The Prince (26 page)

Kingsley heard the edge of old anger in Søren’s voice, the tinge of bitterness, the hurt. The hurt?

Thirty years ago he’d made an offhand remark after being beaten and fucked halfway to unconsciousness…and three decades later Søren remembered it word for word. Remembered the words and remembered the pain.

“
Mon Dieu…
I never thought the day would come. Finally and for once, I have hurt you.”

Kingsley did laugh then—loudly and decadently. And Søren only glared at him until he, too, laughed.

“God, Kingsley, we were children then. Foolish children playing dangerous games after dark.”

“Games? Is that what it was to you? My blood on your body, that was a game?”

Søren sighed heavily. He clasped his hands almost as if in prayer and gazed at Kingsley over the steeple of his fingers.

“No. Not a game. Not at all. In a way, what you and I had…it was my salvation. I thought of it as such back then. Prayed that’s what it was, prayed that God had sent you to me. When you said God wanted nothing to do with us…yes, it hurt.”

Kingsley kept his face composed and tried to pretend Søren’s words didn’t fill up his heart like water poured into a cupped hand.

“I saved your soul by shedding my blood for you. How Christian of me.”

Søren gave him a wry smile. “God saved my soul. You, however, saved my sanity. Before you, I thought…”

Søren’s voice trailed off and Kingsley found himself leaning far forward in his seat. He wanted to touch Søren—his knee, his hands, his face—but dared not lest the moment shatter. Søren did confess to him on rare occasions. Late at night at the town house, at the rectory, when they’d both had too much wine and too little sleep…Søren would sometimes bare his heart a little to Kingsley, just enough for him to remember that Søren did have one.

“What did you think?”

“Horrible thoughts,
mon ami.
” Søren smiled. “After what happened that summer with Elizabeth. I thought I had to stay apart from everyone, far away from them lest they be contaminated with whatever it was that had turned me into this. Even before Elizabeth I knew there was something different about me. With her I discovered what it was.”

“You inherited your father’s sadism like I inherited my father’s eyes. But I am no more my father than you are yours. You have a conscience. He didn’t.”

“I know that now. As a child…I didn’t understand, couldn’t understand. I thought I’d been born broken.”

“Broken?” Kingsley could hardly believe his ears. “When I saw you the first time, I felt…healed. If you are broken, then I only pray someday I break, too.”

Søren lowered his clasped hands and held them between his knees. Once that had been Kingsley’s home. He loved sitting at Søren’s feet between his knees. At the hermitage, after they’d spent their lust and brutality on each other, they would turn from beasts back into students. Søren would read and grade papers while Kingsley rested his back against Søren’s shins and work on his own studies. Such civility after such violence…neither one of them ever noted the strange irony of it. It felt right to them in the moment. It would feel even more right…right now.

Kingsley slid out of his seat and knelt on the floorboard at Søren’s feet. He slid his jacket off and tossed it aside. He kicked off his shoes, his socks, took off the tie and unbuttoned his collar. It had been so long since he’d done this, let his submissive side take over, that he’d almost forgotten how to sit. But as he sank into the floor it came back to him. Respectfully, he lowered his eyes to the floor. He didn’t speak. He relaxed his ramrod straight posture and surrendered to his fate.

“Kingsley…” Søren sighed his name, and Kingsley rested his forehead against Søren’s knee.

“I know you need this, sir,” Kingsley whispered. “It’s dangerous for you to deny yourself. We both know that.”

“I’m fine.” Søren’s voice had a hard edge to it, but Kingsley heard the crack in his resolve. “She’s only been gone a few days.”

“Even when she is here…you hold back with her. I’ve seen it. You worry about breaking her. You know I can take ten times the pain your Little One can. You remember, don’t you? How much I can take?”

Kingsley stopped talking and let the silence speak for him. Pain…so much pain. The things Søren had done to him when they were teenagers—it was a miracle Kingsley lived to be eighteen. Even on the hottest days, when the other boys stripped out of their uniforms to play baseball on the lawn, Kingsley kept his clothes on to hide the bruises, the welts, the cuts, sometimes even the burns. He drank pain in those days, drank it like water, got drunk on it like wine. For years now, his tongue had been dry with the thirst to drink it again. Eleanor Schreiber…Kingsley had taken Søren’s submissive and turned her into Nora Sutherlin, the most celebrated Dominatrix in the world. But he hadn’t created her for the world. He’d made her for himself. And after he’d trained her, he became her first client. He paid through the nose for sessions with her, and she earned every penny. But no matter how vicious and brutal she was with him, it never compared to the pain Søren caused him. Nora could hurt his body in beautiful ways. But only Søren could tear open his soul.

“This can’t happen again...” Søren laid his hand on top of Kingsley’s head as if to bless him.

“Pourquoi pas?” Why not?

“Theresa of Avila…she wrote once that she didn’t love God and didn’t want to love God, but she wanted to want to love God. I understand that.”

Kingsley hid his smile. “You don’t want to want me,” he said, turning his eyes up to Søren. “But you do.”

Søren’s slid his hand from the top of Kingsley’s head to the side of his face.

“Yes.”

Kingsley waited. It would come. Søren would raise his hand and bring it down onto his face with a slap, a slap that would hurt worse than the many punches he’d taken in his day. And then Søren would grip him by the throat and force him onto his stomach or his back. With Kingsley’s own belt, Søren would beat him, perhaps even choke him. There was no end to the possibilities. Some sadists took years learning to master the art of inflicting pain without causing harm. But Søren was a natural. He was fluent in nineteen modern languages, five ancient languages and the one true universal language—pain.

“I am yours.” Kingsley slipped into French, the language they always spoke to each other during their most private moments. French was Kingsley’s first language, and he fell into it when tired, when weak, when at his most vulnerable. With others he used it as a weapon to disarm or a shield to deflect. With Søren, he spoke French in his moments of surrender. French was what he had spoken as a small child. With Søren, he became that defenseless yet again.

Je suis le vôtre. J’étais toujours le vôtre, monsieur.

I am yours. I have always been yours, sir.

“Oui. Tu es le mien.”

Yes, you are mine.

Kingsley froze, not able, not willing to move. For the first time in thirty years, Søren had called Kingsley
his.
He’d waited decades for this moment.

Slowly, Søren traced Kingsley’s lips with the tip of his finger. Kingsley remembered that first night on the forest floor…Søren pushing Kingsley’s broken body onto his back, and those perfect pianist’s fingers on his mouth. The fingers then replaced by lips. The kiss had seemed less personal than the touch. He’d kissed his mother, his sister, his father, his friends. All the French kissed all the time. A kiss was nothing. But to touch fingertips to another’s lips…so erotic, so possessive, so intimate. By now, Kingsley had easily kissed a thousand women, half a thousand men. But he could count only three people who he’d ever allowed the liberty of touching his face with their hands—Nora, Juliette and Søren.

“I still love you as I did that night you broke me.” Kingsley spoke the confession aloud, his lips moving against the back of Søren’s hand. “You can break me again.”

“I can’t break you.” Søren shook his head. “I never could. Your body, yes. But there is a core inside you that I could never touch, never reach, never break. It’s the part of you that was never afraid of me.”

“Is that why you loved her and not me?”

“She has that core, too. And it’s why of all the people in the world, it’s only you and her I’ve ever loved.”

Kingsley’s heart rose. Hope buoyed it. That Søren would even put him in the same sentence as his Little One meant more than the touch of his hands against Kingsley’s lips.

“I have nothing in me that you cannot break. I would let you destroy me, and then I would resurrect myself from my own ashes for the honor of being destroyed by you again.”

“Your sister died because of what you and I were to each other. I can’t risk losing Eleanor the way we lost Marie-Laure.”

“Marie-Laure loved me madly. I was her brother. And she loved you even more madly. You were her husband. We are neither to your Eleanor. And she has left us both. Close your eyes, monsieur. Do you see her now? She’s in his bed right now, opening her legs for him. She’s beneath him. He’s inside her. She walked away from us. No…she didn’t walk. She ran.”

Søren dropped his hand from Kingsley’s lips. Leaning back into the seat, he closed his eyes.

“You might be the devil, Kingsley.”

With a rueful laugh, Kingsley kissed Søren’s knee before sliding back up to his seat. He became the notorious French Dominant again, his feet on the leather seat, one ankle crossed over the other.

“The devil is the Prince of Lies, remember?” He returned to his English. “And you and I both know I speak only the truth.”

The brutal truth hung between them the rest of the journey back to New York. Kingsley pushed no further. If it would happen, it would happen at the time of Søren’s choosing, not his. That was always the way. Their underground world had taken the wildness of relationships like theirs and tamed them, domesticated them. They used labels like Dominant and submissive, and bandied about slogans like Safe, Sane and Consensual. They all had safe words. Even the most violent and perverse among them played by the rules lest they be ejected from their underworld Eden. But Kingsley knew it was all artifice, window dressing, self-deception. He and Søren, they were more than a Dominant and submissive, and the rules didn’t apply to them. This was no game. When Kingsley said “I am yours” he meant it. If Søren had desired to burn him, maim him, sell him, break him—he could, and Kingsley knew he would not and could not stop him. His love for Søren had sold him into slavery, and all the riches of all the kingdoms left in the world couldn’t buy him out of it.

By midnight they finally returned to Kingsley’s town house. Although Søren hadn’t touched him with anything other than a finger to his lips, Kingsley felt he’d been flogged. Seeing the rock on which his sister had died…sitting in the hermitage where Søren had nearly killed him so many times…being back at the school that had been the home to his greatest heartbreaks…

Kingsley trudged up the stairs. He knew only one thing could help him right now. But it was the one thing denied to him. So he planned on drinking himself into a stupor instead.

Kingsley and Søren walked to his grand bedroom at the end of the hallway on the second floor.

“I’m thinking Amontillado tonight,” Kingsley said as he opened the door to his bedroom. “I have a vintage as old as Poe. It would make him proud to see us drink it.”

Søren stood at the end of Kingsley’s bed, his shoulder against the bedpost, his arms crossed. “Poe married his thirteen-year-old cousin when he was twenty-seven. Should we really endeavor to make him proud?”

Kingsley peeled out of his jacket and tossed it on the floor. He couldn’t wait to get back into his normal clothes—his dark gray suit and embroidered vest. His riding boots. His cravat. This Armani nonsense felt like a costume to him. In it he could blend into a crowd of well-heeled businessmen and disappear. Anonymity did not suit him.

“I don’t think either of us has the right to judge Poe. Or anyone. Your Eleanor was only fifteen, remember? And me…we both know my crimes.”

Søren said nothing, merely looked away as Kingsley started to strip off his clothes. He did that always. Even as teenagers. Even when Søren had been inside Kingsley’s body only moments earlier, out of something—discretion, respect, denial, perhaps—Søren always turned away when Kingsley dressed and undressed in his presence. Kingsley had to wonder if he did the same with Eleanor or if he watched her, devouring every second of her naked curves. Kingsley knew he held a privileged position in Søren’s life. Technically, they were related, or had been, by marriage. Søren and Kingsley could spend all the time alone together they desired and no one from outside their world could judge them.

Kingsley pulled his riding boots on, but left his shirt off for a few minutes longer. A childish trick to pull on Søren, but he couldn’t help himself sometimes. Not when the priest stood with his jaw tight and his eyes looking anywhere but at Kingsley.

“Are you staying?” Kingsley asked as he moved to stand directly in front of Søren, trousers and riding boots on and nothing else. Usually he appreciated when the many men and women who visited his bedroom didn’t stare at his chest. His body was riddled with old scars and bullet wounds from his days working for the French government under the auspices of a captainship in the French Foreign Legion. Lovers always stared at his chest right before beginning the interrogation process.

How did you get the bullet wounds?

I was shot.

Who shot you?

All the husbands. Yours isn’t armed, is he?

Kingsley always deflected the questions with his wit, and his lovers loved him even more for it. Only Søren knew the truth of his wounds. Kingsley never converted to Catholicism at Saint Ignatius as Søren had. But he did tell the priest all his secrets. How did he get the bullet wounds? The people he was paid to shoot sometimes shot back. How did he get the pale scars on his back? He’d been held hostage for one month by a foreign terror cell and tortured. How did he get the poorly healed cuts on his wrists? He’d nearly ripped his own hands off trying to get free from the manacles that they’d shackled him with.