The King

by Tiffany Reisz

  We don’t need a bullet. We need a bomb.”

  Sam sighed and ran her hands through her hair. Her warm hazel eyes shone with deep intelligence, and he’d been impressed by how quickly she’d learned names in his house.

  “A bomb? That’s not going to be easy. The Fullers have been around forever,” she said. “I think Reverend Fuller inherited the ministry from his father.”

  “Bizarre.”

  “What is?”

  “Inheriting a church from your father. My only experience with religion is with the Catholic church. Priests have sons sometimes, but they don’t go around handing the keys of the church over to them.”

  “I don’t know much about Catholics. I’m pretty comfortably agnostic. What are you?”

  “I’m French,” Kingsley said.

  “I’m asking about your religion.”

  “That is my religion. And fucking with Fuller is my new religion,” Kingsley said.

  “Are you sure about this? I want to fuck with Fuller, too, but he’s powerful. More powerful than you are.”

  “That hurts.”

  “You said you have a DA and his wife in your pocket. Fuller has the governor in his. And the mayor.”

  “I don’t care who his friends are. I don’t care how big his church is. I’m not going to let him turn this city into his playground, Sam. This is my city,” Kingsley said. The thought of some Bible-thumping preacher bringing his message of hate to New York turned Kingsley’s stomach. He could imagine what Fuller would have to say about him and Søren and what had passed between them back at school. Kingsley knew in his soul—if he had one—that nothing he and Søren did had been a sin. Fuller and his kind could go fuck themselves.

  “So what do you want me to do?” Sam asked.

  “Get me everything you can on Fuller and his church.”

  “King, I’ve looked through everything there is on him already. I haven’t found anything. He’s an ass, don’t get me wrong. Pompous and preachy and completely bigoted. But that puts him in line with every other televangelist preacher out there. No rumors of adultery, no rumors of wife-beating, no rumors of kid-fucking.”

  “There’s something. There has to be something.”

  “What if there isn’t?”

  Kingsley stood up and came around the desk.

  “I’m going to tell you something, and you’re going to keep it between you and me. It won’t always be a secret, but for now it is.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “At the hotel, I told you I knew a world-class sadist who could cut a lit cigarette in half with the tip of a bullwhip. What I didn’t tell you is that he’s also a Catholic priest. Look in my eyes, Sam.”

  She looked into his eyes as ordered.

  “There is always something,” Kingsley said.

  “Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath. “I’ll look again. What are you going to do?”

  “Nothing you need to know about,” he said.

  “No hints?”

  “It starts with an A,” Kingsley said.

  “Assignation? Audition? Ass…sex? They all start with A.”

  “I’m going to audition someone for an ass-sex assignation. I’ll see you later,” he said, standing up straight. The scar tissue on his chest was painfully tight today.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “I saw you wince. Are you in pain?”

  “Don’t start worrying about me.” He shook his finger at her. “Once you start that habit, you’ll never stop.”

  “That worrisome, are you?”

  Kingsley raised his hands and ticked off numbers on his fingers as he spoke.

  “One. My parents died in a train crash when I was fourteen. Two. My sister committed suicide when I was seventeen shortly after marrying the man I was in love with. Three. I used to kill people for a living for a secret organization inside the French government. Four. I have pissed off dangerous men with long memories. Five. My closest friend is a Catholic priest, the aforementioned sadist, who is in love with a girl in his congregation whose father has a rap sheet as long as your leg and some very nasty mob connections. And that, Sam, is only the beginning of the list of reasons you might want to worry about me.”

  “Six. You’re in pain.”

  “I have an old injury that’s healing slowly. It’s nothing to worry about. I’m nothing to worry about. So, don’t worry.”

  “You should see a doctor.”

  “I hate doctors.”

  “I don’t care. See one anyway.”

  “You forget I’m your boss. Not the other way around.”

  “And I’m your assistant. I’m assisting you. You need to see a doctor.”

  “I’m leaving now. Goodbye.” He patted her on the shoulder as he walked past her.

  “I’m making you a doctor’s appointment,” she called out after him.

  Kingsley paused in the door, turned around and came back to her.

  “You are insubordinate,” he said.

  “You hired me to help you,” she said, turning her bright eyes up to him. “Let me help you.”

  Kingsley sat on the edge of his desk and looked down at her.

  “I could align the planets using your nose as a sextant,” he said, tapping the end of it. “It’s that straight.”

  “It’s the only straight part of me. Now stop trying to distract me and tell me how I can help you.”

  “Stop dressing like that.”

  “I dress like a man. No apologies. I don’t feel like myself in skirts and dresses. Okay?”

  “I don’t care about that. I don’t care if I never see you in a dress or a skirt as long as I live.” He waved his hand to indicate his own attire of jeans, T-shirt and jacket. “But you dress nicer than I do, and I’m your employer. You’ll have to tone it down.”

  “Maybe you should tone it up.”

  “Tone it up?”

  “You said you wanted to be a king of your own kingdom, right? You should dress like one.”

  “I’d have to dress in a top hat and tails to outshine you.”

  She tilted her head back and looked him up and down.

  “You’d look incredible in a tuxedo.”

  “You think?”

  “Like a sexy French penguin,” she said.

  “I’m leaving.”

  “Bon voyage,” she said. “I’ll make the appointment.”

  “No doctors,” he called back.

  “I meant with my tailor.”

  Kingsley had a smile on his face as he left Sam in his office. The smile faded by the time he exited the house. His driver, Gia, waited for him with the car, but he waved her off, telling her he’d rather walk today. It was a nice May day after all. The walk would do him good. Of course the real reason he didn’t want Gia to drive him was because he didn’t want anyone knowing where he was going. He walked four blocks and then caught a cab. He still couldn’t believe Søren had talked him into doing this. He hadn’t belonged to Søren since he was seventeen, and yet, here he was, following Søren’s orders like those eleven years had been eleven days. It had been so long since he’d felt as if it mattered to someone whether or not he lived or died that he couldn’t help but give in when Søren pushed him to come here.

  The cab let him out in front of a two-story Brooklyn brownstone with nothing to distinguish it but the brass plaque on the front door. He paused at the steps and heard the roar of an Italian motorcycle engine. Of course. Of course he’d be here.

  “I told you I would do it,” Kingsley said to Søren as he pulled off his helmet and stepped onto the sidewalk. “You don’t have to babysit me.”

  “I’m not babysitting you, and I knew you would do it if you said you would do it.”

  Kingsley wasn’t sure about that, but he appreciated the vote of confidence.

  Thankfully, Søren wasn’t in his clerics today. He looked like any other six-foot-four twenty-nine-year-old blond god out for a sunny late-May motorcycle ride.


  “Then, why did you follow me here?”

  “Even a deviant like you needs a priest sometimes. Especially a deviant like you.”

  Kingsley’s throat tightened. He swallowed the knot.

  “Fine,” he said. “You can come in. But don’t embarrass me in front of cute nurses.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  He strode up the stairs, Søren at his side.

  Once inside Kingsley gave the nurse his name. She handed him a clipboard covered in forms.

  “I don’t fill out forms,” Kingsley said.

  “Give them to me,” Søren said with a put-upon sigh. The nurse raised an eyebrow and led Kingsley back immediately. Without Kingsley asking him to stay or go, Søren followed him inside.

  What a ghastly place—posters covered in dire warnings and pictures of people with diseases hung on the walls.

  “I wish I had a medical fetish,” Kingsley said, looking in horror at the décor of the doctor’s office. “Then I might enjoy this.”

  He opened a drawer at the end of the examining table.

  “Oh, speculums…”

  “Will you please behave?” Søren said as he took a seat in a chair under a Warning Signs of Lyme Disease poster. Kingsley sat on the examining table feeling as if he were a boy again, at the doctor’s with his father to get vaccinated. He remembered how proud his father had been of him, not once f linching at the needles. He was more scared today than he was twenty years ago. And he missed his father.

  “When was your last physical?” Søren asked.

  “Two years ago. And what the hell are you doing?”

  “Your intake form.”

  Kingsley ripped the clipboard from Søren’s hand. In his neat, Catholic school handwriting, Søren had not only filled in most of the blanks on the form, he’d filled them in accurately. Full name, height, age, birth date, address, social security number…

  “Someone else to fill out the health forms…” Kingsley said, nodding his appreciation. “Now I know why people get married.”

  “Now I know why people don’t have children,” Søren said, taking the clipboard back. “Now sit down and behave yourself.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  Kingsley sat on the paper-covered examining table and tried to ignore his racing heart.

  “Why are you here?” Kingsley asked. “Really?”

  Søren fell silent and glanced away.

  “After our first time…” he began and paused once more. “I should have come to you in the infirmary when you were there. I have always regretted not coming to you.”

  Kingsley shook his head. He remembered those first few days after that night with Søren in the forest when he was sixteen, remembered the almost religious ecstasy he’d fallen into. He had been bruised and bloody and broken, and none of it had mattered. He’d never known such peace. All he wanted then was to be well once more, so it could happen again, so he could be broken again.

  “No…if you had come to me, they would have known it was you who put me in there.”

  “I know, and that’s the excuse I used on myself. But the truth is I was afraid to find out if you hated me for what I did to you.”

  “I loved you for what you did to me.”

  “I was equally afraid of that.” Søren gave Kingsley a look of concern. Maybe he’d learned how to make that face in seminary. “Are you scared?”

  “Terrified,” Kingsley admitted. “As you can imagine. Or not.” Kingsley laughed to himself. “Keep forgetting you’re a priest.”

  “I wasn’t always a priest.”

  It was a simple statement of fact. Of course Søren hadn’t always been a priest. But Kingsley heard something else in the words, something under them.

  “Did you…” Kingsley stopped and reconsidered his question. “I know you didn’t catch anything from me.”

  “My father had mistresses,” Søren said, his voice devoid of emotion.

  “Your sister Elizabeth got something from your father, didn’t she? She gave it to you?”

  Søren silently nodded.

  “What did you have?”

  Søren raised his hands and clapped once.

  Kingsley would have laughed if it wasn’t the most horrible thing he’d ever heard. Søren, at age eleven, had contracted gonorrhea, the clap, from his sister during their tortured adolescence.

  “A Benedictine sister worked at the hospital where they took me after my father broke my arm,” Søren continued. “She was my nurse. I’ve never forgotten her kindness. We all need kindness every now and then.”

  Søren started to say something else, but then the doctor came in—an intelligent-looking woman in her late thirties— and the words were lost.

  “Kingsley, this is Dr. Sutton,” Søren said. “She attends my church. Dr. Sutton, this is my brother-in-law, Kingsley. He is a reprobate. You’ve been warned.”

  “I’ve had my fair share of reprobates. They keep me in business.” Dr. Sutton smiled in that placid seen-everything way doctors always smiled. “How are you, Kingsley?”

  “I hate being here, so, please, get this over with as soon as possible,” Kingsley said.

  “As you can tell, Kingsley is also charming and pleasant.”

  “It’s all right, Father Stearns,” Dr. Sutton said, giving him a motherly pat on the knee. “I’ve had worse. Now, Kingsley, we’re getting tested?” she asked, pulling up a wheeled stool.

  “I don’t know what we’re doing,” Kingsley said. “But I’m getting tested.”

  Søren gave him the “behave yourself ” glare.

  Dr. Sutton rattled off a long list of questions that Kingsley answered without making eye contact. Yes, he’d had the clap and syphilis. Yes, he’d been treated. No, he had no current symptoms. When she asked how many sexual partners he’d had, she did a double take at the answer.

  “I think that’s a record,” she said, writing the number down.

  “I’m French,” Kingsley said.

  “That’s your excuse for everything,” Søren said.

  “It’s not an excuse. It’s an explanation.”

  “You’re half French,” Søren reminded him with a scowl.

  “Yes, and if I was all-French that number would be twice that.”

  “Is there anything in particular you think you’ve been exposed to?”

  “Yes,” Kingsley said, staring at Søren who’d forced him to do this stupid testing. “Catholic guilt’s a venereal disease, oui? I wonder who I caught it from.”

  He expected another glare from Søren. Instead, he received something far worse—a look of compassion mixed with pity.

  “Tell her the truth,” Søren said.

  “The truth?” the doctor asked. “You can tell me anything. Whatever you say is confidential. Doctors are like priests in that regard. We can kick him out of the room if you’d like.”