“I will never take you anywhere you don’t want to go,” he promised, taking her hand in his, raising it to his lips to kiss her palm. “But there will be times you might not enjoy the trip there. Will you still go with me?”

She’d answered simply with “Anywhere.” A mistake, possibly, because it appeared “anywhere” meant Kingsley’s bedroom.

* * *

“You let him force you to have sex with my brother?” Marie-Laure interrupted, pulling Nora out of the past.

“Your use of ‘let’ and ‘force’ are a tiny bit contradictory,” Nora reminded her. “Søren owned me. I was his property. I was his property because I let him own me. It was my choice to let him own me. Once he owned me, though, he owned me.”

“You didn’t want to be with Kingsley?”

“I didn’t want to want to,” she said, smiling. “I had this idea in my head that once you fell in love with someone and they loved you back, that was it. There was no one else, right? That’s how it should be. Don’t judge me. I was so young and foolish.”

“You were in love.”

“I am in love. Søren was kind enough to show me the folly of that sort of thinking early on. One person for your entire life? One? Ridiculous. Who needs that kind of pressure? Expecting someone to fulfill all your needs is blasphemy. You’re expecting a human to be God for you.”

“You have a strange theology. My husband let my brother rape you and you make it about love.”

“Rape? Are you serious? Have you met your brother? I don’t think he’s physically capable of raping someone. He speaks and your panties spontaneously combust.”

“You didn’t want to be with him and my husband made you. That’s not rape?”

“A rape victim can’t say a single word to get her ra**st to stop. I could have. I had my safe word, and I chose not to use it.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t want to disappoint Søren.”

“That’s all?”

“Well...and admittedly, I’d always been attracted to Kingsley.”

“Was he attracted to you? My brother?”

“You sound skeptical.” Nora raised her chin and stared down at Marie-Laure.

“I am. But I suppose I was wrong thinking my brother had good taste in women.”

“He has amazing taste in women. He’s probably f**ked the thousand most beautiful women on earth.”

“And you.”

Nora laughed, low and throaty. Catfights...she didn’t get into them often. The women in her world were usually too scared of her to even blink wrong in her direction. She might not play this game often but that didn’t mean she didn’t know how.

“You know what they used to call me in the Underground?”

“Tell me.”

“The White Queen. The subs wore white. I wore it better than anyone. The other submissives were scared of me. They took orders from me like I was a Domme. Being Søren’s property made me something special in that world. I was envied, feared and desired. And you better f**king believe your brother wanted me. And he wanted Søren. That night we went to his house...he got us both.”

22

THE ROOK

Grace didn’t know the answer to Wesley’s question. She was rather certain she didn’t want to know the answer. Where was Kingsley going? Her heart tried to keep the answer a secret from her mind. If he was going where she thought there might be a chance he wouldn’t come back. She hardly knew the man but it didn’t matter. She didn’t know how much more stress and fear she could live with before she simply broke down.

They returned to the house and Grace left Wesley and Laila talking in the living room. Lovely place, it reminded her of a small English manor she’d visited as a teenager on a school trip. She remembered wandering the halls of that elegant old mansion and thinking it was such a shame it had become a museum. It had been built for a family and a family should live in it.

Although she knew she shouldn’t, Grace opened every door on the first and then the second floor. Her heart clenched when she saw a bedroom that obviously belonged to two little girls. Twin beds, side by side. Pale pink and white walls, everything the color of cotton candy. Over the left bed hung a painted sign. Byrony, it read in block letters. Over the right bed in cursive was the name Willa. On each bed sat a mountain of stuffed animals—lions and wolves, sock monkeys and smiling dolphins. Grace picked up a small brown dog and held him to her chest. She’d had one just like this as a child. Still had it somewhere in her parents’ attic. She’d named him Bernard, “although he isn’t a saint,” she’d tell people, proud of her joke. How she wanted to have a room like this in her house someday—a tiny bed piled with toys with Zachary on story patrol every night. Knowing her husband, he’d read their son or daughter adult Books—Thomas Hardy or Virginia Woolf. At least they’d work to put their little one to sleep.

Grace ran a hand over her stomach and hated its flatness. She ran five miles four days a week, ate right, took her vitamins...and yet every month she failed to conceive. She’d prayed for a miracle, that God would heal the scar tissue inside her enough that she could have a baby. Now that prayer seemed so small, so selfish. Nora was trapped by a madwoman intent on revenge. She could only pray now that God was in the miracle-making mood today.

With reluctance, Grace put the dog back on the pile, and left the bedroom. She noticed a door at the end of the hall now open that she could have sworn was closed when she’d come into the girls’ room. Grace walked to the door and saw that it didn’t lead to a room but a staircase going up. She saw no light switch so in total darkness she ascended the stairs until she could go no farther. Running her hand over the dark door, she found a knob, opened it and discovered she’d come up to the roof of the house.