The Mistress (The Original Sinners 4)

Wesley’s head throbbed, his eyes burned. He’d never felt so raw and wounded in his life.

“Do you have any idea,” Søren began, picking up the empty wineglass once more, “how hard it is to overcome one’s own sense of self-preservation? Try it. Try falling face-first into hardwood and see if you don’t catch yourself. You think you can do it, but I promise you, at the last second you’ll put your hands out and catch yourself every single time. She didn’t that night. Her love for you outweighed her love for herself. The least I could do is let her have her way. She wanted you to think I was a brutal monster? Fine. It’s not far from the truth. I’ve certainly been brutal in the past. Even to her.”

“But not like that.”

“No. Not like that. The one time Eleanor ended up in the hospital because of me was...” Søren stopped and ran a hand through his hair. It was such a human gesture of nervous energy that Wesley almost didn’t believe his eyes at first. Søren was human—who would ever have guessed? “I’m sorry. I’m sure you don’t want to hear this.”

“I think after all I’ve been through I can take it.”

“The one time she had to go to the hospital because of me—I had her tied to the bed, only her wrists to the bedposts by leather cuffs, and I was inflicting one of the worst forms of torture you can inflict on Eleanor...tickling. She has the most raucous laugh when she’s being tickled. Infectious. God can hear it in heaven when she laughs like that. She flinched wildly and twisted too hard in the restraints. She sprained her wrist. She screamed in pain and then, because she’s Eleanor, she kept laughing.”

Wesley stood up and turned his back to Søren. He couldn’t even look at the man anymore.

“She does have an amazing laugh.”

“That she does. It’s my favorite music.”

“I’m going to miss hating you,” Wesley said, staring into the shadows between the trees that surrounded the house.

“You’re most welcome to keep despising me if you need to. I’m no saint. When Kingsley and I were at school together...” Søren’s voice trailed off and Wesley said a silent prayer of gratitude that the priest chose to go into no further detail. “That he enjoyed it is no excuse for my savagery. When I put him in the infirmary it was no laughing matter. I’ve hurt Eleanor, too, very badly. Not necessarily physically, although she has been the primary target of my sadism for the past fifteen years. I have bruised her, beaten her, cut her, burned her...all for pleasure. I know that turns your stomach, and I certainly won’t attempt to defend myself. But I also know I don’t have to remind you that Eleanor was an adult who chose to submit to me and to pain of her own free will and that all she ever had to do was utter a single word to stop me, and I would have stopped.”

“You’re trying to make me feel better about hating you.” Wesley turned back around. “You are the weirdest man on the planet.”

Søren paused, glanced at the ceiling and seemed to mull the words over.

“You only say that because you haven’t gotten to know Griffin yet.”

“I know she consents to what you do to her. That’s the only reason I never called the cops on you, and you better believe I seriously considered it a time or two. I even told her I was going to one night, that night of your...anniversary. She said it would be as stupid as calling the cops on two boxers fighting it out in the ring. Kink is a blood sport, she said.”

“A not entirely inaccurate description.”

“I hate blood sports. Hunting, cockfighting, dogfighting, all that horrible stuff people do to animals. Our horses, they run to run. They don’t run because they’re after a tiny fox that’s about to get torn apart by a pack of dogs.”

“Eleanor is no fox being chased by dogs. She’s as much hunter as hunted. And if she runs it’s because she wants to be chased. When she’s caught it’s because she wants to be caught. And when she’s tired of being chased, she mounts her horse and she finds a fox of her own.”

Wesley shook his head.

“You say you regret some of the stuff you did to Kingsley. Do you regret anything you did to Nora? I manned up and apologized to you for thinking you beat her into the E.R. At least you can admit you’re sorry about something you did to her.”

Søren laughed a little. “Very well. If you insist.”

Søren stood up and took his empty wineglass over to the fireplace hearth. He uncorked another bottle of wine and poured a new glass. Wesley never imagined Søren would be this open, this talkative. Was it the fear over Nora’s fate? Or the wine? Whatever, it didn’t matter. Maybe he’d finally get some of the answers he needed.

“This house,” Søren said, raising his glass to indicate the room, “belongs to a man named Daniel Caldwell. You met him briefly.”

“Yeah, seems like a nice guy.”

“He’s more than that. He’s an intelligent and honorable man. I’ve always respected him. He had a wife named Maggie. Older than him by over a decade when they met and married. She and Kingsley had been lovers once. They stayed friends after she married Daniel. Daniel is of the Dominant variety. We were friends, all of us—Daniel and Maggie, Kingsley and I.”

“I saw the pictures in the house—him and his wife and kids. She looks a lot younger than him.”