The Mistress

“Laila,” he said with deliberate, menacing calm to Laila and the woman he gently, playfully suffocated under his hand, “is not to know about sex or talk about sex or have sex. Ever. I’ll never have children. She is therefore my honorary daughter. With her love of animals, Laila was no doubt destined for the Franciscans. I have the perfect convent picked out for her. Her room is already reserved. Now I have spoken. Nod if you understand.”

And Laila and the woman in his arms nodded even as she giggled all the way back to her bedroom.

Of course she knew about sex. She knew he had it all the time with her “aunt,” as she and Gitte, her sister, thought of her. Not that it bothered her. She wasn’t Catholic, after all. Why should she care if he had a lover?

And such a lover he had … No one seeing her could blame him for what he’d done. Then again, no one seeing him could ever blame her, either. As a younger girl, she’d envied her aunt in a way. Her feelings about her uncle made her ashamed of herself sometimes until she got a little older and realized she didn’t want him so much as she wanted what they had, her onkel Søren and tante Elle. What they had … it seemed like magic to her. She even thought of it as not a thing so much or a feeling, but as a place. The Enchanted Kingdom of Adulthood, she’d dubbed it. Adults alone lived in that world and as a girl she’d longed to gain entrance into it and learn all its secrets.

Whenever around her aunt and uncle she felt like she stood outside the gate and could see through the bars. She only needed the key. Love. That was the key. Adult love. Private love. Passionate love between two people who told secrets with their bodies. She’d learned about love watching her aunt and uncle doing nothing but talking to each other. There had only been those few visits, once a year, sometimes twice, but they were enough to teach her that love wasn’t something one found only in books. The kind of love that knights fought for and kings died for and ships were launched for and poets recorded for posterity—it was real. She’d seen it. She wanted what they had, wanted that secret that they told each other without even saying a word. She’d seen it pass between them with every glance. Maybe she would have that someday, she wished every time she’d seen it. Maybe she’d find it here in America.

Silence filled the rectory. She heard nothing, no one. What if he was with her now in his bedroom? Maybe that’s why the quiet all about her resonated with restless energy. In a house so small surely she could hear the sounds of passion even upstairs and behind closed doors. Or was it possible to make love entirely in silence? She doubted her aunt could. As a girl of ten, Laila had discovered that if she sat on the floor with her ear to the wall, she could hear them at night. That young she never quite understood what she heard—breathy gasps, warm, illicit murmurs, a moan followed by silence. Sounds of pleasure caused by … what? Then she hadn’t known. She’d heard other sounds, too—whimpers, cries, quiet noises that sounded far more like pain than pleasure. It gave her the strangest feeling in her stomach to sit by the wall at night and force herself to stay awake and listen to them in their bedroom. Sometimes she felt something like jealousy. Sometimes her whole body shuddered with a need for something she couldn’t name.

Shuddering … that’s what it was. The house seemed to shudder as soon as Laila stepped foot into the kitchen. Laila’s happiness here started to falter. Something didn’t feel right. Never before had she breached her uncle’s home, but she knew the house, like him, would be meticulous, nearly immaculate. And it was. Nothing out of place. Nothing disturbed. Nothing wrong. But still … everything seemed wrong. She passed through the kitchen and into the living room. Beautiful, of course. A thousand books. One perfect grand piano. A fireplace naked without a fire. She found a staircase and took it to the second floor. She found the bathroom, the office…. When she stepped into the bedroom, she almost blushed.

Laila couldn’t look at the made bed without imagining the sheets askew. Four years ago, her aunt and uncle had come to her grandmother’s funeral, and as usual after everyone had gone to bed, Laila pressed her ear to the wall and listened. She’d expected to hear the usual sounds of passion, of pain. Or maybe only talking. But that night she heard them doing something she’d never heard them do before in the Enchanted Kingdom of Adulthood—fighting.

“I don’t want to discuss this with you, Eleanor.”

“The funeral’s tomorrow. We need to talk about it.”

“You brought it with you?”

“Of course I did. I thought you might want … she might have wanted …”

“No, she wouldn’t. She gave it to you. She wanted you to have it. Unless it means nothing to you anymore.” Laila heard the bitterness in her uncle’s voice.

“It means as much to me as it always did. I only thought that since I left you, you might want to bury it with her.”

“You might have left me, but I never left you. Keep it if you want it at all.”

“At all?” Her aunt sounded aghast. “It’s my most precious possession.”

Laila’s stomach had clenched so hard at her tante Eleanor’s words and the fervency in her voice. As was her habit, she reached up to her neck and wrapped her hand around the locket that rested in the hollow of her throat for comfort.

“As you are mine.”

Then Laila had almost stopped listening. The sorrow in her uncle’s voice cut into her, his words sharp as a knife.

“Don’t … don’t make this harder than it is.”

“It couldn’t be any harder than it is, Little One.”

Silence came after that but only for a moment before she heard her uncle’s voice again, tender and careful.

“Forgive me. I’m so grateful you’re here. For me … for them.”

“They don’t know, do they? You haven’t told them I left you.”

“I only told Freyja. Laila and Gitte worship you. I didn’t want to hurt the girls.”

Laila heard laughter then, but it did nothing to untie the knots.

“What are you laughing at?” The mirth in her uncle’s voice calmed her momentarily.

“You saying you didn’t want to hurt the girls. Not your usual style, is it?”

“You keep smiling like that, and I’ll turn you over my knee.”

“Now that’s more like it.”

An intimate silence filled the room again—a silence that hinted at kisses and other more private acts.

“I’ll stay as long as you want or need me to. And I’ll keep this until the day I die. But if one of the girls asks me about us … I won’t lie to them.”

War had broken out in the Enchanted Kingdom of Adulthood. She wanted to hear no more. But she couldn’t stop listening.

Laila backed out of her uncle’s empty bedroom, a bedroom she knew she didn’t belong in, and returned to the kitchen. She’d hoped to find sanctuary here but now she felt only troubled. The very air in the entryway seemed worried, as if someone had left in a great hurry and offered the house no explanation.

She wandered around the kitchen, afraid for some reason to venture out but also afraid to stay put. Maybe she should call the church. She had that phone number. He might be gone but his secretary could be working there. Maybe she had an emergency number.

Laila went to the kitchen phone not wanting to use her cell. When she reached it she discovered at last a cause for her concern.

The rectory had a landline still. Had he been there, she would have teased her uncle for being part of a church so old-fashioned they still used big black rotary phones with dangling cords. But her small smile died when she lifted the receiver and found a crack in the cradle. More than a crack, the phone was marred by a huge ugly gash. The handset, too, was damaged. She stared at the phone in her hand before resting it gently onto the cradle again. Someone had been on the phone and hung it up so violently and with such force the phone had cracked open. As a small child she’d hung off her uncle’s arms like a monkey on a tree—sometimes she clung to his biceps with her hands, sometimes she hung upside down from her knees. It seemed he could keep her suspended in the air forever. As long as she hung and she’d swung, she’d never once feared he would drop her. And he never had. She’d never met a man stronger than her uncle. Only a man of incredible strength could have done this kind of damage with one fierce slam.

Even as her body started to shake, Laila’s mind began to race. She needed to get out and seek safety. She picked up her suitcase and raced to the door, but the sound of footfalls on the hardwood stalled her steps.

She spun around ready to thank God her uncle had come back and would make everything okay again like he always did.

But it wasn’t him.

And nothing was okay.

6 THE QUEEN

A smiling woman stood before Nora. She wore an elegant black-and-purple dress, understated lipstick and a maleficent gleam in her dark eyes. Nora’s chair faced a large window. The sun had already set; the diaphanous curtains moved in the evening breeze like green smoke surrounding her. The woman, whoever she was, looked about forty-five years old and had long dark hair classically coiffed. And for some reason something about the set of her lips, the line of her jaw, reminded her of Kingsley.

“Who are you?” Nora said, her voice groggy with pain. She didn’t follow up with “Where am I?” because she didn’t want to know.

“You don’t know?”

“If I knew, why would I ask?”

Nora pulled on the handcuffs behind her back. She had small hands and could sometimes squeeze out of handcuffs if she had enough wiggle room. But they were clapped on tight, too tight, and no lock pick set or hairpins were to be found. Her heart thundered in newfound panic.

“I’ll give you a hint,” the woman said with a smile that held no friendliness at all. “You’ve slept with my husband.”

“That doesn’t winnow the field down as much as you think it would.”

The woman narrowed her eyes at Nora and something in that look seemed so familiar, she suddenly knew exactly who it was who faced her. Terror, real terror, gripped Nora’s heart with hooked talons.