. I visited him here in Paris, sent money. When my wife found out I had a child…I think she’d been waiting for her moment and that was it. For years…since our marriage probably, she’d secretly kept notes and photographs and files on every man who ever dropped his trousers at that house or picked up a whip. Princes and Generals played under my roof. And they weren’t going to be happy to see their names in print. With what she had, what she knew, what she was willing to tell or sell…she could have destabilized whole regions, started wars. And I would have been a dead man. But that wasn’t enough for her.”

Kingsley had to admire the woman for her cunning—to keep secret files, blackmail material, to use it to control rich and powerful men… God, what a woman.

“I saw what you did to her,” Kingsley said. “The bloody bed. Did you keep her a prisoner in the dungeon?”

The colonel laughed. He laughed and laughed.

“What?” Kingsley demanded, ready to kill the man. He had his Beretta under his jacket. Would serve the bastard right.

“Why am I not surprised she never cleaned up that mess? She probably goes in that room and pleasures herself thinking of what she did to me there.”

“What did she do to you?”

“She drugged me, tied me to the bed, and kept me there a week until I agreed to her terms. Everywhere I looked, I saw her words to me from our wedding night. She’d scrawled them all over the walls. I’d given her a phrase to use if I went too far. Thought we’d need it. I wanted her so much, I didn’t even trust myself. I beat her and she never used the words I gave her—just kept saying, ‘I don’t like this. I want to go home.’ I gave her the phrase to protect her and now she mocks me with it.”

“Looking glass,” Kingsley said.

The colonel nodded. “I thought she was playing along, playing scared, playing innocent. I told her a hundred times before that when she wanted me to stop to say ‘looking glass’ and I would stop. But it had to be that word. It couldn’t be any other word. She never said it.”

“Looking glass,” Kingsley said. “What’s the joke?”

“You don’t know?” the colonel asked. “Thought it would be obvious.”

Finally, Kingsley got the joke.

“Her name is Alice,” Kingsley said.

“I told her I was taking her to a kind of looking-glass world where everything was a little different, a little mad. But anytime she wanted to go back to the real world, the safe world, she only had to say ‘looking glass’ and I would take her back,” the colonel said. “But she didn’t want to go back. She just wanted it all for herself.”

“I saw blood on the bed in the dungeon. Yours?” Kingsley could imagine Madame castrating the colonel on that bed. He liked to imagine it, in fact.

“Hers,” he said. “From our wedding night. Same rule. If I’m hurting her, she was supposed to say the phrase. She didn’t. The room was dark. I thought she was…”

“Wet?” Kingsley said.

“She wasn’t,” the colonel said.

Kingsley cringed and muttered “Christ” under his breath.

“She lay there in the dark,” the colonel continued, “dead silent, playing the martyr, while I fucked her to shreds. I was furious at her for not telling me I was tearing her. I would have stopped, if she’d only… Ah.” He shook his head. “She looked so innocent after when she’d said, ‘I only wanted to please you.’ Cold-blooded and calculating even then.”

“Or a scared eighteen-year-old girl forced into marriage with an older man who her mother told to obey completely, because his family had saved them from starvation?”

“Tell yourself that,” the colonel said with a defiant lift of his chin. “But I know better. She kept the bloody sheet for a reason and it wasn’t sentimental. Kept it, saved it, and used it to torture me. She’s mocked me for years. Mocked me with love letters, then refused to see me. Played mind games with my agents. Turned my best agent against me. Kept the fucking house?” The colonel laughed, not a happy sound. “That house has been in my family for two hundred years. But if I so much as step foot on the property, she’ll send her files to Le Monde. That’s why she went after Leon, you know. I tried to go see her. She sent a note to the front gate, carried by one of her pets, the one with the scar. You know what the note said?”

Kingsley shook his head.

“It said, ‘You come here again, and I will slit your son Leon’s throat and send you the sheet he bled out on as a Christmas gift.’ ”

Kingsley’s eyes widened.

“As if threatening him wasn’t enough,” the colonel said, “she found him. I’d done everything I could to keep him hidden but she worked her magic, her connections. She found Leon, played with his mind, and seduced him into moving in with her. God only knows what she’s told him about me.”

“If it makes you feel any better,” Kingsley said, “he’s very happy there. And she hasn’t slit his throat. Yet.”

“That doesn’t make me feel better.”

Kingsley stood up, looked down at Colonel Masson. He thought about saying something, then decided it wasn’t worth it. He turned for the door, but stopped when the colonel said, “Did you sleep with her?”

“How is that any of your business?”

“So you did?”

“I don’t kiss feet and tell,” Kingsley said. “I will say this: If you go near her or send anyone else to her…ah, no reason for threats. You know what I can do to you.”

They both knew. The colonel had overseen Kingsley’s training, after all. And Kingsley was thirty-five years his junior.

“She must have been very good to you to inspire this kind of loyalty,” the colonel said. “What did she do to you? Play your sweet maman? And you were her little lost boy? It’s all an act. No matter how kind she was to you, it’s nothing but a con. I was her first victim. She played the role of the perfect wife for fifteen years.”

“No, she wasn’t kind to me. She did the cruelest thing a woman can do to a man, and I will still burn you if you go near her and her house again.”

The colonel laughed a sad little defeated laugh.

“I had a feeling you two would get along.”

Kingsley started to tell him just how well he and Madame had gotten along, but the colonel dropped his guard for a split second and Kingsley saw such longing on his face, such loneliness… He recognized that look. God knew, he’d seen it in the mirror enough times.

“Did she tell you she was my wife?”

“She didn't have to. I guessed when you didn't punish me for breaking Huet's nose.”

“I still love her,” the colonel said. “After all that…I still love her. And she still loves me. Almost as much as she hates me.”

“Can’t you make peace with her? Apologize? Grovel?”

And to that the colonel said simply, “No.”

“Your loss,” Kingsley said.

“You don’t understand. This is the game. As long as I keep playing with her, she’s still in my life. The second I forfeit, the game ends.”

“It’s a stupid game,” Kingsley said. “You shouldn’t have dragged me into it.”

“You’re right. But it’s all I have. What do you have?”

Kingsley wanted to give him a smart answer.

He didn’t have one.

The colonel’s shoulders slumped, the fight gone out of him. “I retire in two months. I think we can pretend this never happened, yes?”

Kingsley shrugged. “What happened?”

Without another word, Kingsley walked down the hall of HQ and wasn’t surprised to see Bernie sitting on a chair right outside the door to Captain Huet’s office.

Kingsley paused and narrowed his eyes at Bernie. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-five,” Bernie said. “Why?”

Jacques’s our first boy in twenty-five years… Our last boy—I call him my nephew…he moved away years ago, but he’s still drawn back to us. He visits me often, brings me all the gossip. The children of this house are all very loyal even if their parents are not…

She has someone on the inside. I never told her my last name. She knew it anyway…

“No reason,” Kingsley said. He’d left the château, and he was never going back. Some things were better left a mystery.

Kingsley left Bernie without another question, without another word and walked out onto the Paris streets sweating in the full heat of a city morning. Exhausted and sore as he was, he walked back to his apartment rather than take a taxi. Paris was bright and thriving that day, buzzing with voices, with beautiful women in trim high heels with silk scarfs of every color dancing behind them as they strode the sidewalks. Tourists thronged the parks and nannies pushed carriages and men sat at café tables drinking coffee and solving the world’s problems. He bore the marks of Madame’s château on his body, but only on his body. By trying to break his spirit, Madame had helped heal an old wound. Maybe now that he knew why he’d run away from Søren, he could find a way back. He thought of this when he turned the corner and saw the very same phone booth he’d used to call Madame that first day. He stepped inside and closed the door. He put in all his coins and dialed a phone number he shouldn’t have known by heart but did.

After three rings, someone answered.

“St. Ignatius Catholic School for Boys?” A woman’s voice. They must have hired a receptionist. “How may I help you?”

“Is Marcus Stearns there?” Kingsley asked, in an American accent.

“No, he no longer teaches here. I could relay a message to him, if you like.”

A message. He’d leave a message and in an hour or a day or a week, he’d get a phone call. Is that what he wanted? A call back? A long chat?

Or nothing.

He could leave a message and wait and wait and wait and his phone might never ring.

And that would break him in a way Madame could only dream about…

“No message,” Kingsley said. “Thank you.”

He hung up.

If Søren wanted him, he would find him. In the meantime…

Kingsley returned to his apartment, stripped out of his clothes, and crawled under his sheets. They embraced him like an old friend. He closed his eyes and felt sleep creeping along the floor toward him, ready to join him in bed. At last sleep came to him.

He did not dream.