Laila backed out of her uncle’s empty bedroom, a bedroom she knew she didn’t belong in, and returned to the kitchen. She’d hoped to find sanctuary here but now she felt only troubled. The very air in the entryway seemed worried, as if someone had left in a great hurry and offered the house no explanation.
She wandered around the kitchen, afraid for some reason to venture out but also afraid to stay put. Maybe she should call the church. She had that phone number. He might be gone but his secretary could be working there. Maybe she had an emergency number.
Laila went to the kitchen phone not wanting to use her cell. When she reached it she discovered at last a cause for her concern.
The rectory had a landline still. Had he been there, she would have teased her uncle for being part of a church so old-fashioned they still used big black rotary phones with dangling cords. But her small smile died when she lifted the receiver and found a crack in the cradle. More than a crack, the phone was marred by a huge ugly gash. The handset, too, was damaged. She stared at the phone in her hand before resting it gently onto the cradle again. Someone had been on the phone and hung it up so violently and with such force the phone had cracked open. As a small child she’d hung off her uncle’s arms like a monkey on a tree—sometimes she clung to his biceps with her hands, sometimes she hung upside down from her knees. It seemed he could keep her suspended in the air forever. As long as she hung and she’d swung, she’d never once feared he would drop her. And he never had. She’d never met a man stronger than her uncle. Only a man of incredible strength could have done this kind of damage with one fierce slam.
Even as her body started to shake, Laila’s mind began to race. She needed to get out and seek safety. She picked up her suitcase and raced to the door, but the sound of footfalls on the hardwood stalled her steps.
She spun around ready to thank God her uncle had come back and would make everything okay again like he always did.
But it wasn’t him.
And nothing was okay.
6 THE QUEEN
A smiling woman stood before Nora. She wore an elegant black-and-purple dress, understated lipstick and a maleficent gleam in her dark eyes. Nora’s chair faced a large window. The sun had already set; the diaphanous curtains moved in the evening breeze like green smoke surrounding her. The woman, whoever she was, looked about forty-five years old and had long dark hair classically coiffed. And for some reason something about the set of her lips, the line of her jaw, reminded her of Kingsley.
“Who are you?” Nora said, her voice groggy with pain. She didn’t follow up with “Where am I?” because she didn’t want to know.
“You don’t know?”
“If I knew, why would I ask?”
Nora pulled on the handcuffs behind her back. She had small hands and could sometimes squeeze out of handcuffs if she had enough wiggle room. But they were clapped on tight, too tight, and no lock pick set or hairpins were to be found. Her heart thundered in newfound panic.
“I’ll give you a hint,” the woman said with a smile that held no friendliness at all. “You’ve slept with my husband.”
“That doesn’t winnow the field down as much as you think it would.”
The woman narrowed her eyes at Nora and something in that look seemed so familiar, she suddenly knew exactly who it was who faced her. Terror, real terror, gripped Nora’s heart with hooked talons.
“You’re supposed to be dead,” Nora whispered.
“You’re Catholic. Haven’t you ever heard of resurrection?”
“Marie-Laure.” Of course she was. She looked so much like Kingsley it was as if she was a house he haunted.
“Marie-Laure Constance Stearns. Comment ça va?”
Nora swallowed.
“I’ve been better,” she said in answer to Marie-Laure’s question. “Usually when I’m handcuffed it’s consensual.”
“Only usually?”
“I get arrested a lot.”
Marie-Laure came toward her and bent over. She stood so close and studied her with such scrutiny that Nora could smell her perfume—cypress—and see the crow’s feet mostly hidden by an impressive makeup job under her eyes.
“See something you like?” Nora asked as she leaned back in the chair trying to move her head as far from Marie-Laure’s as possible.
“Simply trying to see what he sees in you. My husband, I mean. I’m not finding it yet.”
“I give great head.”
The retort was answered with a slap, hard and fast, to her left cheek.
Nora winced and blinked her now-tear-filled eyes.
“You are seriously good at that,” she said. “Wow.” Søren had slapped her harder than that but only once ever, on the night she’d gone back to him.
“I thought my husband was a man of refined tastes.”
“In wine and books and music, he is. Terrible taste in women, though. Obviously.”
Nora braced herself for another slap. It didn’t come.
Marie-Laure took a few steps back until she stood at the window again. Something about that window, this room … Nora had a feeling she’d been in this house before, but when? She remembered it like she remembered a dream—all haze and feeling, no substance.
“I was only twenty-one years old when I got married. And he’d turned eighteen on our wedding night. We weren’t much more than children then, so I forgave him for not loving me.”
“How Christian of you.”
“You see … shortly after we married, I discovered the truth about him and my brother. They tried to keep it from me. But I knew. I saw them whispering together at times, saw the way my husband looked at my brother when he should have been looking at me. Kingsley boasted of his female conquests. As a girl I thought he was exaggerating. Then when I knew about him and my husband, I thought he’d been lying the whole time. Embarrassed, a cover-up.”
“Kingsley’s not gay. Neither is Søren. Not that there’s anything … well, you know.”
“I realize that now. Then I thought they were, that they were deeply in love with each other. I knew my marriage was ostensibly for money—that’s what he said, anyway—but I agreed to it because I knew he’d love me eventually. Why wouldn’t he?”
“I can think of a few reasons,” Nora said, determined to piss Marie-Laure off as much as possible. What a fucking lunatic. If she survived this, Nora would kill Søren for marrying Marie-Laure all those years ago. On paper it had seemed like the perfect solution. Marie-Laure and Kingsley had had no money. Søren had his trust fund just waiting for him to get married or turn twenty-one. If Søren and Marie-Laure married, no one could say a word about all the time Kingsley and Søren spent alone together. They could have lived in the same house. And Marie-Laure would have been rich and free to do whatever she wanted with whomever she wanted. But it was Søren she wanted, the one man whose love she would never have. And the plan that looked so perfect on paper, the marriage that meant everyone would win … for Kingsley, Søren and Marie-Laure, it had been the beginning of the end of everything. Maybe even Nora’s life.
“Everyone loved me at that school. I had every boy there falling all over himself for me. When I knew my husband had no interest in me, I even took one of them up on his offer. One of the students, a boy named Christian. Perfect, non?