LITMIR.BIZ

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scent of winter.

      Without a word to either him or Matthew, the young man left the church without looking back.

      “Stearns,” Matthew breathed, once the pianist had gone.

      So that was the mysterious Mr. Stearns who inspired both fear and respect from the students and Father Henry. Fascinating … Kingsley had never been in the presence of someone that immediately intimidating. No teacher, no parent, no grandparent, no policeman, no priest had even made him feel what standing in the same room with the piano player, with Mr. Stearns, had made him feel.

      Kingsley looked down and saw his hand had developed a subtle tremor. Matthew saw it, too.

      “Don’t feel bad.” The boy nodded with the wisdom of a sage. “He does that to everybody.”

      

      NORTH

       The Present

      The fear had been his favorite part. The fear that followed him like the footsteps through the woods where he’d fled for sanctuary and found something better than safety. The footsteps … how his heart had raced as they grew louder, drew nearer. He’d been too afraid to run anymore, afraid that if he ran he would get away. He ran to be caught. That was the only reason.

      Kingsley remembered his sudden intake of air as a viciously strong hand clamped down onto his neck … the bark of the tree trunk burning his back … the smell of the evergreens around him, so potent that even thirty years later he still grew aroused whenever he inhaled the scent of pine. And after, when he woke up on the forest floor, a new scent graced his skin—blood, his own … and winter.

      Three decades later he could never uncouple sex from fear. The two were linked inextricably, eternally and unrepentantly in his heart. He’d learned the potency of fear that day, the power of it, even the pleasure, and now thirty years later, fear had become Kingsley’s forte.

      Unfortunately, at this moment his Juliette was not afraid.

      He could change that.

      Kingsley watched her out of the corner of his eye while he sipped his wine. Standing next to Griffin and young Michael, she smiled in turns at each of them while they bent her exquisite ears with the tale of how Nora Sutherlin had brought them together. For one single solitary day without hearing about the amazing Nora Sutherlin, he would cash out half his fortune, lay it on a pyre in the middle of Fifth Avenue, set it afire and watch it turn to ashes. If only it were that easy to kill the monster he’d created.

      No, he corrected himself. The monster they had created.

      Juliette glanced his way and gave him a secret smile, a smile that needed no translation. But he would wait, bide his time, let her think he wasn’t in the mood tonight. He’d let her anticipation build first before replacing it with fear. How beautifully Juliette wore fear, how it shimmered in her bistre eyes, how it shivered across her ebony skin, how it caught in her throat like the scream he’d hold inside her mouth with his hand….

      Kingsley’s groin tightened; his heart began to race. Setting his wineglass down, he strode from the bar through the back room and into the hallways of The 8th Circle. Right outside the door to the bar, his foot connected with something lying on the floor. Curious, he bent down. Shoes. A pair of shoes. He picked them up. White patent-leather stilettos … size six.

      Shoes last seen on the feet of Nora Sutherlin.

      Staring at the shoes, Kingsley pondered how and why they’d ended up in the hallway outside the bar. Nora could do almost anything in her high heels. He’d seen her top some of the most hardened masochists in them. She’d beaten them, whipped them, flogged them, kicked them…. She could stand on a man’s neck in high heels, walk on his bruised back, balance on one leg while her other foot was being worshipped. He knew of only one activity she couldn’t do in her towering high heels—run.

      He carried the shoes down to the bottommost floor, where he and a few of the other VIPs kept their own private dungeons. At the last door on the left, he paused, but didn’t knock, before entering.

      A man, blond and tall and deep in thought, stood by the bed, his arms crossed, his brow furrowed.

      “Have you ever heard of knocking?” Søren uncrossed his arms and leaned his shoulder against the bedpost. Kingsley clenched his jaw.

      “I’ve heard rumors of knocking. I never believed them.” Kingsley stepped into the room. No one’s dungeon at the Circle exemplified the concept of minimalism better than Søren’s. It held nothing more than a four-poster wrought-iron bed tucked into an alcove, a Saint Andrew’s cross front and center, and a single trunk filled with various implements of torture. Søren’s sadistic side was the stuff of legend at The 8th Circle and throughout the Underground. He didn’t need a thousand types of floggers and single-tails and dozens of canes and tawse and toys. Such a piece of work was Søren—he could break a submissive with a word, a look, with his penetrating insight, his calm, cold dominance that left even the strongest quaking at his feet. He cowed them with the beauty of his exterior first, and second, with the beast that was his heart.

      “I brought you a gift.”

      Kingsley held out the shoes by the straps. Søren raised an eyebrow.

      “Not really my size, are they?”

      “Your pet’s.” Kingsley dropped them on the bed. “As you know. You must have walked past them as you left the bar.”

      “I left them there so she would find them when she came back for them.”

      Kingsley gave a small, mirthless laugh.

      “Didn’t I overhear you telling her that if she had any mercy in that dark heart of hers, she wouldn’t run from you to her Wesley?”

      Søren didn’t answer. He merely stared at Kingsley with his eyes of steel. Kingsley resisted the urge to grin. Schadenfreude … such an unbecoming emotion. He kept it to himself for as long as he could. Then, turning on his heel, he swept out of the room, quoting an old poem as he left Søren in his dungeon, with only Nora’s shoes on the bed for company.

      “I saw pale kings and princes, too,

       pale warriors, death-pale were they all;

       they cried—’La Belle Dame sans Merci

       Hath thee in thy thrall.’“

      Kingsley returned to his own dungeon and paced as he waited. His bed sat in the very center of the room, unlike the priest’s at the end of the hall. For Søren, pain was sex. He could possibly be what the church demanded him to be—a celibate priest—if it weren’t for Nora, for his Eleanor, who needed the flesh as much as Kingsley needed the fear. He could only imagine the tantrum she would throw if her owner decided to cut her off sexually. But Søren would never do that. He inflicted pain for his release, and the sex that followed was mere afterglow. And who didn’t enjoy the afterglow?

      Kingsley paused midstep as he heard the floor creak in the hallway outside his chamber. Silently, he moved to stand by the door and waited. He’d spent two years in the French Foreign Legion after leaving school, and five years pretending to still be in the French Foreign Legion while he served his country in other quieter ways. He’d learned the lessons of a spy well. See everything but never be seen. Hear everything but never be heard. When Juliette slipped through his door, he knew she expected to find him in bed, waiting for her. When his hand shot out and captured her by the arm, she gasped in fear.

      Parfait.

      His hand over her mouth killed her scream as Kingsley shoved her into the wall. He kicked the door closed even as Juliette attempted to wrest herself from his grasp. And although at five-ten, his willowy Juliette could not match his strength—no woman could—that didn’t stop her from trying, from digging her heels into the hardwood floor as he

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