The Mistress

Kingsley stopped his thoughts in their tracks. He couldn’t think about Juliette now, what she was to him, what the future held. He needed to stay calm, rational, if they were to make it out of this alive, all of them. And they would survive this. He would make sure of it no matter the price to his soul.

For two hours he sat and watched the house, waiting for a curtain to move, a door to open. Nothing happened. Nothing at all. A wasted trip. As Kingsley started to stand, to stretch his legs, he saw something.

Ducking down again, he waited and watched.

At the front of the house on the second floor, a curtain moved. It could have been nothing, the air-conditioning coming on. Or it could be something, someone... He brought the spyglass up and stared.

The curtain parted and a woman stood at the window. Thirty years disappeared in an instant. Long dark hair, bistre eyes, a dancer’s physique...

“Ma soeur...”

Marie-Laure stood staring out the window onto the long driveway. She seemed to be waiting for someone. He knew who she waited for, and as long as Kingsley had a breath left in his body, he’d make sure the person she waited for never came.

He raised his rifle and peered through the sight.

Only Marie-Laure stood at the window, however. And surely she hadn’t executed Nora’s kidnapping alone. If he killed her now, what would stop her henchmen from killing Nora and making a run for it? Nothing.

Marie-Laure stepped away from the window and Kingsley lowered the rifle.

He had no choice. He would wait for tonight, for darkness, and he would go in.

Back through the woods he crept, careful to not be seen or heard. Once in his car he stopped to breathe. Until that moment he saw Marie-Laure in the window, he had cherished a shadow of a doubt that perhaps they’d been wrong, that it was someone pretending to be her to torture them. Now he had no doubts. It was her, his sister, still alive. But not for long.

He started the car and eased back onto the road. Although it had been years since he’d been to Daniel’s house, he needed to consult no maps. He still remembered the way.

Funny how terribly, maddeningly small the world was they lived in. Kingsley had met a beautiful woman named Maggie back in his twenties during a brief trip to New York. Although wealthy and with a high-powered job as an attorney, she craved the domination of powerful men. He’d happily fed her hunger to submit until he had to return to France. Soon after she’d met a younger man named Daniel, a librarian without a penny to his name, and married him. Maggie and Daniel had a house in the country, a retreat a few hours from the city yet less than ten miles from the house Søren had grown up in. Ten miles—close enough to scout out the house easily, far enough away not to tip them off.

As he pulled into Daniel’s driveway he saw Søren’s motorcycle parked near the front door. Kingsley felt a momentary stab of sympathy for the man. He knew Søren hated being anywhere near this part of the world. Even Kingsley didn’t know the extent of what had happened in that house, the house where Nora was being held. Not even to Nora had Søren shared all the horrors of his past. Not to Nora or to him, and for that Kingsley was grateful. He had enough skeletons of his own in his past. He’d run out of closet space for any more.

He glanced up at the colonial manor as he headed to the door. Lovely place—two stories, two hundred years old. Elegant. Tasteful. Stately. And home to one of the kinkier men of his acquaintance.

The door opened before Kingsley even knocked.

“Daniel, get out of this house right now,” Kingsley said without any preamble.

“It’s my house,” Daniel reminded him as Kingsley pushed past him.

“Yes, and I’m commandeering it.”

“You can’t commandeer my house.”

“Fine, then I’ll commandeer your wife.”

Daniel followed Kingsley down the hallway into the library where Kingsley deposited himself on top of Daniel’s desk.

“Kingsley.”

“Daniel.”

Kingsley attempted to stare Daniel down. A bad idea. Daniel’s ability to stare down people was notorious in the Underground. Only Søren had a more vicious glare than Daniel’s infamous unyielding blue-eyed stare. Maggie called it the Ouch and the name had stuck. Anyone on the receiving end of the Ouch would likely be saying “ouch” for the next couple of days.

“Put the blue eyes away,” Kingsley ordered.

“I can’t very well take my eyes out.” Daniel continued to glare. The years had been kind to Daniel. Marriage and children even kinder. In his day the man had been so handsome he’d even tempted Nora from Søren. For only about five seconds, she’d confessed to him, but still, something of a feat. Then again, Nora always did have a bit of a fetish for blonds.

“I’ll do it for you if you don’t stop glaring at me. I told you that I needed your house for a few days. And non, I’m not going to tell you why.”

“I already told him why.” Søren stood in the doorway. He, too, had gone for “business casual,” as Griffin always called it. No collar, no clerics. Black pants, white shirt open at the neck. He never got used to seeing Søren in his collar and clerics. Yet, he never quite got used to seeing him without them on, either. “If we’re stealing his house, he deserves to know why.”

Kingsley sighed. It was for the best. Unless Daniel knew the real danger, he might put up more of a fight about leaving. Thankfully, Kingsley had four little trump cards he could use on Daniel.