Near the end of the hallway, he saw a closed door with flickering yellow light sneaking out from under the sill. He pressed his ear gently to the door. He heard murmurs followed by laughter—a woman’s throaty laughter and a younger man’s nervous chuckle. Looking down he saw the door had a large keyhole. He knelt and pressed his eye to the keyhole and peered inside.
He saw almost the entire room through the keyhole. A fireplace took up nearly one entire wall—a large stone mantel, leaping red-and-golden fire behind the grate, and a portrait of an old French queen hanging on a scarlet cord from the picture rail. What appeared to be a man and woman’s discarded clothing were tossed over the back of a red-and-gold brocade chaise lounge. On a grand bed with embroidered covers and a looming canopy lay a naked man, a young man no more than twenty. Leon? On top of him, straddling his hips, was a lovely woman, thirty-five at the most. She was wearing a loose white gown with a loose bodice that slipped over one bare and delicious shoulder. She had dark skin and dark hair drawn up at the nape of her neck in a knot. The young man reached for the tie of her gown and she slapped his hands away.
“Naughty boy,” she said in what Kingsley recognized as an Algerian accent.
“You have my cock. I want your breasts,” he said without contrition, without apology.
She rocked on his hips and the young man groaned, then laughed at his groaning. “Behave or I won’t let you come,” she said.
What a wicked tease, Kingsley thought. She was moving on the boy’s cock even as she denied him his own pleasure. He liked this lady.
“I’m trying to behave, Amel. You make it too hard.”
“Behaving?” the woman said.
“No, my cock. You make my cock too hard.”
“Oh, Leon. You stupid little boy.”
So he had found Leon. Leon didn’t seem to be the least insulted by Amel’s mockery. He grinned broadly. He ran his hands through his pale brown hair, and locked his fingers behind his head.
“See? Behaving now,” he said.
“It’s good you’re new here,” she said, poking his chest. “Or you’d be in so much trouble.”
“I love to be in trouble almost as much as I love to be in you.” He punctuated this statement by lifting his hips off the bed, an erotic undulation that had Kingsley breathing harder.
“I suppose I can be a little nice to you,” the woman said, taking Leon’s face in her hands and pinching his cheeks. “If you can guess the number I’m thinking of, I’ll let you play with my breasts.”
“Good game,” he said.
“I’m thinking of a number,” she said, her head falling back and her eyes closed, “between one and one billion…”
Kingsley scowled at Amel from behind the door. Unfair. Truly unfair.
“Hmm…” Leon said. “Let me think. Is it…four hundred, eighty-four million, three hundred fifty-four thousand, nine-hundred and ninety-one?”
“Ah, you guessed it,” she said. “Good boy!”
Kingsley had to bite his tongue not to laugh out loud and give himself away. Should he be watching this couple having sex? Not under normal circumstances. But he was here for work. He had a job to do, and he really ought to learn all he could about Leon’s “captivity” here.
The woman—Amel—untied the drawstring on the bodice of her nightgown and allowed Leon the liberty of slipping it off her shoulders and baring her breasts. She had full breasts with large dark nipples, and Leon sat up on his elbows and latched onto one immediately.
Amel grinned as he sucked her. “Not too much,” she said. “I’m tender.”
Leon must have obeyed because the woman gasped and smiled. Whatever the young man was doing to her nipples, she liked it. She rocked her hips on his cock again, and Kingsley grew hard. He ignored his erection. This was work and he wasn’t about to wank off in the hallway while on reconnaissance. Amel’s little gasps turned into little moans and it sounded like she was close to coming. She moved harder on Leon as he licked and sucked her nipples. Her moans and gasps suddenly turned into a quick cry. Leon looked startled.
“Did you come?” he asked, eyes wide.
“No,” she said, laughing. “Somebody just kicked me.”
She slid off Leon and lay on her back, propped on the thick luxurious-looking pillows. Kingsley saw then what her voluminous white gown had hidden while she was on top of Leon.
Amel was pregnant. Very pregnant.
On her back, the fabric of the gown settled over her swollen stomach. Leon lay beside her, his erection resting on her thigh.
“Can I feel?” he asked.
She took his hand in hers and placed it on her lower belly. “It was there,” she said. “A foot, I swear it.”
Leon must have felt the foot too because his head twitched and he looked at her in delighted surprise.
“He kicked me!” Leon said. “Rude.”
“He knew what you were doing to his mother and didn’t like it. Or she knew.”
“A girl wouldn’t be so rude,” Leon said. “How far along are you?’
“Six months,” she said. “Too pregnant to be playing with little boys like you.”
“I don’t think so,” he said as he kissed her neck, his hand still on her stomach. Kingsley stared at Leon’s hand on her belly and felt a pang of longing.
Longing, not desire. He envied the boy.
“You don’t?” she asked Leon.
“I don’t,” he said.
“You know I don’t care what you think,” she said, but not unkindly. “I didn’t wake you up and bring you here for your brain.” She tapped his forehead.
“What did you want me for?” he asked. “Tell me and I’ll do it.”
“Make me come,” she said. “Use your fingers. Make me come hard enough so my fucking back will stop aching for five fucking minutes, and I’ll let you come inside me.”
“I don’t know if I can,” Leon said, kissing her on the neck again. She closed her eyes in pleasure. “But I’ll try…”
He slid his hand under her gown, raised it to her hips as she settled into the pillows and opened her legs. Kingsley watched just long enough to see Leon’s fingers slip inside her wet slit before he decided he’d seen enough. His conscience had got the better of him. Kingsley stood up—reluctantly—and walked away from the scene. But not before he heard Amel breathing heavily and then crying out in pleasure. Good for Leon.
Kingsley considered going straight back to Polly, but as long as he was here…
At the end of the corridor he found the old servants’ stairway and took it downstairs. His bare feet ached on the cold concrete steps, and he had to keep his hand pressed to the wall to find his way in the darkness. No ambient light allowed for the servants. He would have killed for his old military torch.
Kingsley made it down to the lower-floor landing. He found nothing much of interest downstairs except more closed-off rooms. A drawing room. A dining room. A music room with a grand piano under a ghostly white sheet. A music room? He’d love to have a music room with a piano like that and someone to play it day and night. He couldn’t play piano, but he vowed if he ever had the money, the first thing he’d do with it would be to buy a house of his own and put a piano inside it.
Really, now, he absolutely had to go back. Except something kept him from leaving quite yet. He entered a parlor and knew that had Story of O been real, this is where it would have happened. O would have been escorted into the front door of the old wing on her lover’s arm. And she would have been brought here, to this room with the low carved ceilings and tapestries along the walls. Here is where the four men who ruled O’s château would have seized her and fucked her and sodomized her. Kingsley wandered the perimeter of the room, peeking under sheets. He found nothing but more furniture.
He checked under a sheet on the wall, expecting to find a painting underneath. Instead, he uncovered a large mirror—gilt filigree, and ornate. Not a reproduction. The real thing. He yanked the sheet off to see the whole thing. The
mirror itself was cracked. No, not cracked…shattered, like someone had hit the center of it with a mallet.
Or a fist.
Kingsley pulled the sheet off and lifted the mirror away from the wall an inch and he heard a click. The wall panel next to the mirror opened.
Ah. The mirror, of course. The looking glass.
Now he was getting somewhere.
19
Before entering through the panel, Kingsley had to find a light. He’d noticed a matchbox on the fireplace mantel in the music room, which he returned for. And in the parlor, he found half a candle, wearing wax and dust on its holder, abandoned on a shelf. He lit the candle and slipped through the panel door and into whatever mad world awaited him behind it.
Kingsley was grateful for the candle, for it surely saved him from tumbling down the steep stone staircase that began immediately on the other side of the door. He descended carefully, moving his hand along the walls to steady himself. The surface beneath his fingers was cool and gritty, rough like bare stone. He counted thirteen steps in all. When he was certain he’d reached the bottom, he felt along the wall for a light switch. While he didn’t find one, he felt something. He brought the stub of yellow candle toward what his hand had discovered.
He saw an old man’s face.
Kingsley recoiled, his breath catching in his throat.
Then he laughed. It wasn’t a face at all, but a black leather face mask. What were they called? Gimp masks. That was it. Not his taste, but he’d seen men wearing them in some of the more hardcore clubs he’d frequented, sometimes for work, sometimes for pleasure. Kingsley lifted the mask off the hook on the wall. It was finely-stitched and well-made, though the leather had dried out and cracked from long neglect. He returned it to the hook.
Kingsley swept his candle ahead of him before moving even an inch forward. He couldn’t see the full expanse of the room, but he saw enough to know that he was in some forgotten place filled with decades-old instruments of torture. The dungeon—for surely that was the only word to call this hidden part of the château—smelled like a cave. Dusty and dank with rot and decay. Kingsley had been in kinky clubs that tried to recreate the medieval dungeons of old. They had the stone walls, the candles, the iron latches. What they lacked was the smell. The scent of the forgotten. The odor of despair.
He stopped to examine a set of wooden and iron stocks, similar to what the Puritans once used to publicly shame offenders. Next to it he saw something like a kneeling bench in a church, no doubt used for spanking and paddling. What else? A rusting suspension rig. And scattered on the floor the remnants of broken canes, leather straps, and a scalpel he almost stepped on with his bare foot. Kingsley picked it up. He saw it had dried blood on it. He flung it from him and wiped his hands on his jeans.
Ten paces from the stocks he found an X-shaped cross, the wooden beams scored with the marks of decades of desperate fingernails. Kingsley touched the scratch marks and remembered leaving marks just like these one long dark night. Not on wooden rails, however, but on the stomach of a beautiful pale-haired monster, petty payback for the cock being shoved down his throat.
In the same cavernous room, Kingsley also found iron brackets nailed deep into the walls, a tall metal cage locked but with no key in sight, and a sort of medical bed with platforms for the legs and cuffs for the ankles. He pictured his red-capped beauty lying naked on the table, strapped here and helpless while he stroked her open pussy, fucked it while she pretended to hate every second of it. He needed one of those tables for his flat back in Paris.
Five paces from the table, Kingsley found a hallway. His candle wasn’t guttering yet, but it would soon. He didn’t have time to linger.
“Where are you, you monster?” Kingsley breathed, shuddering with need as he wandered down the hall. “You should be here. This is where your kind belongs. And mine.” For they were the same, he and his monster. And truly, who was the more depraved—the boy sadist or the grown man who would have knelt to him on this fetid floor? Even now Kingsley was hard, his breaths shallow, his cock aching. Seven years ago, he’d whispered to his master, “There is nothing you could do to me I wouldn’t want…” And in this cold dark dungeon corridor, Kingsley knew those words were still true. More true than ever. Indeed, the only truth he knew. If his monster were only here now…
“I want you,” Kingsley whispered. “I still want you with every cell in my body.”
As if in answer to his longing, the candle’s scalding wax spilled onto Kingsley’s fingers, sending pain shooting through his arm, into his chest, down to his groin.
“Merci,” Kingsley said to his monster, who he wanted to imagine had sent the burning wax as a gift. Nonsense, of course. Stage one insanity. Still, Kingsley couldn’t help but think his monster would have liked it here in this dungeon. And where else in a house like this could you keep a wolf?
Kingsley brushed the wax off his fingers as he went deeper into the corridor. His candle revealed a door in the wall and Kingsley tried to open it. It wasn’t locked, but the hinges were rusted. He put his shoulder against the damp wood and pushed. The door split along the hinges. That wasn’t quite what he’d intended. Ah, well, too late now. He entered the room.
At first, he found nothing that surprised him. In the center of the small room was a narrow brass twin bed, leather straps hanging loose from the bars of the headboard and the footboard. The mattress was bare and foul, with a rust-colored stain in the center. Kingsley didn’t know what was more frightening—that the large stain could be blood? Or something else?
He moved quickly to leave but stopped when he saw the writing on the wall. With a loose bit of stone, someone had scrawled words on every wall. The same words over and over again.
Je déteste mon mari.
I hate my husband.
Kingsley laughed softly. Madame must have been kept in this room once upon a time, and she’d rebelled against her master/husband by decorating the dungeon with these lovely little messages. Cute. He might have done the same if his master had left him unsupervised long enough to cause that kind of trouble.
The words were everywhere, Kingsley saw. On the walls—all four of them. On the floors from corner to corner. On the back of the broken door. Kingsley raised his candle over his head, curious to see if Madame had really written those four words all over the ceiling as well. She had written something there, but not about her husband. Something more chilling.
I don’t like this. I want to go home.
“Christ,” Kingsley said, reading those words.
“What, Kingsley?” Madame had asked him just that night. “What would you have said if your Marcus had answered the phone?”
“I was in the hospital when I called. I would have said, ‘Please come get me. I want to go home.’ ”
“Like a little boy, sick at school, calling his mother,” Madame had said.
Or a new bride, terrified of her new husband and the games he forced her to play…
I don’t like this. I want to go home.
A thousand times Kingsley had cursed the boy who’d owned him. A thousand times he’d screamed and railed and ranted. But never had he said, “I don’t like this.” Not once. Not ever.
Not even now.
“What did he do to you?” Kingsley said to the ceiling, to the ghost of the girl Madame had once been, the girl who’d been kept a prisoner in this vile room by her husband.
Kingsley’s arousal fled. Nausea took its place. Nausea and sadness. He retraced his steps to the panel door, doubling his original pace. He exhaled with relief when he was once again in the parlor, the dungeon locked and hidden behind the looking glass where it belonged. Kingsley hoped it would rot forever.
Kingsley sped quietly up the servants’ steps and past the room were Amel and Leon played. No wonder they’d come to the closed wing of the house to have sex. Amel was a screamer. After seeing the stained bare mattress and those words scrawled in the dungeon, the sound of a woman having a loud and lusty org
asm was sweeter than a sonata to his ears. He’d known there had to be a catch to this place, a dark side, a terrible secret. Down in that foul dungeon he’d found it. But instead of making him fear Madame, he felt the deepest admiration for her. She hadn’t perished in that dismal cell. She hadn’t let her husband break her. She’d survived, escaped, and taken control. No more monsters in the house, and all thanks to her.
There had been a catch, yes, but Madame had caught it. Caught it like a bullet. And now there was nothing in the château but warm and friendly fires, laughing lovers, delicious decadent games, and a beautiful newborn baby with another on the way.
Kingsley found his room again. Polly was still asleep in the bed. He stripped naked as quickly as he could and crawled under the covers, grateful for the warmth of the bed and Polly’s body. She stirred awake and drew him close.
“Where did you go?” she asked, pressing her soft body against his. She didn’t sound accusatory, only curious.
“I went to smoke,” he said. “And I heard the baby crying so I went into his room. Madame was there, and we talked awhile. Sorry.”
“It’s alright,” she said and settled down to sleep again. “What do you think of Madame?”
“I think I want to kill her husband.”
Polly laughed. “Stand in line.”
20
Kingsley awoke late the next morning. The first thing he did was glance at the glass doors to the balcony. The snow was still coming down. From the looks of the pile on the windowsill, it had accumulated ankle-deep overnight.
It had been a long time since he’d woken up this late and to a sight this lovely. He turned to wake Polly so she could see it, but her side of the bed was empty. Too bad. He would have liked to have served her again. All morning. All day.
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