The Prince

“Oui, it’s French.” Kingsley read the words and his stomach tightened as he recognized the same ones that had been written on the wall above the body of his dead Sadie.

Griffin squinted at the messages, clearly making no sense of them. “I told you...” He shook his head and sighed. “What does it say?”

Kingsley exhaled heavily, not sure he wanted to tell Griffin or anyone about the writing. But even if he told him, Griffin wouldn’t know what it meant.

“It says, ‘I will kill the bitch.’”

“I will kill the bitch? Nora? Who is he talking to?” Griffin rubbed his face and turned even paler. “King…does someone want to kill Nora?”

Kingsley saw something on the walls he hadn’t seen at first. Holes. No, not holes, stab wounds. Someone had taken a knife and repeatedly plunged the blade into the drywall, leaving one-inch slices everywhere he looked. He went to the bed and picked up one of Nora’s bloodied corsets. The slash marks had been concentrated in one spot. The stomach. Had Nora been wearing this while it was stabbed, she would have been dead in seconds.

“Oui. Someone very much wants to kill our Nora.”

“But…” Griffin turned wide and horrified eyes to Kingsley. “Why? Nora’s never hurt anybody. I mean, not without their consent.”

“I fear this person feels Nora has taken something that doesn’t belong to her.”

“Nora’s never stolen anything in her life, either. Well, other than all those cars when she was a kid. But nobody would kill over a car.”

“No. Not the cars. That is not it.”

“Then what the f**k is it? What did Nora steal? Whoever this f**ked-up freak is, I’ll pay him off.”

“No amount of money could buy what they want, I’m afraid.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” Griffin said, in the tone of a man who’d been raised to believe he could buy anything or anyone he wanted—including another’s life. “What does he want?”

Kingsley reached into the pile of Nora’s clothing and found what he knew he would find. He pulled out a string of rosary beads—bloodred and worn smooth with a thousand prayers that would have made the Magdalene herself blush. He knew Nora kept the key to the box that held her collar behind the crucifix of her rosary beads. He found the beads…the crucifix…and no key.

Kingsley wrapped the beads around his hand and held them out toward Griffin by way of explanation.

“Søren?” Griffin asked, fear replacing the determination on his face. “This freak wants Søren?”

Kingsley nodded. “Oui,” was all he said.

Griffin pressed his hands into his stomach. Now it seemed he was on the verge of illness.

“Kingsley…this is crazy. No one comes after any of us. Your money and power…my money and power…and Søren? Who would ever go after Søren?”

“Someone who cares nothing for money and power. And I fear such people do exist.”

“What does it mean…all of this?” Griffin looked again at the bloody words on the floor, the pile of shredded clothes and the bed itself—charred and bloodied. To anyone but Kingsley, the scene would be incomprehensible. What did it mean?

Kingsley knew exactly what it meant. After running away from Saint Ignatius he’d joined the French Foreign Legion. First his facility with English had caught the notice of higher-ups, that if he concentrated he could speak it without any trace of a French accent. Then his other skills came to light—his intelligence, his way of charming anyone into telling him anything he wanted to know, his natural gift of marksmanship…and his utter disregard for his own personal safety, for his own life, even. They’d made him a spy first and then so much more after. He’d seen the deaths of thousands begin with a single act that took place behind closed doors in a bedroom like this. Oh, yes, he knew exactly what the scene before them meant.

“It’s a declaration, Griffin.”

Kingsley pulled the keys out of the pocket of his leather jacket. He had to go now and find Søren. The time for secrets had come to an end.

“Of what? Insanity?”

“No, mon ami. Of war.”

SOUTH

Nora stayed calm and collected for the entire trip back to Wesley’s house. She barely blinked and didn’t cry. No emotion showed on her face or in her hands. Long ago she’d learned how to control herself under the most difficult of circumstances. She’d had to for her job. Lesson number two from the great Kingsley Edge, King of the Underground—you are the Dominant. Act like it.

Those seven words had kept her face straight and her hands still even as one submissive after another had come to her with the most desperate and dangerous of fantasies. One Wall Street trader had wanted to drink her urine from a wineglass. The deputy mayor of New York confessed to the most graphic of rape fantasies involving him as the victim. A Texas cattle billionaire had begged her on his hands and knees to brand his back with his own branding iron. No matter how disturbed she’d been by their fantasies, their fetishes, she always had to stay calm and in control, even as they begged her, pleaded with her to hurt them as they dreamed. “No,” she often told them. “You haven’t earned it.” That was her line, her cover for when she knew no amount of love or money could convince her to do such a thing. And then they would beg harder, up their offer and she’d acquiesce.

“Now you’ve earned it,” she would say, which was code for, “now you found my price.”