The Mistress

No. She wouldn’t give in to such apocalyptic thinking. She was a Dominatrix, after all, not some damsel in distress waiting for a prince on a white charger to ride in and save her. Søren had taught her to be strong. Any woman sharing the bed of a sadist had to be strong.

The thought stirred Nora and slowly she rolled up off the floor.

The bed of a sadist...

No bed sat in the room they’d thrown her into, but clearly once there had been a bed. She saw the piles of ash on the floor, the blackened walls and ceiling, smelled the scent of burned wood and fabric. And that’s when she realized she’d been in this bedroom before. Standing up, Nora walked to the door. She didn’t even bother touching the knob. One jiggle and Damon would probably start firing. No, she wasn’t going to try to get out...she only needed to remember.

The night she first visited this room, she’d been seventeen. Two years she’d lusted after her priest, loved him, obeyed his every last command he’d given her under the auspices of supervising the community service Judge Harkness had imposed upon her. And all that time she’d known...something. She had no idea what she knew but she knew she knew it and she knew Søren knew it, too. It had been maddening, like living with a word on the tip of her tongue for years. Her gut had told her she belonged to Søren in some deep cosmic way she couldn’t begin to comprehend. Even if he never laid a hand on her, never kissed her, never made love to her at all, that changed nothing. She was his. She knew it.

He knew it, too. But it wasn’t until his father had died that he finally felt safe enough to tell her the truth. He’d told her...in this very room.

Nora stood by the door, closed her eyes, and when she opened them again she could see the chair by the window...and she saw Søren even younger than she was now, praying in his childhood bedroom, his blond hair like a halo in the moonlight. Walking across the floor, Nora inhaled the memories of that night—kneeling at Søren’s feet, crawling into his lap, surrendering to his arms. He’d held her before—when her father had been sentenced to prison, when her mother had turned her back on her for the final time—but all those times before the embrace had been that of her priest, a caring friend comforting a troubled girl, and nothing more. That night he held her like a lover. He’d asked her if she wanted to know the truth about him, about them, and he’d given her the sternest of warnings that her life would never be the same again if she let him tell her the truth.

To that warning she’d simply answered, Tell me.

“Tell me...” she said to the empty room. But no, not entirely empty. The bed was gone. It appeared someone had set it on fire and let it burn down to the hardwood, leaving waste, burn marks and ashes behind. Yes, even the residue of the ashes snaked up the wall and onto the ceiling, and around the outline of words someone—Elizabeth most likely—had tried and failed to wipe clean.

Love thy sister.

“You sick bitch.” Nora raised her hand and traced the outline of the words on the wall. How dare Marie-Laure mock Søren and Elizabeth for the sins of their childhood, sins no God in heaven or on earth would ever hold them accountable for?

The night of Søren’s father’s funeral, he’d confessed his darkest secrets to her, and she’d listened in silence and in horror—never horror at him for what he’d done, horror only at what this man she’d loved so completely had suffered. She would never forget him turning his face from her and meeting the gaze of the moon. The words he said...she wanted to take them into her hands and set them alight and watch them burn until they ceased echoing inside her ears.

I am like him, like my father. I take the greatest of pleasures in inflicting pain. Eleanor, you cannot even imagine what I did to my sister...what she did to me. I never want you to imagine... Please, Søren had begged of her, please never imagine. And for his sake and Elizabeth’s sake she never tried to imagine.

But today she knew she needed to imagine.

“Søren,” she whispered to his childhood bedroom. “Please...don’t fail me. If I know you half as well as you know me...”

She started to look around the room where Søren had lost his virginity to Elizabeth, his own half sister, the room where he’d first begun to explore the strange dark desires he’d been born with. She knew herself. She knew her past. As a young teenager she’d often scald herself with candle wax, carve shallow patterns into her skin with needles—games, they were. Challenges. Dares. A game of chicken played with herself. All their kind started young. The sadists’ first victims were their own bodies. The masochists’ first sadists were themselves. Simone, one of Søren’s favorite submissives, had once confessed that she’d play cowboys and Indians with her brothers only because they always tied her up during their role-play. The sexual thrill she’d experienced as her older brother lashed her to the foot of their parents’ bed embarrassed her even to this day. When the game ended, she’d disappear into the privacy of her own bedroom, and tie herself up, leaving only one hand free to masturbate.

The innocent games children play...

Nora got on her hands and knees and swept along the edge of the baseboards looking for a loose board. Nothing. Over the top of the window frame she found only dust. Little furniture in the room but for the remnants of the bed and the bookcase.

The bookcase.

Kneeling in front of the shelves Nora ran her eyes over the books. They looked untouched, unread. Søren had spent almost his entire childhood from age five to ten away in England at boarding school. The books had been mere decoration in this house where every smile was nothing but show. Søren had come back to this house at age eleven after he’d killed the boy who’d attacked him in his bed.