The Queen

“I warned you he had this side.”

“I know you did.” She looked at Kingsley and shook her head. “He made me promise him forever. Did you know that? I had to obey him forever just because he got me out of going to jail when I was fifteen. Did he really think I owed him the rest of my natural life because of that? I would have gotten out of juvie at twenty-one. Maybe I shouldn’t have made the deal.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“No,” she admitted. “But sometimes, I do wonder...”

“What do you wonder?” Kingsley asked, coming to stand in front of her.

“When I was with my mom at the convent, we talked one day about my dad. She told me something I didn’t know, and it’s been bugging me ever since she told me. Now I know why.” She paused, gathered her words. She wasn’t sure why Kingsley needed to know what she was going to tell him, but he did. He had to know.

“Go on,” Kingsley said gently. She had his complete attention.

“I was still a baby when my parents divorced,” she began. “My mom asked for full custody of me, but the judge said my dad could have me on the weekends. But then Dad got caught stealing some car parts. Spent three months in jail. But there were about four weekends I stayed with him at his place before he got arrested and my mom got full custody. Do you know where he lived back then?”

“No.”

“A shitty apartment at the edge of West Harlem. Barely two miles from Riverside Drive. Two miles from this house. King.” She smiled, shook her head, laughed at the mad world they lived in. “It’s funny... If he hadn’t gotten arrested, I would have grown up two miles from this house. Dad started jacking cars and running a chop shop full-time when I was about ten. When I was fifteen he made me help him. Remember that?”

“I do. It’s what brought him to my doorstep to save you after you were arrested.”

“If I lived with my dad and wanted to steal cars, my first stop would have been Riverside Drive. A Rolls-Royce two miles from my place? Very tempting target. I would have stolen your Rolls if I’d grown up with my dad instead of my mom. I know it. I know it for a fact. I don’t know how I know it so don’t ask. But when I go back in time in my mind I can see where that one little event changed the course of my life. I would have stolen your Rolls that night I helped my dad jack cars, and I would have gotten arrested. And what would you have done when you found out a fifteen-year-old girl had been the one who stole your Rolls?”

“I would have gone to the police station to get a look at this girl. Like I did with Mistress Irina when she was arrested for trying to poison her husband. I wouldn’t have been able to resist seeing the little girl car thief.”

“So you, not Søren, would have met me first. If I’d lived with my dad on the weekends, then I wouldn’t ever have gone to church with my mom on Sundays, right? No Sacred Heart for me,” she said. “It was like God flipped a coin and it landed on heads instead of tails, on Søren instead of you. It could have landed on tails.”

“And you would have landed on me.”

She nodded, not laughing. It wasn’t a joke. She saw it all happening. Kingsley would have walked into the police station interrogation room and it would have been him sitting across from her when she opened her eyes. She would have said, Who the fuck are you? and he would have answered, That’s for you to decide, chérie. I’m either your best friend or your worst enemy. He would have wanted her. Kingsley was no saint. He would have had far fewer qualms about fucking her as a teenager than Søren had. Kingsley wasn’t a priest, didn’t care what happened to him. Instead of at age twenty and with Søren, she would have lost her virginity at age fifteen or sixteen to Kingsley. Although it hadn’t happened that way, it was as if she had the memories of her other life on that other path. Her first time with Kingsley would have been nothing like her first time with Søren. She would have been scared with Kingsley, and he wouldn’t have hurt her first. No flogging, no caning. She would have been on top to minimize the pain and to remind them both what she was—a switch. Because he would have recognized her as the switch she was from day one and would have trained her accordingly—to hurt and be hurt, to dominate and to submit, to rule and to serve. And where would Søren have been in all this? At Sacred Heart, praying, working, without realizing the girl he could have owned was tied to the bed of the boy he’d once loved.

“You told me once what would have happened if you’d seen me first. But I never told you what would have happened if I’d seen you first,” she said.

“What would have happened?”

She met his eyes. “I would have fallen in love with you. I still remember that night I first saw you. The night of the wedding at Sacred Heart. I thought I’d never meet a man who tempted me like Søren did. And then you waltzed in whistling and wearing those boots and your bad attitude and you threatened to lose your watch in me. The reason I didn’t fall in love with you that night was because I’d already given my whole heart to him. But if I’d seen you first...and wasn’t in love with him, I would have loved you.”

“Yes,” he said. “I believe that. And I would have fallen in love with you.”

“Do you think that’s what was meant to happen? You and me in love?” Nora asked. “Søren came to see you because he needed your help to get me out of jail. But if I’d stolen your car...”

“I might never have seen Søren again,” Kingsley said. “I was in a bad place when he showed up here in my music room asking me to help him help you. And he helped me pull myself together. But if I’d seen you first in that police station, fifteen, scared, alone...I would have pulled myself together to take care of you.”

She’d seen the way Kingsley treated his assistant, Calliope. He protected her, adored her, watched over her... He would have done the same for her had she moved in with him at age sixteen. She would have, too. A father in jail, a mother who was a religious fanatic...easy enough to get her legally emancipated. By age eighteen she would have been Kingsley’s second-in-command. His second, his partner in crime, his dominant, his submissive, his lover, his everything. Kingsley had never fallen in love with her because she was always Søren’s. But with Søren out of the picture...

“And it all happened because my piece-of-shit father got caught stealing a hundred bucks’ worth of spare parts from a junkyard. Something he’d done a thousand times before. One choice, one mistake, one tiny twist of fate...”

“Chills the blood to think of it, doesn’t it?” Kingsley asked, and she could see it did trouble him to realize how tangled was the thread that tied their three lives together.

“If he’d never met me, he would never have broken his vows. What if that’s how it should have been?”

“Is that what you wish had happened?” Kingsley asked. “Do you wish we’d seen each other first?”

“All I know is that looking back I can see where the road forks. But I also see that if I’d ended up on the other path, with you...I still would have found my way to this moment. I’m saying this feels like destiny, like both paths would have brought me here, like every path would have brought me here. But I could have been here so much sooner if he...”

Her voice trailed off. Anger choked her throat, strangling her words. Her hands clenched and unclenched. She wanted to hit someone, something. Set fires, burn the old world down and rise up from the ashes. If Søren were here right now she would teach him a new pain...

Nora saw the flogger in Kingsley’s hand. She took it from him and walked to the towel still pinned on the wall.

“Søren knew I was a switch the whole time, and he never said a fucking thing to me about it. If I’d never met him, I would have been doing this since I was sixteen.”

With all her anger and sorrow and bitterness, she threw the flogger with a fearsome snap.

The towel went sailing to the floor. It sat limp and defeated at her feet. She wished it was Søren’s heart.

Nora turned to face him.

“Well, look at that,” Nora said, smiling at Kingsley.

“By George, I think she’s got it.”

10 (#ulink_2ab9af07-8339-56ee-ba5b-a93c53a86e5e)

Milady

KINGSLEY TOOK NORA’S hand and helped her step over a naked body on the floor. The man didn’t appear to be dead, merely spent. Merely very spent considering he didn’t seem to notice the woman in the blue-and-black silk cancan dress and the man in the Regency suit and Hessian boots stepping over his panting, sweating torso to reach a set of steps behind him.

Nora didn’t thank Kingsley for his gallantry. She couldn’t if she wanted to. In addition to the cancan dress, seamed stockings and her black button-up ankle boots, she also wore a blue leather collar and a blue leather leash. The leash Nora clenched between her teeth. When they made it to the landing at the top of the stairs and saw no one else near, Kingsley took the leash from between her teeth.

“What is this place?” she asked. They were in a big fancy Westchester County mansion that looked like every other Westchester County mansion on the street.

“It’s called the Body House,” Kingsley said.

“Why haven’t we ever been here before?”

Kingsley had taken her to every kink club in the city, but she’d never even heard of the Body House.

“It’s not our sort of place,” Kingsley said. “Now shh...” Kingsley lifted a finger to his lips to shush her, and she rolled her eyes behind her feathered masquerade mask. “Your voice is recognizable. If you have to speak, do so very quietly.”

“I could speak in a French accent,” Nora said, putting on her very best French accent, which she’d picked up from Kingsley. He winced at it. “That bad?”

“You sound like a drunk Brigette Bardot.”

“Oh, I do not. Søren said my fake French accent is very good.”

“It is,” he said. Kingsley paused and it was a meaningful pause. “Too good.”

“Too good?”