The Mistress

He’d wanted to keep it.

He pushed the thought away. The house...the hallways...the trees...the line of fire... He ran through various scenarios, visualizing the target, anticipating the worst, but it wasn’t a target, was it? His sister had Nora and he’d seen her with his own eyes.

He stood at the window in Daniel’s bedroom and stared in the direction of the house as Wesley was doing on the first floor. No doubt somewhere else Søren was staring in the same direction. “Please, Marie-Laure, don’t make me do this....”

Kingsley turned around, putting his back to the window, and noticed for the first time the rocking chair sitting in the shadows. He’d been in Daniel’s bedroom before but had no memory of such a bourgeois bit of furniture in the otherwise elegantly decorated room. It must be Anya’s doing. No doubt she had rocked the children to sleep many a night in that chair before carrying them off to the nursery and returning to her husband’s bed as his own mother had with him and Marie-Laure.

Whatever Marie-Laure’s crimes, she was still his sister. She’d even named him, his mother had told him long ago when he’d asked who was to blame for giving him such a decidedly un-French name. Marie-Laure, only three years old, had a set of paper dolls—knights and squires, lords and ladies, kings and queens. One day Marie-Laure took the king doll and placed it on top of his mother’s pregnant stomach. His American mother, wanting her daughter to know French and English, had pointed at the doll on her stomach and said, “It’s a king.” For the next two months whenever curled up with her mother, Marie-Laure would pat the growing stomach and repeat, “It’s a king. It’s a king.”

And so Kingsley was born.

How did it happen...how had it come to this? His sister had been a sweet child once, his mother’s little angel...and then she’d become a teenager and her beauty had blossomed. More than blossomed, it had exploded, gone off like a bomb complete with mushroom cloud and utter devastation. Mon Dieu, the fallout—he’d never seen anything like it before or since. Nora had broken her fair share of hearts but she somehow always managed to leave the men better off than she found them—even Daniel, especially Daniel. But his sister... At the time he’d been too busy with his own conquests to pay much attention to her. Last thing he wanted to think about was who his sister was spreading for. Looking back, they should have seen the signs. One boyfriend had threatened suicide over her dismissal of him. When he ended up in the hospital after swallowing a bottle of pills, Marie-Laure had laughed and bragged about it to friends and said it could only have been better had he died. Perhaps that’s where she’d gotten the idea—punishing someone who didn’t love you by killing yourself. But for whatever reason she had come back and seen both him and Søren happy and in love.

Kingsley had wealth and power and the most beautiful, intelligent, understanding woman in the world in his bed. Søren had a peaceful life in his parish, and the respect and devotion of his entire congregation. And he had his Little One, whom he loved above all others and who loved him in return in her own beautiful if broken way. Marie-Laure’s first attempt at revenge had failed. This was take two.

He would make sure her second attempt would fail like her first had.

And this time, Marie-Laure would stay dead.

19

THE QUEEN

Nora lay on the floor and stared at the door. After her late breakfast with Marie-Laure, Andrei had escorted her to a room, locked her in and made casual mention that if she tried anything, Damon would be waiting right outside the door ready to shoot her—or worse. Death waited outside that door. She barely noticed the rest of the room. The footsteps in the hallway commanded her complete attention.

The footsteps faded and Nora forced herself to breathe, to relax. Carefully she got off the floor and tried the window. That was a waste of time, of course. Elizabeth, having had the childhood from hell, had taken childproofing her home to an absurd extreme. If Nora had a lead baseball and a cannon, she still couldn’t have shattered the window glass. And someone, Damon or Andrei, had kindly nailed the wood to the frame. She was trapped. Nothing to do but wait and stare and pray the day away.

And plan.

After all, while she believed in the power of prayer, she also believed in having backup plans on the off chance God wanted her to get off her ass and do it herself. Escape plans...these were her specialty. The daughter of a man who ate his meals with the Mafia, she’d learned early on that the world was an ugly, dangerous place full of men with guns who’d pat you on the head, call you a good kid and then walk out the door and kill somebody who’d made the fatal mistake of crossing them. The lowlifes of the world had been her father’s best friends, his worst enemies and all at the same time.

So even at the tender age of eleven she’d started to figure things out. A coat hanger bent the right way could unlatch a car door in under a second. A tiny ball bearing held between two fingers and aimed at the center of a pane of glass could shatter it into a thousand pieces. This wire to that wire and the car would start, no key necessary, no permission asked.

They hadn’t tied her up before tossing her into the room. No reason to bother if she couldn’t get away through door, window or ceiling. Trapped...she was trapped in this house that had been a house of horrors to Søren growing up. He’d almost died in this house the day his father had caught him with his sister in the library. He’d almost died and now she might, too.