But.
There was no denying his essential nature. He’d once told a client of Nora’s that fetishes were the pet you feed or the beast that eats you. It had been almost three months since he’d fed that chained beast of his. Coming to New York had tested Kingsley’s willpower. He knew the phone numbers of every good Dominatrix in the city by heart, and his fingers itched to dial one of them.
He might have succumbed if it was merely pain and submission he desired. But it wasn’t. Not even pain and submission and pleasure. He simply wanted his priest as soon as possible. Now, preferably. But as he wasn’t going to get his priest until Nora left for France in January, Kingsley hadn’t even bothered putting him on his Christmas list.
“Can your doorman fetch me a taxi?” Kingsley said.
“Already taken care of,” Griffin said, pointing at the doorman, who nodded and picked up the lobby phone. As they waited, Kingsley pulled on his gloves and adjusted his scarf.
“King,” Griffin said, pushing his hands deep into his coat pockets. “I wanted to ask you something.”
“Ask,” Kingsley said.
“It’s about the wedding. I was hoping, you know... Would you maybe be my best man?”
Kingsley’s surprise must have shown on his face, because Griffin started talking again before he could answer.
“It would mean a lot if you were up there next to me,” Griffin went on hurriedly. “My whole life changed for the better that day I woke up in your strip club with your boots on my chest.”
“Griffin, I’m honored. Truly. But you have brothers.”
“That’s the thing. I love my brothers. I can’t pick just one without hurting the others. Even if I could, I’d still want you. You saved my life. You did, don’t deny it. I know it and you know it and Mick knows it and my brothers know it. You got me into rehab. You helped me find something better than drugs to make me feel like I mattered. There’d be no Griff and Mick without you, because there’d be no Griff. So please say yes. Nora’s going to be Mick’s ‘best mistress’ and Søren’s already agreed to perform the wedding.”
“In that case.” Kingsley smiled at Griffin and embraced him. “Of course I will be your best man. It would be my honor.”
“Thank you,” Griffin said, on the verge of tears. “Seriously. Thank you.”
“Stop. You’re the new King of the Underground. You can’t be this soft in public.”
Griffin chuckled before composing his handsome face into a mask of cold hard fury. “I am very scary and dangerous,” he said. “Can’t you tell?”
“That would be more believable if you weren’t wearing Queen Elsa fuzzy slippers.”
Griffin looked down at his feet. “They’re very warm.”
Kingsley glared at him.
“Okay, so they’re not as intimidating as Hessian boots. But how did you know what they were anyway?” Griffin demanded. “Secret Disney fetish?”
“I have a two-year-old daughter. What’s your excuse?”
“Killer fashion sense,” Griffin said. “Car’s here.”
As soon as they walked out the double glass doors, a sleek black town car pulled forward.
“Very nice,” Kingsley said.
“Even a king in exile is still a king.” Griffin stepped forward to open the rear door for him.
“It was good to see you again,” Kingsley said. “Come down and visit.”
“I will. Hey, I’m supposed to give this to you.”
Griffin handed Kingsley a crisp white envelope.
“What’s this?” Kingsley asked.
Griffin smiled. “Don’t be mad. I’m just following orders.”
“Orders? Whose orders?” Kingsley demanded.
“Um…let’s call them…un-holy orders.”
And with that, Griffin slammed the car door shut. Outside the car window, Griffin grinned and waved goodbye. Kingsley had a very suspicious feeling that he’d just been kidnapped.
The car pulled into traffic and Kingsley leaned forward to address the driver. “You’re not taking me to the airport, are you?”
“No, Mr. Edge.”
“I don’t suppose you could tell me where we are going, then?”
He guessed Juliette had arranged to meet him somewhere for a night in the city alone together. She’d talked about it, if Nora were willing to watch Céleste. But what about Griffin’s crack about un-holy orders?
“I’m supposed to tell you that everything you need to know is in the card.”
With his heart in his throat, Kingsley ripped the envelope open and removed the card from within. At first glance it appeared to be nothing more than a standard-issue Christmas card, the sort one received from banks or doctor’s offices. A generic forest snow scene, the sky streaked with falling stars.
Except…the forest in the photograph seemed eerily familiar.
Kingsley opened the card, and something fell out of it and into his lap.
A silver cross on a silver chain. The chain was broken, split near the clasp and tarnished with age.
He knew that cross.
He knew that chain.
One dark night long, long ago, he’d torn it from the neck of the boy he’d loved more than life itself. And that hadn’t been a cliché that night. He’d loved that boy so much he would have traded his very life for one night with him. That night he nearly had.
Kingsley wrapped his fist around the cross and chain and pressed it to his heart. He knew where he was being taken. He knew because he’d flipped the card over to read the caption on the back. The forest seemed familiar because he’d been in one just like it before.
“Get comfortable, Mr. Edge,” was all the driver said. “It’s going to be a long drive.”
They merged onto I-95 going north.
North to Maine.
“Driver?” Kingsley said.
“Yes, sir?”
“If they give you a ticket for speeding, I’ll pay it.”
The driver glanced back at him in the review mirror and smiled. Message received. “Yes, sir,” he said, putting his foot on the gas.
They drove in silence a few minutes. Kingsley was about to roll the partition up between them so he could make a phone call in privacy when the driver asked him a question.
“So what’s in Maine anyway?”
Kingsley could have said “my Christmas gift” if he wanted to be twee. He could have said “visiting a friend” if he wanted to lie. He could have said “rough trade” if he wanted to be obnoxious (and accurate).
But he would tell the truth, though it was a bittersweet truth. Then again, the true meaning of Christmas was bittersweet. A child born to save us? Yes, but also a child born to die.
Kingsley answered the driver.
“Unfinished business.”
Two
Capture the King
As soon as the car cleared the city, Kingsley took his phone from his coat pocket and called Juliette.
“Bonjour, mon roi,” she said.
“You’re in on this, aren’t you, you wicked girl?” He spoke in French to her so the driver wouldn’t understand their conversation if he felt like eavesdropping.
“I had no part in the planning,” she said. “But I did give a certain tall blond someone my permission to have you...relocated.”
“Relocated? I’ve been kidnapped.” Albeit very politely kidnapped. Someone had even left him a picnic basket full of fresh fruit, nuts, cheese, and white wine in the backseat.
“You’re so happy you’re about to explode, aren’t you?” Juliette giggled like a school girl. “I can tell.”
“I am very happy, yes.” Très heureux, oui.
“You need this. You haven’t been yourself for too long. I know when it’s time for you to go away and be someone else for a few days. And it’s past time. You’ll come home in a much better mood,” she said, her voice still flush with barely suppressed laughter.
“This isn’t good for my ego, you sitting there laughing at me while I’m being a
bducted. You could at least pretend you’ll miss me.”
“You’ll only be gone three days and two nights. And we’ll be too busy to miss you. I’m taking Céleste to visit her grandmother for a few days—with your permission, of course. We’ll be home in time for réveillon.”
“You’ll be safe?” he asked.
“Nora is coming with us, if that makes you feel better.”
“Much better,” he said. Nora could watch Céleste while Juliette tended to her mother. “Yes, you have my permission. Give la Maîtresse my thanks. She takes good care of both my children.”
“In very different ways,” Juliette said.
“Don’t remind me,” he said.
“I love you, mon roi. And I will miss you. So will your daughter.”
“Tell her I love her and give her a thousand kisses for me.”
“Always.”
“And a thousand and one kisses for her beautiful, naughty mother.”
“Parfait,” Juliette said. “I’ll tell her and kiss her. But you tell your priest something for me.”
“What is that?” Kingsley asked.
“Tell him to send you back in one piece, s’il vous plait.”
Kingsley laughed. “You know the priest. No promises.”
“Two pieces then,” Juliette said. “One for him and one for me.”
They said their goodbyes, and Kingsley hung up.
He’d stayed up most of last night reading through the clubs’ account books. He should sleep if he could, as he had a long night ahead of him. The car was spacious and the interior comfortable, the temperature warm and the ride smooth. The driver rolled down the partition an inch.
“Would you like me to put on some Christmas music, Mr. Edge?”
“If you like,” Kingsley said. “But nothing modern. If I hear even one bar of ‘Wonderful Christmastime,’ I’ll be forced to violently commandeer the vehicle.”
“Christmas classics it is, Mr. Edge.”
He rolled the partition up, and Kingsley leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes.
The quiet strains of violins and cellos filtered through the speakers.
In the bleak midwinter...
It sounded like a recording from the Vienna Boys’ Choir.
It sounded like a memory.
St. Ignatius.
It must have been a Saturday or a Sunday, as he didn’t recall having classes that day. What he remembered was the loneliness. The worst kind of loneliness. The loneliness of being in love with someone he couldn’t have.
Kingsley had been so happy to see his sister Marie-Laure when she’d come to the school for a surprise visit. Oh, and how happy had all the other boys been at the sight of her French beauty. But his pleasure in her presence faded shortly after her arrival. She’d quickly become as obsessed with Søren as he was, and Kingsley’s only comfort was that although Søren had treated her with unfailing politeness, it was clear he did so only for Kingsley’s sake, not hers. Yet she monopolized their time and it became nearly impossible to be alone with him. He and Søren had snuck off campus the week before together in a Rolls Royce and spent the best afternoon of his life in the back of it.
Almost a week had passed since then. Søren hadn’t touched him in all that time. He would have gone a week without eating before he’d willingly go a week without Søren. When Kingsley saw Søren and Marie-Laure sitting alone at a table in the dining room, he turned his back on them and walked to his dorm room where he put on his coat, his winter boots and scarf, and set out into the snowy woods in the hopes of letting the bitter cold soothe his burning blood.
The only thing even remotely like submitting to Søren was a walk in a snow-filled, freezing dark wood. There was the cold of his heart, the terror of the darkness, the exertion of trudging in a foot of snow, and the beauty like no other. If he could not have Søren, this was the next best thing.
As he walked, he thought angry terrible things. Marie-Laure didn’t even like Søren. She was playing a game with him. She wanted to win his heart like she’d won every other boy’s heart in the school. Søren was aloof, showed no sexual interest in her. That’s why she was so obsessed with him. And how dare she not love him like he deserved to be loved? She only wanted to conquer and discard him. He almost told Søren to confess to her that he was madly in love with her. Knowing her, she’d pat his cheek and tell him how flattered she was, but she simply didn’t feel the same.
As Kingsley trudged deeper into the forest, he realized he had no idea where he was. Above him the tree cover was so thick he could barely see the moon. He tried to orient himself, to find his footprints in the snow in the dark. Six years from that night he’d be alone in the Carpathian Mountains with a sniper rifle strapped to his back, stalking through a forest ten times as thick and dangerous, hunting down a rogue KGB agent. But that night he was still a boy and the boy was lost and scared in the cold dark woods.
And it had started to snow again.
“Merde,” he breathed as the snow filled up his footprints. Shit. He hadn’t told anyone he was going for a walk. No one would notice he was missing until lights out. And even then, the boys in his dorm room were used to him sneaking out after dark because of his “insomnia.”
Kingsley’s pretend insomnia might get him killed tonight. His coat was warm, but not warm enough to keep him alive all night if the temperature dropped a few more degrees. Though they were likely all hibernating, Kingsley knew there were bears in the woods. And sometimes criminals would use this forest to cross into Canada. His mind was running away from him with fear. Hypothermia. Criminals. Bears.
Then he heard a twig crack.
He spun around, his heart taking off in his chest like a spooked bird.
“You could have told me this was your plan,” Søren said, stepping into the clearing.
Even if he hadn’t spoken, Kingsley would have known it was him—despite the darkness, what little moonlight filtered through the trees reflected off Søren’s blond hair, giving him the illusion of a halo.
“Plan?” Kingsley asked.
“I assumed you came out here so I would have to come and find you and bring you back? An excuse to be alone together?”
“You’re here, aren’t you?” Kingsley said, trying not to betray his relief in his face. “You didn’t need me to tell you the plan.”
“I suppose not.” Søren gazed up at the sky through the trees. A light dusting of snow fell gently onto his hair and face. “Not even you are foolish enough to walk off into the woods at night without marking a trail back to the school?”
“I marked a trail,” Kingsley said. “It’s...over there.”
“Over where?” Søren asked, his tone mocking, dismissive.
“Over...you know, the same trail you marked.”
“You’ll have to show me where you marked the trail on our way back, as I didn’t notice any markings at all other than your footprints on the way here. They’re gone, by the way. Your footprints. You’ll be lucky to find mine.”
“I’m going back. Stay out here all night if you want.” Kingsley brushed past him. “See if I care.”
He made it two steps before he felt a hand viciously hard on the back of his neck.
“Not that way.”
“That’s where you came from,” Kingsley said, meeting Søren’s steel eyes, which were a perfect complement to his iron grip on Kingsley’s neck.
“No. I came from there.” Søren nodded to a space between two other trees. “If you’d gone that way for ten more steps in the dark, you would have fallen to your death off the cliff.”
“Maybe I want to fall to my death.”
“You’re not allowed.”
“I’m not allowed?”
“No,” Søren said. “You are not allowed. You are not allowed to get lost unless I want to lose you. You aren’t allowed to be found, unless it’s me doing the finding. And the only way you’re allowed to die is if I choose to kill you with my own hands. Your life doesn’t belong to you
anymore, and if I have to murder you tonight and paint the snow with your blood to make you understand that, I will. You are mine, Kingsley. End of discussion.”
At the time, Kingsley was certain he would never understand how words as cruel as those, how vicious and possessive and cold, could warm him like a bonfire and heal his wounds like a magic elixir from a fairy tale. It made no sense, but it was true nonetheless. Kingsley nearly collapsed on his knees into the snow right then from the sheer force of his love and his lust and his adoration of this bitterly cold boy with the snow in his veins.
“Are you going to kill me?”
“Probably,” Søren said.
Probably?
Kingsley looked at him. “Do other lovers say the sort of things you say to me?”
“Why wouldn’t they?” Søren asked.
“Fear of being sent to prison?”
Søren stared at him.
“Just thinking out loud,” Kingsley said. “Sir.”
“Come on,” Søren said, dragging him by the hair to the path.
They walked in silence and Kingsley could have sworn he’d never seen this part of the woods before.
“This isn’t the way back to the school, is it?” Kingsley asked.
“We’re making a detour,” Søren said.
“Where?”
Søren didn’t answer. Kingsley had no choice but to follow him. While Kingsley had attended St. Ignatius for only two semesters, Søren had lived here full-time since he was twelve. Søren was as intimate with the woods around the school as Kingsley was with his own cock. And if someone didn’t get intimate with his cock in the next few minutes, he would die from blood loss to his brain since it had all gone to his erection. He was about to tell Søren this when they stepped from the edge of the woods and onto a sheet of glass.
“Jesus,” Kingsley said, nearly slipping and falling.
“Steady,” Søren said. “We’re on ice.”
“Thin ice?”
Winter Tales Page 22