Author: Tiffany Reisz

“I know you said I look like shit but it still sounded sexy. Why does everything sound better in French?” She carefully ran her finger along the outside of the injury. “You want some help?”

“S’il vous plaît.”

“On the bed, slut,” she said. “If I hurt you enough, I’m going to expect payment.”

“We’ll put it on my tab.”

Kingsley laid on the bed on his uninjured side. Nora returned in a few minutes with rubbing alcohol, a towel and a needle and thread.

“Good thing Anya’s a sewing freak. She’s got every kind of thread in existence in this house.”

“You’re going to stitch me up?”

“I am. Either you let me do it now, or I’m taking you to the hospital.”

“No hospitals,” he said, recalling his last hospital stay that would have been his last stay anywhere had it not been for a priest showing up and scaring the merde out of the doctors.

“Thought so. Now hold still.”

Kingsley winced as Nora cleaned the wound. The alcohol burned deep and he breathed through the pain.

“Want some real alcohol? The drinking kind?” Nora threaded the needle with black thread and soaked the thread in the alcohol. “This is gonna hurt like a motherfucker.”

“You remember who you’re talking to?”

Nora laughed as she bent over his wound.

“Good point. Speaking of points...” She pushed the needle into his skin and Kingsley closed his eyes, fighting the urge to wince or flinch. “Jesus, King, you got beat to hell. Some of these bruises look old.”

He raised an eyebrow at her. Nora rolled her eyes.

“That horny priest. I leave to go fuck somebody else for one week, and he jumps you the second my back is turned.”

“Not true. I seduced him, and he did make me wait a few days.”

“He’s such a sadist.”

“He almost killed me, if that makes you feel any better.”

“It does.” She pulled the thread through his skin and brought the needle back down. “But we both know that’s how you like it.”

“I wasn’t complaining, I promise.”

She worked in concentrated silence for a few minutes as Kingsley clung to the rung of the headboard to steady himself.

“Where did you learn how to do sutures?”

“Mistress Irina.”

“Ahh...yes, my Russian. She was quite the good sadist, too.”

“That client of mine with the medical fetish...what was his name? Rhymed with Fucker.”

“Tucker.”

“Him. He liked having his lips sutured. Paid me five hundred per stitch.”

“I don’t recall you making nearly that much off him.”

“It was off the books.” She winked at him.

He started to laugh but stopped himself. No laughing during stitches. He learned that the hard way once.

“I knew you were skimming.”

“You were, too.”

“It wasn’t skimming,” he protested. “It was creative arithmetic.”

“Times like this,” she said, tying the end of the thread, “I miss working for you.”

“We were a good team, you and I, Maîtresse.”

“We were. Especially when we teamed up on Blondie.”

“He’s his own army. We needed a unified force to defeat him.”

“He still always won.”

“Only because we let him,” Kingsley said, and Nora grinned broadly. She wore nothing right now but black panties and a black tank top so all her bruises were on open display. But even with the bruises, the cracked and healing lip, she was still a thing of beauty any man would lay down his life for. Even a priest. Even a king. “At least, that’s what we told ourselves.”

“You think we could do that again?” Nora asked, pausing to dab an alcohol-soaked cotton ball over the bleeding stitches.

“Do what? Gang up on him?”

“Be a team again.” She looked at him without smiling. “Friends, maybe? Or maybe at least you could stop hating me?”

“I never hated you.”

Nora flicked his open wound with her fingers. Kingsley gasped in pain.

“Liar.”

“Fine. I did hate you. A little.”

“Why? We were good once, King. You and me. When I worked for you, we were almost even friends.”

He exhaled heavily.

“When you left him the first time, I knew why. I understood, and as much as it hurt me to see him so broken, I didn’t even blame you. Quite honestly, I was shocked you lasted as long as you did in his collar.”

“I took great pleasure in imagining creative ways of murdering him.”

“This does not surprise me. Any true slave or submissive wouldn’t have minded his tests. But I knew what you were and I knew how hard it must have been for you to deny that half of yourself that wanted to be the master.”

“The Mistress,” she corrected him.

“Oui, la Maîtresse.”

She worked in silence through a difficult patch of especially torn skin. Without a word, Nora handed him a pillow and Kingsley bit down on it.

“You need to start taking better care of yourself,” she said, eyeing his battered body after a few more stitches.

“I’m fine.”

“Fine? Let’s not even talk about the six-inch gash I’m sewing up right now. You’re covered in welts and bruises and it even looks like that big blond fucker tiger-striped you.”

“He did,” Kingsley said with some pride.

“Have you possibly maybe once considered using, I don’t know, a safe word or something?”

“Don’t insult me.”

“Or maybe the green light, yellow light, red light system?” Nora dug her needle into him again and Kingsley bit down into the pillow.

“You might as well turn me vanilla.”

“Kingsley, you stubborn ass, you have a child on the way.”

He stopped biting the pillow long enough to bury his face in it for a moment and mumble something.

Nora pulled the pillow back.

“What was that?”

“I said, ‘Do not remind me.’”

She nodded her head knowingly.

“Terrifying as fuck, isn’t it?”

“You have no idea.”

Nora glared at him.

“Forgive me,” he whispered. “You did have an idea.”

“Yeah, I do. I’m so happy for you I could cry. I probably will when I remember how.”

“I’m trying not to think about it.”

Nora sighed heavily as she continued to stitch him up.

“Don’t sigh at me,” Kingsley ordered. “I’d much prefer you hit me than sigh at me.”

“I’m sighing because Juliette’s pregnant, and you’re obsessing over Søren again. Any possibility those two things are related?”

“Don’t analyze me. I’m still sore from the last time I was analyzed.”

“Kingsley Théophile Boissonneault, talk to me or I’m going to suture your eyelids shut.”

“Very well. It is terrifying. I feel everything starting to change. I don’t want to lose him. I don’t want to love someone more than I love him, more than I love Juliette. My heart’s divided enough as it is. I’m not sure it will survive another cut.”

“I know it’s scary. But you’re not going to lose Søren because you have Juliette and Junior now. What you two have, it’s something even I can’t touch.”

“Funny...I’ve always thought the same about what you and he have. I’ve envied it.”

“Envied it? I have to obey him. That’s how it works. How many orders has he given you this week?”

“Dozens.”

“How many have you disobeyed?”

“All but one.”

“You want to take my place? You want to sit at his feet and water sticks and do everything he tells you?”

“He’d be dead in a week.”

“Thought so.”

“He saved me.” Kingsley closed his eyes and he remembered waking in the hospital and knowing his superiors would let him die and take their dirty little secrets with him. Søren had come and made sure he walked out on his feet instead of being carried out in a bag. That was only the first time Søren had saved his life. God knows who or what would have killed him if Søren hadn’t come back into his life at the right time. “I can’t let him go.”

“You don’t have to let him go. His heart is strong enough to put up with you and me. And that’s saying something.”

“C’est vrai,” Kingsley agreed as she resumed her stitching. “But I envied you. I envied how much he loved you and how freely. That’s why I was so angry with you for throwing that away for your pet. The only reason I was so angry.”

“His name is Wesley, thank you very much. And he was never my pet.”

“Keep telling yourself that. You might believe it someday.” She flicked him again before picking up the tape and finishing her bandaging. “Your Wesley...he wasn’t one of us. I knew he would never be. When you fell in love with him, it was like you were leaving us all, throwing away everything le prêtre gave you and everything I worked so hard for. Denying yourself, what you are, it was like denying us.”

“I never threw it away. I never denied you or him. I cherished it always even when Søren and I were apart, when you and I were apart. Especially then. I loved Søren when I was with Wes the same as Søren loved you when he and I were together.”

“But you chose le prêtre, didn’t you? In the end you loved him more. The same way he loves you more than me.”

Nora sighed again, heavier this time. Kingsley almost laughed at her disgust. He did love to torment her.

“Love versus love. King, you’re comparing infinities. There is no ‘more.’ That’s not how love works. If it’s love, it’s infinite. You can’t count it. I can’t line up my love for Søren and my love for Wes side by side and see which one is longer. I’ll never reach the end of either. Søren will no more reach the end of his love for you than he’ll reach the end of it for me. He let you go because he loves you, because he knew you needed your freedom. He keeps me close for the same reason. Because he loves me and that’s what I need. Him.”

Nora tied off her thread and taped a gauze pad over the stitches.

“See? That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

“I think I almost enjoyed it,” he admitted, rolling onto his back.

Nora laid a hand on his inner thigh and slid it up to his crotch.

“I don’t think ‘almost’ is the right word. Fucking masochists.”

“If I didn’t think you’d tear my stitches, I’d insist upon it.”

She raised her eyebrow and started opening his pants.

“I won’t tear a thing,” she promised as she pulled her top and panties off. He’d never seen a blacker, uglier bruise than the one on her side. And yet she still seemed uncrushed to him, unbroken. “I can be gentle, believe it or not.”

“Where did you learn how to be gentle?”

“Where else?” she asked, the shadow of sadness briefly crossing her face. “Wesley.”

The sadness disappeared as the Nora he knew and loved and hated and loved again reappeared in her wild green eyes.

“Now stay still while I blow you. Doctor’s orders.”

“Mon Dieu...” He gripped the bar of the headboard as she worked her siren’s spell on him with her lips and tongue, with her hand that knew his hungers as well as he did. She pulled up and straddled him before sinking down onto him an inch at a time.