The King: The Original Sinners Book 6 (9 page)

11

KINGSLEY COUGHED AND
sputtered. His eyes finally flew open as water rose and thrashed all around him.

“What the fuck?” He wasn’t sure if he spoke in English or French, wasn’t sure he even spoke out loud.

“Kingsley. Look at me.”

“Non.”

“Kingsley. Right now. Do as I say.”

“I don’t take orders from you anymore.” Kingsley sank down into the water before a strong hand hauled him back up.

Søren gripped his neck hard enough to penetrate the shield his body had become.

“What do you want?” Kingsley’s eyes fluttered open again. He saw Søren waist-deep in the water. Søren grabbed Kingsley by the shirt and backed against the edge of the pool.

“I want you to live.”

“That makes one of us.” Kingsley tried to pass out again, but Søren shook him awake once more.

“Are you hearing anything I’m saying?”

“I hear you.” Finally Kingsley had the strength to open his eyes and keep them open. He saw Søren again, saw his face. He looked angry and scared, almost human. He had his clerics on again, his white collar. “Why are you wearing that?”

“I’m a priest, remember? How many brain cells did you kill tonight?”

“Not enough of them.”

A wave of nausea passed through him. He coughed again, and Søren hauled him up and over the edge of the pool. Into a large white towel, Kingsley threw up.

“Get it all out,” Søren said calmly. Kingsley felt a hand on his back, rubbing the heaving muscles. He wasn’t drunk enough to be sick from the alcohol. The dream had done it to him.

Kingsley’s body complied with the order. For what felt like eternity, he threw up again and again. Søren held his hair back, rubbed his shoulders, offered encouragements that Kingsley could barely hear over the sound of his own wrenching sickness.

Finally Kingsley stopped. He knew better than to move, lest he get sick again. He shivered and took shallow breaths.

“You threw me in the pool?” Kingsley asked when the nausea finally passed.

“You were screaming and thrashing. I couldn’t get you to wake up.”

“Bad dream,” Kingsley whispered. “I have them sometimes.”

Kingsley pulled away from Søren and sat on the steps that led into the pool. He closed his eyes and tried to focus on the water that surrounded him. Water. Only water. It wouldn’t hurt him. Nothing here would hurt him. Not even Søren. Not anymore.

“Why were you drinking tonight?” Søren asked, standing in front of him. He didn’t seem to mind that he was fully dressed in his clerics and soaked to the skin. If Kingsley passed out and fell forward, Søren’s chest would break his fall.

“Same reason I drink every night.”

“Which is?”

“It helps me sleep.”

“A sleeping pill would help you sleep. Tell me the truth.”

Kingsley raked his fingers through his wet hair, slicking it back. He breathed into his hands before looking at Søren with a half smile.

“You don’t want to know.” He shook his head. “You think you do, but you don’t.”

“I know I don’t want to know,” Søren said. “But you need to tell me.”

“Why do you care?”

“Because I care.”

“That’s a tautology. You like the word? I remember philosophy class at St. Ignatius.” Kingsley released a weary, mirthless laugh.

“I care about you, because I care about you is a fact.”

“You don’t give a shit about me. I took her back to France alone.”

“I offered to go with you, and you said no. You didn’t want me with you.”

“You let me go, and you forgot all about me.”

“I never forgot about you.”

“You did. You let me go to France and you forgot—”

“I never forgot you.” Søren shouted the words. They echoed off the tile floor, off the walls, and slammed into Kingsley like a fist, sobering him up instantly. He’d never heard Søren raise his voice like that. Ever.

Kingsley smiled tiredly.

“Now you are yelling at me.”

“You want me to yell at you? Fine. I will yell at you, Kingsley. Maybe if I yell, you’ll finally hear me. I never left you. And when you went back to France, I tried to find you.”

“You tried to find me?” Kingsley’s eyes slowly focused on Søren’s face. “When?”

“I waited for you to come back to school. When you didn’t, I went to find you. I left two days after the semester ended. I didn’t even tell my own sisters I was leaving the country. I packed, ran one very important errand and left for Europe. I went to Paris, Lyon, Marseilles—every city you ever told me you’d visited in France. I went to your old neighborhood. I found your father’s former business partner. I hunted down every single fucking Boissonneault in France.”

Kingsley blinked. Søren said “fucking”? He must be furious.

“You looked for me?” Kingsley repeated, not quite able to believe Søren’s words.

“I looked everywhere for you. I looked for you before I even looked for my own mother whom I hadn’t seen since I was five years old.”

“You looked for me,” Kingsley said again. This time it wasn’t a question.

“And I didn’t find you.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you looked for me?” Kingsley asked.

“What does it matter?” Søren was quiet now, but his voice still resonated. “I didn’t find you.”

“It doesn’t matter that you didn’t find me.” Kingsley shook his head. “It matters that you looked.”

“After six weeks of searching in five different countries, I gave up,” Søren said. “I assumed you were hiding because you’d didn’t want me to find you. I took it as a sign from God that I was supposed to become a priest like I’d dreamed of since I was fourteen. My last and final prayer to God the night before I entered seminary in Rome was, ‘God, if this is not your will for me to become a priest, then let me find him tonight.’ I didn’t find you. I became a priest. And you...”

“I joined
La Legion
.”

“I never considered you the military type. Although in retrospect, I should have. You were certainly good at taking orders.”

“My commanding officers had nothing on you. You should have been in the army.”

“And follow in my father’s footsteps? No, thank you.” Søren’s voice was cold and bitter. “Why
did
you join the military?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it was the next best thing to suicide.” Kingsley laughed, although he wasn’t joking. “Anyway, it was good not to have to think for myself for a while. I needed that.”

“Believe it or not, I understand,” Søren said. “The discipline of a religious order has the same comfort of routine. My own thoughts scared me after everything happened, after you were gone. It was better to let someone else direct my existence for a few years.”

“I was too good at taking orders. And too good at hitting targets. And too good at speaking English without an accent. Someone in the government thought I’d be more useful working in a less official capacity.”

“What did you do?” Søren’s voice was even and calm, but Kingsley heard the smallest note of suspicion hiding under the surface of the words.

“Everything they ordered me to. I hunted who they told me to hunt. Spied on who they told me to spy on. Killed who they told me to kill. And then someone caught me. I was a prisoner for a month. See? I still have scars from the shackles.”

He held up his wrists. Two matching swaths of scar tissue marred the skin on the sides of his wrists. They rubbed against the bone, the shackles had. Like a trapped wolf, he’d wanted to gnaw off his own hands.

“I was a prisoner,” he continued. “I was tortured. And...”

“And what?” Søren’s voice was gentle now, probing, but not demanding.

“It wasn’t just torture.”

He gazed up at Søren and met his eyes for one second before lowering them again in humiliation.

“Oh, God, Kingsley.”

“I was unconscious,” Kingsley said. “I guess you’d call it a blessing that I don’t remember it happening. I only remember waking up and knowing it had happened.”

“Kingsley...”

Kingsley raised his hands to his face, pressed his palms against his eyes. He couldn’t bear to hear the pity and the sorrow in Søren’s voice.

“It’s funny.” Kingsley’s eyes burned. He wanted to blame the chlorine. “I loved Lawrence of Arabia as a boy. He was my hero. I read all the books I could about him. Now I can say Lawrence of Arabia and I have something in common.”

“Two things in common.”

“Two?”

“T. E. Lawrence loved a good flogging.”

Kingsley opened his eyes but couldn’t look at Søren.

“Is he dead?” Søren asked as Kingsley watched the water. “The man who hurt you?”

“Very dead,” Kingsley said.

“Good.”

“Good? Aren’t you supposed to love your enemies?”

“Put me alone in a room with him, and I could conveniently forget that command.”

“He’s in hell now,” Kingsley said. “Then again, so am I.”

Søren took a long deep breath. Meanwhile Kingsley considered falling asleep. Falling asleep and never waking up. The dead don’t dream.

“Can I touch you?” Søren finally asked.

“Toujours,”
Kingsley said, laughing again. Always.

Søren reached out and cupped the side of his face. Water ran down Kingsley’s cheek. He hoped it was water from the pool and nothing more.

“It shouldn’t have happened to you. You didn’t deserve it.”

Kingsley smiled. “You’re good at this. They should make you pope.”

“A Jesuit pope? It’ll never happen.”

Kingsley closed his eyes again, cupped water into his mouth and spit it out. He couldn’t remember when he’d been this tired, and yet he never wanted to sleep again.

“There’s something I never told you,” Søren said. “Something I wanted to tell you, but never found the words or the reason to tell you.”

Kingsley opened his eyes.

“What?” he asked.

“The semester before you started St. Ignatius, a visiting priest came to teach church history. I was in his class. He was a young priest, thirty-five. Charming, Irish, handsome. He taught me Gaelic in his free time.”

Søren fell silent. Kingsley let the silence stand.

“Three weeks before Christmas we were alone in his office working on a translation of the
Fiannaidheacht
. In the middle of a sentence, Father Sean simply stopped talking. And he shut the door to his office and locked it. He knelt in front of me on the floor and begged me in the most hushed and desperate whispers to take him. He said ‘Anything... You can do anything to me, Marcus. Anything you want. Anything at all.’ He tried to touch me.”

Kingsley had no words. His mouth was dry, and he couldn’t swallow.

“I was almost seventeen then. It was growing more difficult all the time to control myself. I ran miles every day, worked myself into exhaustion, cut myself in secret trying to cool the fever in my blood. And I could have had everything I wanted right then and there with Father Sean. I could see in his eyes he would have let me destroy him right there on his office floor.”

“What did you do?”

“I told him to stop touching me or I would kill him. It shames me to admit I meant it. If he touched me again, I would have killed him. I told him to stand up. I told him to find an excuse, any excuse to leave St. Ignatius, because if he returned next semester, I would tell Father Henry he’d tried propositioning a student for sex.”

“You wanted him?”

“I wanted to hurt him.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I didn’t love him,” Søren said.

“You hurt me. The next semester you—”

“I loved you.”

“Well...” Kingsley said. “Now you tell me.”

Kingsley met Søren’s eyes. It was past tense, the word he’d used.
Loved
, not
love
. But it was enough. Tonight it was enough.

“Here’s my confession,” Kingsley said. “I fuck for money.”

Søren looked at him in shock and dismay.

“Why?” he breathed. “You have all the money in the world.”

“It’s not the money. It’s the paper trail. Makes it easier to blackmail people if I have the paper trail. That’s where I was going when I left you alone with Blaise. A DA’s wife. The DA I paid off to get your Virgin Queen her ‘Get Out of Jail’ card.”

Søren didn’t say anything at first. The silence was the purest hell.

“How much do you charge?” Søren finally asked.

“Why? You want to buy an hour with me? I’ll give you the friends-and-family discount.”

“I want to know what price you put on something I considered priceless.”

“Sex isn’t priceless.”

“It was with you.”

Kingsley’s stomach cramped from guilt and sorrow. Søren laid a hand on the top of Kingsley’s head.

“I absolve you,” Søren whispered.

“I’ve killed people.”

“I absolve you.”

“I’ve fucked half of Manhattan and three-fourths of Europe.”

“I absolve you.”

“Absolve me? I’m not Catholic.”

“I absolve you of that, too.”

Kingsley laughed once more, a real laugh this time. Søren laughed with him. Then the laugh died, and the room was silent once more, silent but for the slight sloshing of the water against the side of the pool whenever Kingsley moved. Søren stepped even closer. Kingsley rested his forehead on Søren’s chest, too tired to hold it up any longer.

“You have to stop punishing yourself,” Søren said, cupping the back of Kingsley’s head. “Judgment is for God alone. You’re committing slow suicide with the way you’re living. That is a sin I cannot absolve you of.”

“I’m so tired,” Kingsley confessed, ashamed to admit even this one small weakness. “The nightmares make me afraid to sleep. No matter how tired I am, I don’t want to sleep. But if I have someone in bed with me, I sleep better. They expect me to fuck them first. Can’t disappoint them, can I?”

“Are you at least being careful?”

“Not very often.”

“Kingsley, you have to be.”

“I’m getting a condom lecture from a priest.”

“You’ll get more than that if you’re not careful. And you have to stop taking drugs. And you can’t drink like this.”

“I’m a
bon vivant
.”

“You’re the most miserable
bon vivant
I’ve ever met. Drinking is for celebrating, not for suicide.”