“Forgive me. I’m so grateful you’re here. For me … for them.”
“They don’t know, do they? You haven’t told them I left you.”
“I only told Freyja. Laila and Gitte worship you. I didn’t want to hurt the girls.”
Laila heard laughter then, but it did nothing to untie the knots.
“What are you laughing at?” The mirth in her uncle’s voice calmed her momentarily.
“You saying you didn’t want to hurt the girls. Not your usual style, is it?”
“You keep smiling like that, and I’ll turn you over my knee.”
“Now that’s more like it.”
An intimate silence filled the room again—a silence that hinted at kisses and other more private acts.
“I’ll stay as long as you want or need me to. And I’ll keep this until the day I die. But if one of the girls asks me about us … I won’t lie to them.”
War had broken out in the Enchanted Kingdom of Adulthood. She wanted to hear no more. But she couldn’t stop listening.
Laila backed out of her uncle’s empty bedroom, a bedroom she knew she didn’t belong in, and returned to the kitchen. She’d hoped to find sanctuary here but now she felt only troubled. The very air in the entryway seemed worried, as if someone had left in a great hurry and offered the house no explanation.
She wandered around the kitchen, afraid for some reason to venture out but also afraid to stay put. Maybe she should call the church. She had that phone number. He might be gone but his secretary could be working there. Maybe she had an emergency number.
Laila went to the kitchen phone not wanting to use her cell. When she reached it she discovered at last a cause for her concern.
The rectory had a landline still. Had he been there, she would have teased her uncle for being part of a church so old-fashioned they still used big black rotary phones with dangling cords. But her small smile died when she lifted the receiver and found a crack in the cradle. More than a crack, the phone was marred by a huge ugly gash. The handset, too, was damaged. She stared at the phone in her hand before resting it gently onto the cradle again. Someone had been on the phone and hung it up so violently and with such force the phone had cracked open. As a small child she’d hung off her uncle’s arms like a monkey on a tree—sometimes she clung to his biceps with her hands, sometimes she hung upside down from her knees. It seemed he could keep her suspended in the air forever. As long as she hung and she’d swung, she’d never once feared he would drop her. And he never had. She’d never met a man stronger than her uncle. Only a man of incredible strength could have done this kind of damage with one fierce slam.
Even as her body started to shake, Laila’s mind began to race. She needed to get out and seek safety. She picked up her suitcase and raced to the door, but the sound of footfalls on the hardwood stalled her steps.
She spun around ready to thank God her uncle had come back and would make everything okay again like he always did.
But it wasn’t him.
And nothing was okay.
6 THE QUEEN
A smiling woman stood before Nora. She wore an elegant black-and-purple dress, understated lipstick and a maleficent gleam in her dark eyes. Nora’s chair faced a large window. The sun had already set; the diaphanous curtains moved in the evening breeze like green smoke surrounding her. The woman, whoever she was, looked about forty-five years old and had long dark hair classically coiffed. And for some reason something about the set of her lips, the line of her jaw, reminded her of Kingsley.
“Who are you?” Nora said, her voice groggy with pain. She didn’t follow up with “Where am I?” because she didn’t want to know.
“You don’t know?”
“If I knew, why would I ask?”
Nora pulled on the handcuffs behind her back. She had small hands and could sometimes squeeze out of handcuffs if she had enough wiggle room. But they were clapped on tight, too tight, and no lock pick set or hairpins were to be found. Her heart thundered in newfound panic.
“I’ll give you a hint,” the woman said with a smile that held no friendliness at all. “You’ve slept with my husband.”
“That doesn’t winnow the field down as much as you think it would.”
The woman narrowed her eyes at Nora and something in that look seemed so familiar, she suddenly knew exactly who it was who faced her. Terror, real terror, gripped Nora’s heart with hooked talons.
“You’re supposed to be dead,” Nora whispered.
“You’re Catholic. Haven’t you ever heard of resurrection?”
“Marie-Laure.” Of course she was. She looked so much like Kingsley it was as if she was a house he haunted.
“Marie-Laure Constance Stearns. Comment ça va?”
Nora swallowed.
“I’ve been better,” she said in answer to Marie-Laure’s question. “Usually when I’m handcuffed it’s consensual.”
“Only usually?”
“I get arrested a lot.”
Marie-Laure came toward her and bent over. She stood so close and studied her with such scrutiny that Nora could smell her perfume—cypress—and see the crow’s feet mostly hidden by an impressive makeup job under her eyes.
“See something you like?” Nora asked as she leaned back in the chair trying to move her head as far from Marie-Laure’s as possible.
“Simply trying to see what he sees in you. My husband, I mean. I’m not finding it yet.”
“I give great head.”
The retort was answered with a slap, hard and fast, to her left cheek.
Nora winced and blinked her now-tear-filled eyes.
“You are seriously good at that,” she said. “Wow.” Søren had slapped her harder than that but only once ever, on the night she’d gone back to him.
“I thought my husband was a man of refined tastes.”
“In wine and books and music, he is. Terrible taste in women, though. Obviously.”
Nora braced herself for another slap. It didn’t come.
Marie-Laure took a few steps back until she stood at the window again. Something about that window, this room … Nora had a feeling she’d been in this house before, but when? She remembered it like she remembered a dream—all haze and feeling, no substance.
