The Virgin

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Kingsley said in English to the boy with the big rock.

The boys took one look at him and made their first smart decision in their young lives.

“Come on. Let’s go,” the other, smaller boy shouted at his friend. The older boy dropped his huge rock and ran off as fast as his pale, hairless legs could carry him.

“Casse-toi,” came the woman’s voice again. She cursed in French but switched back to English when she saw him standing there. She must have assumed he was American. How insulting. “I should have killed them.”

She bent down and picked up a soccer ball.

“You forgot your ball,” the woman shouted, this time in English. “Want it back?”

She made as if she would throw it at them. Kingsley stopped her.

“I’ll take it,” Kingsley said. He grabbed the ball out of her hands, dropped it on the sand and kicked it with the perfect blend of force and precision. A hundred feet away, the ball hit the older boy in the back of the legs and sent him tumbling to his knees. He scrambled up and ran off again.

Kingsley looked at the woman. She looked at him.

“You have good aim,” she said.

“You’re not the first woman who’s told me that.” He waited. The woman got the joke. He could see that in her eyes. She did not, however, find it funny. She turned from him and knelt on the ground.

“What were they doing?” Kingsley asked her.

“Killing babies.”

Kingsley looked down and saw a bird’s nest on the ground, eggs shattered and oozing on the sand. A small bird with yellow on its wingtips danced in distress around the branches of a flowering bush. The woman studying the broken nest had dark skin and large black eyes. She looked much closer to twenty-eight than eighteen, thank God. Her long straight hair was pulled back in an elegant high ponytail. She wore a white ankle-length skirt and a white halter top that left her flat and muscled stomach bare. She was tall, too. Almost as tall as he. Her eyes were full of fury and her hands had balled into fists. She had the bearing of Cleopatra, the face of Venus and the wrath of God. And whoever she was, she’d attempted to stone two boys to death for the crime of throwing rocks at a bird’s nest.

“Little monsters. Look what they’ve done.”

“Do you want me to kill them for you?” Kingsley asked, almost sincere in his offer. He could hardly imagine a good man growing up out of the sort of boy who’d crush bird eggs for pleasure. “I didn’t pack my gun, but I can use my hands. I can drown them and make it look like an accident. Oui? Non?”

Her dark eyes flashed in his direction.

“Are you mocking me?”

“Not at all,” he said. Pas du tout. If this woman had asked him to bring him the heads of those boys to her on a platter, he would have done it.

“No,” she said. “Let them go. They’re in God’s hands. We all are.”

It could have been a platitude—in God’s hands—but the way she said it made it sound like a fearful threat.

The woman knelt in the sand in front of the bush that the boys had attacked with their rocks. She studied the scene of carnage—the shattered eggs, the broken nest.

“Men destroy everything,” she said, talking to herself. “Why do they have to destroy everything?”

Carefully, as if the nest was made of glass, the woman lifted it off the ground and tucked it into a tree. Then she bent down again and covered the broken eggs with sand. She did so quietly, reverently, as if performing a sacred burial ritual. The mother bird flitted down to the sand, looking for her lost babies.

“Try again, Maman,” the woman said to the little bird. “Try again for me.”

He looked at her face, and saw tears on it. Tears over a broken nest and a baby bird.

Fuck Manhattan. And fuck the entire world.

Haiti had just got very interesting.

10 (#ulink_141f9af4-49dd-5a3e-8e4c-bbb4060096b6)

Upstate New York

“BEWARE THE IDES of March” read the note Kingsley had slipped under her bedroom door. “Don’t drink any alcohol today. Dress in your finest and wait for me by the Rolls at ten.”

Eleanor supposed this note was Kingsley’s version of a birthday card? Card and invitation. She hadn’t planned on a big party for her twenty-sixth birthday. Sounded like Kingsley had planned one for her.

When evening turned to night and the city turned on its lights and switched off its inhibitions, Kingsley put her in the back of his Rolls-Royce. He had a smile on his face, a secret little smile. Something told her she was about to get her birthday present.

“You know I’ve had sex in the back of a Rolls-Royce,” she reminded him. “So don’t even ask.”

She’d had sex with him in the back of a Rolls-Royce so many times she’d lost count. Luckily it was a limousine-style Rolls that kept the backseats separated from the driver by a partition and a thick black curtain.

“I know you’ve had sex in the back of the Rolls-Royce. But not with him.”

“Him who?” Eleanor asked.

The car pulled over. The door opened.

A young man of about twenty-three years old with dark spiky hair, a handsome face and a dirty grin got into the car.

“Happy birthday, beautiful,” he said.

“Oh my God. Griffin.” Eleanor threw herself into Griffin’s arms, and he pulled her so close to him it almost hurt. “When did you get back?”

“Two nights ago.”

“And you didn’t call me?” she asked, feigning irritation.

“Surprise,” he said, grinning.

She sat on this lap and wrapped her arms around him. Griffin...she loved this kid. Had it only been eight months ago when Kingsley had first summoned Griffin to the town house and shown him the ropes? She’d been in the ropes that night as Kingsley beat her and fucked her, all as part of a demonstration showing Griffin what kink in action had looked like. He’d taken to the scene like a duck to water, but old habits had died hard. Kingsley had caught him snorting coke in one of the town house bathrooms one day and stone drunk the next day. Kingsley had enough demons of his own, he’d said, without inviting Griffin’s demons over for tea. So Kingsley had laid down the ultimatum—go to rehab and get clean or...get out. Griffin had gone to rehab.

And now he was back.

“God, I missed you,” she said as she pressed her face against his warm strong neck and inhaled cedar and suede. Griffin always smelled as if he’d just stepped out of a shower.

“Good,” he said, taking her by the upper arms and positioning her on his lap. “Because I’m your birthday present.”