Author: Tiffany Reisz

A new and precious hope had burrowed a hole into her heart. She tucked it in, let it get comfortable. Thirty-six years ago, a troubled little boy had hidden a razor blade inside this book and thirty-six years later the woman who’d grow up to love him would find it the moment she needed it most. The razor blade in her hand felt like a miracle, like a sign, like salvation. She tucked the blade into her back pocket where she could reach it even with her hands tied.

“Thank you, God,” she prayed with the deepest, most profound gratitude she’d ever experienced in her life. Even the night her father had been killed and she’d realized she was free of him and his kind forever, she hadn’t felt this unfathomably infinite gratefulness. “Thank you for making him like this...thank you.”

How could she not thank God right now? Søren had confessed there were times as a child and teenager that he wondered why God had made him this way, made him so that he took the deepest of pleasures in causing the most brutal pain. Now she knew the reason why and she couldn’t wait to see him again, couldn’t wait to tell him.

God made Søren what he was so that he would leave this precious gift for her three years before she’d even been born.

Part Three

QUEEN’S GAMBIT

20

THE PAWN

Evening came and Laila knew she would go mad from waiting. Her uncle and Kingsley had something planned but whatever their scheme, she wouldn’t be allowed to take any part in it. She wandered the house they’d been brought to and found little in it to distract her. A beautiful house, well-decorated and clearly loved. She’d found one stray pink sock in the hallway outside the bedroom she’d been given. A little girl’s sock... Laila had stared at it until finally picking it up and putting it in the laundry room. She felt like an intruder in this private home. She didn’t belong here in these rooms and halls. Children did. Love should fill every room. Instead, Laila found only fear.

Knowing he’d discourage her from leaving the house, Laila didn’t even tell her uncle she decided to go on a short walk. She left a note on her bed in case he came looking for her and set out on her own. But she hadn’t made it to the end of the drive before she heard footsteps behind her.

“Your legs are too long.” Wes jogged a little to catch up with her.

“I’m sorry,” she said, smiling at him as he met her at the end of the long driveway. “I’ll try to shorten them.”

“I’m used to walking with Nora. I’d forgotten not every woman on the planet is a shrimp.”

“She can walk really fast when she wants to.” Laila set out again down the tree-lined road. “But don’t ever ask her to—”

“Run. I know. Hates running. Told me she’s allergic to it. She has a long list of allergies.”

“Yes. Let’s see, there’s...cooking.”

Wes nodded. “She’s definitely allergic to cooking. Anything that required more than two ingredients—or, as she called them, the hard stuff and the chaser—she’d give up and order takeout.”

“Cleaning,” Laila thought of another.

“That was one. She had scared off six housekeepers by the time I moved in with her.”

“Six?” Laila gazed around her at the beautiful August evening with the sun low through the trees and this man walking with her. She wished she could enjoy it even a little but the fear held her heart in its unforgiving grasp. “Why so many?”

“Um...” Wes winced and Laila knew she’d inadvertently stumbled into secret territory.

“Let me guess...I don’t want to know.”

“She had a bad habit of not picking up after herself.”

Laila weighed whether or not to tell Wes what she wanted to tell him. Might as well. Her uncle tried to shield her from the truth about him and her, but her aunt never had.

“I have read her books. You don’t have to pretend she’s...you know...”

“Normal?” Wes supplied.

“Vanilla,” Laila said. “You read even one of her books and you learn the words.”

Wes exhaled with obvious and profound relief.

“Thank God. I wasn’t sure what you knew and what you didn’t.”

“I know enough to know that I wouldn’t go sneaking around in her bedroom without body armor on first.”

“It’s not that bad, I promise. I lived with her. She keeps most of the stuff in her closet. Sometimes I’d find snap hooks between the couch cushions. One time I accidentally sat on a Wartenburg wheel. That sucker hurt. And ripped a hole in my jeans.”

Laila laughed and the sound bounced off the road and into the trees.

“And she had this big long bag,” Wes said, stretching his arms three feet wide. “Kept it in her office most of the time. She told me not to open it unless I never wanted to look her in the eyes again.”

“Did you open it?”

“Nope.” He shook his head and Laila’s heart jumped as a sliver of the day’s last sunlight caught in Wes’s hair. She felt the most overwhelming urge to run her fingers through it. But she restrained herself. He probably wouldn’t like some girl he barely knew messing with his hair right now. “I liked looking her in the eyes.”

“I think I could have, anyway, even after opening the bag. My uncle, on the other hand...” She let her voice trail off and Laila found herself blushing.

“I guess you know about him, too, then.” Wes crossed his arms over his chest.

Laila nodded. “Well, if she is like that, then he is. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have stayed together so long. I’ve even accidentally heard them.” Accidentally? Not quite but he didn’t need to know that.

“I overheard my parents once. Oh, my Lord, I thought I’d never be normal again.”

“My parents got divorced when I was very young. I think I would have liked to have parents in love enough to sometimes overhear them in bed together.”

“I’m sorry. Yeah, hearing your parents having sex is better than not hearing it, I guess. How old were you when they broke up?”

“Six. Gitte was two. It was a bad match, my mother said. Neither of them did anything wrong. They didn’t have anything in common. She had the good job, and all the money, so we stayed in the house and he moved away. Min onkel Søren tried to step in, but it wasn’t easy for him across an ocean. He called all the time to check on us.”

“Min onkel?”

“My uncle Søren,” she corrected herself. “Sorry.”

Wes only smiled. “Don’t apologize. Seriously. I like when you slip into Danish.”

Laila blushed as if he’d complimented her breasts instead of her words. Maybe since they were outside in the sun he wouldn’t notice how much talking to him made her turn so red.

“Happens when I’m tired. I slip in and out.”

“We should go back if you’re tired.”

She shook her head. “No, not yet. I don’t want to go back. It’s too...”

“I know,” he said quietly, staring into the sun for a moment before looking back at her. “Everyone’s so scared and we make it worse being around one another, scaring one another even more.”

“It’s hard to be around him,” she said. “My uncle. He loves her so much, and I can’t help him. I can’t even look in his eyes...I hate seeing him so scared. I don’t ever remember seeing him scared before.” Laila stepped off the road and into the manicured woods.

“Never?”

Wes followed right behind her. Inside a clearing she found a downed tree and sat on it.

“I didn’t think anything could scare him. Anything bad that happened, he was always so calm. Gitte fell once and hit her head on a rock. So much blood...I’d never seen so much. All of us were screaming and crying. He picked her up and carried her into the house and held her until help came. He made her tell him about her day at school and what she’d learned that week. Anything to keep her calm and awake. I realized that day that he was different from us.”

“Different how?” Wes sat next to her on the tree trunk. As he lifted himself and settled in, Laila noticed the muscles flexing in his arms. She needed to stop noticing stuff like that.

“No one in Denmark is Catholic. It’s a secular country. No one goes to church. I think that was the day I realized that him being Catholic and believing in God...he did believe there was some higher power taking care of people. He did have faith and it kept him calm when everyone else was afraid.”

“Is it weird having a priest for an uncle?”

“Yes and no.” Laila looked up at the darkening sky. “I’m so used to it now that it’s only strange when I stop to think about it. I’ll see something on television about the pope or Rome and I’ll think, ‘He’s one of them....’”

“He’s not one of them. Priests aren’t supposed to have girlfriends.”

“The girlfriend is the part that isn’t weird. If he didn’t have her, then that would be strange. What man would choose to be alone if he could have her?”

“No man in his right mind.”

Laila tried to smile at him but Wes didn’t meet her eyes. For some reason it seemed he was hiding something from her. But he glanced her way again.

“I don’t blame him for being in love with her. I just wish, for her sake, she wasn’t in love with him.”

Wes said the words tentatively, as if he worried about giving offense.

“Don’t tell him I said this,” Laila found herself almost whispering, “but I’ve thought the same thing.”

“You have?” Wes looked at her with new eyes and in shock. “I thought—”

“I love him. Completely. He was a father to me and Gitte after our father was gone. But I love my aunt, too, and I can’t imagine how hard it is for her.”

“Hard?”

“In our house in Copenhagen, she’s his wife. We treat her like family because she is family. Everywhere else she goes, she’s just...”

“The mistress,” Wes finished the sentence for her, and she was glad he had. The word felt like treason to her.

“Yes, the mistress. She told me she fell in love with him when she was fifteen years old and loved him every day since the day they met. That’s almost twenty years now. And not once has he been able to publicly say they’re together. She’s his dirty secret. She’s something he has to hide. When I found out that she’d left him, I wasn’t surprised and I wasn’t angry. I was sad, but I understood why.”

“I’m glad you get it,” Wes said. “I didn’t want her to go back to him. For a lot of reasons. I feel like she thinks I’m the bad guy because I don’t want her in a relationship like that. She deserves better.”

“She does,” Laila agreed. “And he tried to give her more.”

“What do you mean?”

“Tante Elle and I went for a walk together last time she came to visit. I asked her why she and my uncle never got married. I said I felt bad for her because she couldn’t be his wife. I asked her if she was mad at him for not leaving his job and marrying her.”

“What did she say?”

“She said being a priest was like being a writer or a healer or a parent. It was a calling, not a job. It wasn’t something you did, it was who you are. And she would no more ask him to quit being a priest than he would ever ask her to quit being a writer, or ask my mother to quit being a mother. She said that for Catholics the priesthood was a sacrament. Being a priest was written into his very DNA. She loved him and he was a priest, and if he quit the priesthood, he wouldn’t be him anymore. He’d give up so much of himself there would be nothing left of him to love. And then she told me something I’d never known....”