The King

“You’re speaking English,” Kingsley said.

“So?”

“You’re speaking it with a British accent.”

“I am?”

“You sound like John Major.”

“How much alcohol is in this wine?” Søren asked, examining the bottle.

Kingsley mentally flipped his brain back to English. He hoped.

“What am I speaking now?”

“English,” Søren said. “More or less.”

“Bon. And you can’t do that. You can’t put pinot in a glass with cabernet sauvignon. That’s worse than incest.”

Søren ignored him and finished pouring the remnants of his pinot into the glass of cabernet.

“Can I ask in which direction your moral compass points?” Søren asked as he came back into the living room and sat down in his armchair again. Kingsley gestured in the direction his moral compass pointed.

“I’d figured as much,” Søren said.

“I like your house,” Kingsley said, looking around. “It’s like a little wizard’s house.”

“Thank you. I think?”

“It’s little and pretty and you have trees. What’s the word? Cozy.”

“Hygge,” Søren said.

“No Danish,” Kingsley said. “Anything but Danish.”

“Ja, Danish. The word you’re looking for is hygge. Coziness, comfort and being surrounded by friends and family. Hygge.”

“I tried to learn Danish. It’s an evil language.”

“It’s not an easy language to learn,” Søren said. “Even other Scandinavians struggle with it. Did they want you to learn it for your job?”

Søren put suspicious emphasis on the word job. Kingsley didn’t blame him for it.

“Non.”

“Why did you try to learn it, then?”

“Because you said something to me in Danish once, and I wanted to know what you said.”

“You could have asked.”

“Would you have told me if I did?”

“Probably not. I certainly wouldn’t have told you the truth,” Søren said with a grin over the top of his wineglass. The smile, the sadism and the wine hit Kingsley all at once. He rolled onto his back again and looked up at Søren from the floor.

“You have the most interesting eyes of any man I’ve ever known.”

“Kingsley.”

“I want my club, and I can’t have it. Give me more alcohol.”

“You can have your club. Find another building. And I’m cutting you off.”

Kingsley tossed his empty glass into the cold fireplace and relished its shattering. Søren didn’t say a word about it.

“This hotel, I love it—beautiful, abandoned, lost. She needs me.”

“She needs you? Don’t you mean it needs you?”

Kingsley ignored him. “It’s safe, too. I looked at it. Two exits. Easy to watch, easy to guard, easy to protect the people inside.”

“Who are you protecting?”

Kingsley paused before answering. In that pause he thought of all the people he’d failed. Mistress Felicia. Lachlan. Irina. Sam.

Himself.

“Mistress Irina. She’s my Russian. Her husband fucked her every night, she told me. He said it was his right as her husband. Sick, tired, bleeding—he didn’t care. Even if she said no. My Irina. Who works for me. Who I’ve played with. She’s twenty-two years old and her husband...” Kingsley met Søren’s eyes. “I was your slave. You remember that?”

“I remember.”

“You owned me...body and soul. Do you know why you owned me?”

Søren gazed at him steadily. Kingsley was certain Søren already knew the answer, but still he said, “Tell me why.”

“Because I wanted you to own me. And I wanted you to hurt me. And I wanted you to treat me like your property. And that’s what made it right. That’s what made it beautiful. Irina’s husband treated her like a slave. She didn’t want that. She was his slave, and it wasn’t right and it wasn’t beautiful.”

“It’s good what you did for her. What you are doing for her.”

“You know who introduced me to her, to Irina?”

“Who?” He stood up, took two steps forward, and then sat next to Kingsley on the floor.

“He’s a cop. Beat cop. Cooper. Big man, big as a house. He’s black, too. Grew up in Harlem. Submissive. Loves submitting to women.”

“It’s always the ones you least suspect.”

“He’s terrified his squad will find out what he is. The biggest man I know, scared of other men, of lesser men. It’s not right.”

“No, it isn’t right.”

Kingsley turned his head back to face Søren.

“They put electrodes on Sam because she likes girls. They gave her drugs to make her vomit while they strapped her to a chair and forced her to watch lesbian porn. She was sixteen. She still has the burn scars. You want to look me in the eye and say our kind doesn’t need protecting?”

“I know we do,” Søren said. “And more than that. Eleanor has scars on her arms from where she burned herself. Second-degree burns.”

“Someone needs to teach her how to hurt herself the right way.”

“Someone does, yes.”