“No, she wasn’t kind to me. She did the cruelest thing a woman can do to a man, and I will still burn you if you go near her and her house again.”
The colonel laughed a sad little defeated laugh.
“I had a feeling you two would get along.”
Kingsley started to tell him just how well he and Madame had gotten along, but the colonel dropped his guard for a split second and Kingsley saw such longing on his face, such loneliness… He recognized that look. God knew, he’d seen it in the mirror enough times.
“Did she tell you she was my wife?”
“She didn't have to. I guessed when you didn't punish me for breaking Huet's nose.”
“I still love her,” the colonel said. “After all that…I still love her. And she still loves me. Almost as much as she hates me.”
“Can’t you make peace with her? Apologize? Grovel?”
And to that the colonel said simply, “No.”
“Your loss,” Kingsley said.
“You don’t understand. This is the game. As long as I keep playing with her, she’s still in my life. The second I forfeit, the game ends.”
“It’s a stupid game,” Kingsley said. “You shouldn’t have dragged me into it.”
“You’re right. But it’s all I have. What do you have?”
Kingsley wanted to give him a smart answer.
He didn’t have one.
The colonel’s shoulders slumped, the fight gone out of him. “I retire in two months. I think we can pretend this never happened, yes?”
Kingsley shrugged. “What happened?”
Without another word, Kingsley walked down the hall of HQ and wasn’t surprised to see Bernie sitting on a chair right outside the door to Captain Huet’s office.
Kingsley paused and narrowed his eyes at Bernie. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-five,” Bernie said. “Why?”
Jacques’s our first boy in twenty-five years… Our last boy—I call him my nephew…he moved away years ago, but he’s still drawn back to us. He visits me often, brings me all the gossip. The children of this house are all very loyal even if their parents are not…
She has someone on the inside. I never told her my last name. She knew it anyway…
“No reason,” Kingsley said. He’d left the château, and he was never going back. Some things were better left a mystery.
Kingsley left Bernie without another question, without another word and walked out onto the Paris streets sweating in the full heat of a city morning. Exhausted and sore as he was, he walked back to his apartment rather than take a taxi. Paris was bright and thriving that day, buzzing with voices, with beautiful women in trim high heels with silk scarfs of every color dancing behind them as they strode the sidewalks. Tourists thronged the parks and nannies pushed carriages and men sat at café tables drinking coffee and solving the world’s problems. He bore the marks of Madame’s château on his body, but only on his body. By trying to break his spirit, Madame had helped heal an old wound. Maybe now that he knew why he’d run away from Søren, he could find a way back. He thought of this when he turned the corner and saw the very same phone booth he’d used to call Madame that first day. He stepped inside and closed the door. He put in all his coins and dialed a phone number he shouldn’t have known by heart but did.
After three rings, someone answered.
“St. Ignatius Catholic School for Boys?” A woman’s voice. They must have hired a receptionist. “How may I help you?”
“Is Marcus Stearns there?” Kingsley asked, in an American accent.
“No, he no longer teaches here. I could relay a message to him, if you like.”
A message. He’d leave a message and in an hour or a day or a week, he’d get a phone call. Is that what he wanted? A call back? A long chat?
Or nothing.
He could leave a message and wait and wait and wait and his phone might never ring.
And that would break him in a way Madame could only dream about…
“No message,” Kingsley said. “Thank you.”
He hung up.
If Søren wanted him, he would find him. In the meantime…
Kingsley returned to his apartment, stripped out of his clothes, and crawled under his sheets. They embraced him like an old friend. He closed his eyes and felt sleep creeping along the floor toward him, ready to join him in bed. At last sleep came to him.
He did not dream.
III
Winter
38
Trillium Woods, Maine. Present Day.
Kingsley stood in the clearing of the snow-filled forest. He saw the stone. He saw the chess board laid out upon it. He saw the boy with the January eyes and the ice in his veins.
But this was not a dream and the boy was not a boy anymore. He was a man, a beautiful man with blond hair going silver, gray eyes vital as struck flint, his face and jaw granite though his heart was red and warm and alive. If there had ever really been ice in the boy’s veins, it had melted decades ago.
Kingsley walked toward the chess board, leaving a trail of footprints in the snow. His breath steamed in front of him and rose to the tops of the trees like incense in a cathedral.
“What the hell are you doing?” Kingsley asked.
“Are you going to sit and play chess with me?” Søren asked. “Or stand there laughing all night.”
“It’s fucking freezing out here,” Kingsley said, shivering. “I never should have told you about that dream.”
“But you did, and now we’re going to sit out in the cold and the snow and play chess until one of us wins. Never let it be said that I haven’t made all your dreams come true.”
“I have better dreams than this,” Kingsley said.
“But it’s this dream you told me about. Sit.”
Last night Søren had bestowed a rather cathartic beating onto him. During the aftermath, Søren had ordered Kingsley to tell him a secret, something he’d never confessed before to anyone. Maybe it was the wine Kingsley had drunk or the happiness of getting to be alone in a cabin in Maine with his lover, but Kingsley had told him a story he’d kept secret for over twenty-five years. The story of the château.
“Well?” Søren said, moving his white pawn forward. “I’m waiting. And I’m not letting you back in the cabin until you play with me.”
Kingsley sighed so heavily, his breath turned into a cloud around his head before dissipating.
He sat across from Søren and moved his pawn.
Søren sacrificed a pawn almost immediately.
“The Danish Gambit,” Kingsley said. “I should have guessed.”
“Yes, you should have. I’m going to beat you.”
“I hope so.”
“Whore,” Søren said.
“Always.”
“I beat you last night. And today.”
“And tonight?”
“Win the game and I’ll consider it,” Søren said.
“I already won,” Kingsley said.
“Did you?”
“I’m playing with you,” he said. “Therefore, according to you, I win.”
Søren looked at him with utter disgust. Kingsley grinned maniacally in response.
“I didn’t actually say that,” Søren said. “A twisted, absurd dream version of me said it.”
“It sounded like something you would say.”
“Did it?”
“It was obnoxious and arrogant,” Kingsley said. “And pompous. Smug, too.”
“Yes, point taken.”
“Self-important. Self-righteous.”
“Kingsley.”
“Yes?”
“Checkmate.”
Kingsley looked down at the board. “Thank fuck,” he said. “I’m freezing my balls off out here.”
“This was your stupid dream,” Søren said as he packed the chess pieces away. “Not my fault your subconscious is as much of a whore as you are in your waking hours.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You dreamt I was a wolf that sexually assaulted you.”
“It wasn’t assault. It was consensual,” Kingsley said with a shrug.
“My God, Freud would have a field day with you.”
“He’d have an entire field year with you. Field decade. Field century…”
“I have perfectly normal dreams, thank you,” Søren said as they walked back to their cabin, the snow up to their ankles now.
“Such as?”
“For starters, I’ve never dreamt about having anal intercourse with apex predators.”
Søren held the door of the cabin open for him and Kingsley walked through without a retort. The man had a point.
A fire smoldered in their fireplace and Søren nodded toward it. With a put-upon sigh, Kingsley squatted by the hearth like some caveman of old and built up the dying fire with shredded newspaper and other kindling. Søren stood by the steadily building fire holding out his hands to warm them.
“I still can’t believe you never told me about Madame and her cult,” Søren said. “What other cults have you nearly joined and not told me about?”
“It was just the one cult. And I was only there about three days total,” Kingsley said. “After a week it felt like it had all been a dream. After a year it felt like something that had happened to someone else. After this long, I’d almost forgotten it ever happened at all.”
That all was true. He had nearly forgotten it. Until Søren had prodded him, and it had all come back to him like the words to an old song when he’d heard a stray bar or two.
“I have so many questions,” Søren said. “I don’t know where to begin.”
The fire caught at last, and Kingsley stood with his back against the mantel. “I probably don’t have the answers,” he said. “I still can’t figure out what Madame meant when she said she’d lied to me only once, but it was a big one.”
“I may know that one,” Søren said. “Her big lie was telling you how innocent she was when she married her husband. I was eighteen once. Was I innocent?”
“You think she really planned to overthrow him for fifteen years?”
“She did say he gave her a copy of Histoire d’O a week before the wedding. If I remember correctly, at the end of the book, O is discarded by her lover, and she asks for permission to commit suicide. Maybe your Madame read that and decided to write a better ending for herself. What do you think?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Kingsley said.
“What happened to your colonel?” Søren asked.
“He retired, like he said he would. Never saw him again. I want to think he finally humbled himself enough to beg her forgiveness, but I doubt it. Funny thing though…as soon as the colonel retired, Bernie quit our agency. Never saw him again either. I hope he went to Madame to serve.”
“You think he wasn’t as stupid as he pretended to be?”
“Maybe. Still don’t know if Bernie was working for Madame or the colonel. Or both. Or neither,” Kingsley said. “I don’t want to know. I like to imagine he was secretly the best spy in the agency.”
“And Captain Huet?”
“We made up eventually,” Kingsley said, a little smile playing at the corner of his lips. “He forgave me for breaking his nose.”
“You slept with him, didn’t you?”
“No comment,” Kingsley said. A better answer than the truth. Yes, he had slept with the good captain—gentle kisser, rough blow jobs. They were lovers for almost a month before Huet was sent to Argentina to arrest an escaped Nazi war criminal. He’d died on that mission, but at least he took the Nazi down with him. They’d sent Kingsley to retrieve Huet’s remains. There but for the grace of God go I, Kingsley remembered thinking as he looked at his lover’s destroyed body.
One week after that, Kingsley became Captain Boissonneault.
“I really shouldn’t be telling you any of this,” Kingsley said. “Supposedly all my work was classified.”
“But this assignment at the château was unofficial, yes?”
“Everything I did for them was unofficial.”
Søren went very silent and his brow furrowed.
“What?” Kingsley asked.
“Colette,” he said. “Did you see her with your own eyes after your Madame said she wasn’t actually pregnant?”
“No. Madame ordered me to leave. I left right away.”
“So she could have been pregnant?”
Kingsley glared at him.
“Will you ever stop fucking with my mind?” Kingsley asked.
“It wouldn’t be this easy to fuck with you if you’d used condoms a little more often,” Søren reminded him.
“True. But if I had, there’d be no Nico.”
“And no Colette Junior out there somewhere weeping in her pillow at night, pining for her lost papa.”
“If you must know, I got a postcard a week later,” Kingsley said. “It said, Sorry we tricked you.”
“From Colette?”
“No,” Kingsley said. “From Georges, the tick.”
Søren laughed. His laughter died, and Søren looked deeply into Kingsley’s eyes. “I want to ask you something, and I’m almost afraid of the answer.”
“You don’t have to be,” Kingsley said. “Ask.”
“Do you ever regret the choice you made?”
“Madame’s choice?” Kingsley asked.
Søren nodded.
“No,” Kingsley said without hesitation.
“She offered you a home and a family, children, comfort, safety, lust, pain, and love. And you chose to wait for me to find you instead.”
“I wasn’t wrong. You did find me. Eventually. And I have two beautiful children. I have a home. I have a family. I have comfort, safety, love and lust. And you for pain.”
It pleased Kingsley to count his blessings. His Juliette—his lover, his better half, the mother of his daughter and the joy of his days. His Céleste—his daughter, his angel and his princess. His Nico—his son, whom Kingsley not only loved, but admired and respected. His home in New Orleans. His friends. His work. His life.
And Søren. The boy in white who now wore all black.
“I do wonder sometimes what would have happened if I’d left you a message that day I called our school,” Kingsley said. “Would you have found me sooner?”
“Yes,” Søren said. “And I would have come to you that very same day. And I would have taken you home.”
“Ah,” Kingsley said. “One more regret for the butcher’s bill.”
“But I would never have let you hear the end of it,” Søren said.
“Maybe I don’t regret it then.” Kingsley leaned forward, wanting to kiss Søren, and it seemed—for once—Søren would let him. At the last second, however, Søren brought his hand up and clapped it over Kingsley’s mouth.
“If you ever try to kiss me again without permission,” Søren said calmly, “I’ll eat your heart like an apple and throw the core on the ground and let the worms have the rest.”
Ah. Still a wolf. No matter how much he denied it, Søren still had the teeth, still had the claws, still had the bite.
Kingsley smiled. “You tried that trick last night,” he said. “I have the bite marks on my chest to prove it.”
Søren raised an eyebrow at him. “Are you complaining?”
Kingsley shook his head. “Never.”
“Good,” Søren said and though his tone was stern, his eyes were alight with amusement.
“But,” Kingsley said, “I do have a question.”
Again, the eyebrow went up.
“Did you…when we were young, I mean, back in school…did you pick me up when I was sleeping and put me into bed with you? Or did I just dream that?”
“You want to know?” Søren said.
“I’ve wanted to know all my life,” Kingsley confessed.
“The answer is…” Søren leaned in and put his mouth to Kingsley’s ear. Kingsley caught his breath and held it tight. He had truly wo
ndered about that night for thirty-three years.
“Yes?” Kingsley said.
“The answer is…” Søren said again, and grabbed Kingsley by the back of the neck and pulled his mouth to his for a long, hard, passionate kiss.
Ah. Well. So be it.
Between the kiss and the answer, he would always pick the kiss.
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The Chateau_An Erotic Thriller Page 22
