The Mistress

She started as she heard the sound of a car coming up the road. It turned into the driveway and crawled toward the house, another car behind it. Grace couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe, could do nothing but clutch her hands at her heart and stare.

The first car stopped and Kingsley stepped out from the driver’s side. Kingsley...bloodied but alive. He laid his hand on the hood and breathed, clearly in agony.

Another car door opened and Søren emerged, something in his arms. Not something...someone. He carried Nora to the house. But was she alive? Grace couldn’t tell.

From the second car emerged Wesley. He looked shell-shocked, pale as a ghost, but alive. Alive was all she cared about. Alive was all that mattered.

Wesley went to Kingsley and took his arm and put it around his own shoulders. Kingsley let his weight fall onto Wesley and Wesley half walked, half carried Kingsley toward the house. Towels, bandages...she’d find them and see to Kingsley’s wounds.

Grace ran to the door and opened it. Søren came in first.

Nora’s head lay on Søren’s shoulder. Grace gasped as two bright green eyes met her own.

“Grace? What the hell are you doing here?” Nora asked, as if they’d met at a party in Manhattan and not a house in the middle of nowhere.

“It’s a long story. Are you all right?”

“Oh...I’m fine,” she said as Søren carried her up the stairs and Grace waited at the bottom. “Is Zach here?”

“He’s in Australia.” Grace laughed the words. How absurd it was for her to be here—she wanted to be nowhere else in the entire world.

“Can you tell him something for me?”

“Anything,” Grace promised.

“Tell him my edits are going to be a little late. I have a good excuse, I promise.”

38

THE PAWN

Laila awoke to silence. Silence, yes, but not stillness. The air buzzed around her as if something great and terrible had happened and the whole world still shuddered from the aftershock.

She threw off the blankets and raced into the hallway. She saw her uncle and her aunt disappear into a bedroom at the end of the hall. At the bottom of the stairs Grace stood with Kingsley, helping him take off his bloody shirt. And Wes, he stood in the middle of the foyer, leaning against the wall, taking short, shallow breaths like he was trying to stop himself from throwing up.

“She’s alive...” Laila looked at Wesley and started to head to her uncle’s door. He grabbed her hand and pulled her back to him.

“We should give them some time.”

Laila nodded and tried to calm herself, although everything in her wanted to run to her aunt, embrace her, cling to her, weep in her arms for unparalleled joy. But something told her Wes was right, she should stay here. She should stay with him. He’d taken her hand and hadn’t let it go.

She looked down at their hands and then back up at Wes. He stared down the hall, stared at the closed door behind which her aunt and uncle had their reunion. On Wes’s face she saw grief and relief wrestling with each other. The relief she understood. The grief...

It came to her then. Wes wasn’t merely a close friend of her aunt’s. His feelings went far deeper than a crush. He loved her. He was in love with her. And in her moment of greatest crisis, her aunt had clung to her uncle and not him.

It seemed such a travesty...such a waste. Here stood this beautiful young man who had everything to give and no one to give it to.

“I shouldn’t say this,” Laila said, summoning all her courage. When all her own courage wasn’t enough, she summoned some of her aunt’s and then some of her uncle’s. Finally it was enough. “But I will.”

“Say anything you want, Laila.” Wes still held her hand. She took that as a sign to say the words her heart demanded of her.

“If I were her...” she began before leaning forward and giving him the quickest of kisses on the cheek, “I would have picked you.”

39

THE QUEEN

Nora clung to Søren as he carried her up the stairs. They didn’t speak. What was there to say? Everything they needed to say to each other they’d said in that room where they knelt facing each other with death at their backs. They needed no words, needed nothing but each other, and since they had each other, they wanted for nothing.

Søren sat her gently on the edge of the bed while he went into the bathroom and turned on the bathtub faucet. She was covered in blood, in dirt, in two days of sweat and fear. She couldn’t wait to get clean again, to get out of these clothes she’d been wearing for what felt like a year now. A long hot bath sounded like heaven and she knew it would be heaven because Søren was there.

As the water filled the bathtub, Søren came back to her and helped her undress. He didn’t wrinkle his nose at how badly she smelled. He didn’t comment on her wounds, even the huge blackening bruise on her side from where she’d been brutally kicked. To talk about it would make it matter and now nothing mattered except the beautiful truth that she was alive and safe, he was alive and safe and they were together.

He led her to the bathtub and she sank into the water slowly, gingerly, and winced as the heat seeped into her wounded skin.

Søren knelt at the side of the bathtub and pulled her hair loose and helped her lay back into the water. When she rose up again she saw water on his face.

“Sorry, sir,” she said, picking up a towel. “I didn’t mean to splash you.”