Читать книгу The Queen - Tiffany Reisz - Страница 18

9

Mistress Nora

ELLE ATTEMPTED TO creep back into Kingsley’s town house under cover of night. A few years ago she might have succeeded in her sneaking but that was before Kingsley acquired his “children.”

Four black Rottweilers—the children in question—bounded down the stairs, galloping toward her in a hail of paws and ears and tails and tongues. She ended up flat on her back beneath them with four wet noses in her face. Kingsley’s dogs—Brutus, Dominic, Sadie and Max—were reportedly vicious attack dogs. Anyone who knew them, however, quickly discovered that although they, like their owner, were capable of killing if necessary, in general they were lovers, not fighters.

“Brutus, stop it,” she said as Brutus, the alpha of the bunch, stuck his nose between her thighs. “Jabberwocky.”

“They don’t respond well to safe words,” Kingsley said from the top of the stairs.

“Jesus Christ,” she said, petting and pushing the dogs away at the same time. “Why couldn’t you be a cat person?”

“There’s enough pussy in this house as it is.” Kingsley started down the steps toward her. He was dressed but disheveled, looking like a well-fucked rogue. Apparently she and Kingsley had both had a nice evening. Finally he whistled, calling the dogs off her. They whimpered but obeyed their master although it was obvious they were not done with the lickings and the pettings.

“Where’s Calliope?” Elle pulled herself off the floor and brushed herself off. “I thought they slept with her.”

“They do. But she’s on a date.”

Elle walked past him heading up to her room.

“Guess we’re all getting lucky tonight,” she said.

Kingsley grabbed her arm as she tried to pass him, stopping her on the stairs. “Griffin?”

“Yup.”

“He wasn’t supposed to tell you he was watching you,” Kingsley said.

“He didn’t tell me. I caught him in the act. He’d make a terrible CIA agent.”

Kingsley sighed heavily. “I’ll kill him.”

“Don’t kill him. I need him alive if I’m going to keep tying him up and fucking his brains out.”

Kingsley narrowed his eyes at her. “But Griffin’s a dominant.”

“So?”

“You topped him?”

“I did.”

“You topped a top.”

“I’ve topped you,” she said.

“I’m a masochist. Griffin isn’t.”

“Griffin’s barely twenty-three and couldn’t scare someone if he wore a suit made out of knives. He’s a puppy, King. It’s pretty easy to top a puppy when you’ve already topped a...” She looked down at Brutus sitting at Kingsley’s heels. “A Rottweiler.”

Kingsley cocked his eyebrow at that. Probably the first time in his life a woman had ever likened the inestimable Kingsley Edge to a dog.

“You enjoyed it with Griffin?”

“As much as he did. So...a lot.”

“My office. Now.”

“Now? I’m so tired,” she said. “I came like eight times today. I need to put an ice pack on my pussy.”

“Ice later. Talk now. Go.”

Elle went. The fantasy of owning her own house was growing stronger every day. Wouldn’t it be lovely to return home from a day of debauchery to an empty house? Or if not an empty house, a house devoid of her boss. She wouldn’t have to answer questions about where she went and what she did and with whom she did it. Someday...once she got her money. Not money, she corrected. A lot of fucking money.

Since Kingsley would be the source of her getting “a lot of fucking money” she dutifully trudged up to his office and sat gingerly in the chair opposite his desk. Next time she took a year off cock, she’d pick a guy with a much smaller penis to help with her reentry into the world of PIV intercourse.

“I have good news,” Kingsley said. He sat on the edge of his desk in front of her.

“I like good news.”

“Milady will be at the party we’re attending tomorrow night.”

“Good,” Elle said. “Can’t wait for the beat and greet.”

“You think you’re ready to go out again? Be around our people?”

“He won’t be there, will he?”

“No.”

“Good.”

“But eventually you will have to see him again. You need to prepare yourself for that. If you saw him right now, could you handle it?”

Elle paused before answering. Finally she spoke.

“While we were having sex, Griffin called me something. He called me Mistress. Mistress Nor.”

“You liked that?” Kingsley asked.

“I loved it.” She heard the heat in her own voice, the emotion betrayed, and she quickly worked to cover it. “I don’t want to go back to being Eleanor. I want to be Mistress Nor.”

“Nor?”

“Griffin hates the name ‘Eleanor.’ He just started calling me Nor one day and that’s what he calls me. Then he called me Mistress Nor, and when he called me Mistress Nor, it was like I heard my real name for the first time.”

“There is a queen named Noor. Queen of Jordan. Beautiful woman. Brilliant and accomplished. I send her roses on her birthday. It’s a good name for a queen but perhaps not a dominatrix. Nor. Rhymes with whore. Can’t have that, can we?”

“No, I guess not.”

Kingsley leaned over and took her chin in his hand. He looked at her, looked into her eyes, at her face, looked like a man aiming for a target. Where was the bull’s-eye?

“Nora.”

The name sounded elegant with his accent. Strong, sophisticated. Not her name and yet there was her name buried inside it. Those three letters—Eleanor, Nor, Nora...it was her and yet it wasn’t.

“I like it,” she said.

“Mistress Nora. Yes...parfait.”

“It is.”

“Mistress Nora,” he said again. “Nora, la Maîtresse. Son Maîtresse.”

“Votre Maîtresse,” she said, completing the conjugation. The Mistress. His Mistress. Your Mistress.

“Oui,” he said. “Ma Maîtresse.”

My Mistress.

“Mistress Nora,” she said, rolling the name around her mouth and loving the way it tasted—sweet and spiked like Christmas punch.

“What’s my name?” Nora asked.

“Mistress Nora.”

“Who am I?

“Mistress Nora.”

“Who will be Queen of the Underground?”

Kingsley smiled. “Mistress Nora.”

“Fuck yes, I will,” Nora said, beaming.

Nora.

That was her name.

Not Elle like her friends called her.

Not Ellie like her mother called her.

Not Eleanor, which Søren called her in public.

Not even Little One, which he called her in private.

And not Nor because that wasn’t quite right.

Nora.

Mistress Nora.

“Mistress Fucking Nora,” she said aloud.

“Well, Mistress Fucking Nora,” Kingsley said, “if you’re going to be queen, you’ll need a throne room. I’ll start working on your dungeon tomorrow.”

“Finally.”

“Go, get some rest. We’ll start fresh tomorrow.”

“Do I get to play with the whip?”

“You can’t even flog a towel off the wall. Now go to bed. There’s a naughty Haitian submissive in my bed who will be wondering where my cock has gone to. Sleep well.”

“I plan to.” She stood up. When she’d sat down she’d still been Elle. When she stood up she was Nora. Mistress Nora.

She headed to Kingsley’s office door.

“You really topped Griffin?” he asked.

“I did. Like a boss,” she said, laughing. “But don’t be too impressed. Like I said, he’s a puppy.”

“You were gone for a year. So was I. Tessa told me that while we were gone, Griffin became one of the most sought-after doms in the club. He’s brutal when he wants to be. When we were gone, he wanted to be. Tessa had bruises for two weeks after a session with him—inside and out. He’s made grown men bleed, and he’s not even a sadist. He says he does it for ‘shits and giggles.’ If Griffin seems like a puppy to you, it’s because you’re a tiger.”

Nora narrowed her eyes at him and raised her hand in a claw. “Rawr.”

Kingsley laughed. “Go to bed.”

“Yes, Master.”

“Goodnight, Mistress.”

“Mistress... I could get used to that.”

Truth was, she was already used to it.

She walked out of his office intending to go straight to her bedroom. She’d take a long bath, sleep for twelve hours, eat all the food for breakfast...

But she didn’t make it to her bedroom. She stopped at Kingsley’s playroom first. Inside she turned on the light and walked around gazing at the array of BDSM toys hanging on the wall. He had ten floggers of various sizes and materials hanging on evenly spaced hooks—red floggers, blue floggers, black, brown, elk-hide, cowhide, deer-hide, vinyl and vicious rubber floggers. He had canes, too, over a dozen of them. Tiny little white ones that burned like a bee sting on sensitive skin. Large rattan canes that could put a full-grown man in the hospital if wielded with too much force.

When she came to the crops, she smiled. Oh, yes, these were her favorite. Something about a riding crop. The feel of it, the balance, the elegance. Riding crops were designed for humans to use on horses, for striking thick skin and driving a ton of pure muscle. Perhaps that’s why she loved the crop so much. Kingsley had told her a dominatrix would never be physically stronger than the men she topped. It wasn’t about physical strength. It was about control, about taking command over a beast bigger and stronger but with a will that could be bent, a drive that could be directed, power that could be restrained, channeled, dominated.

Nora reached out and took a particular riding crop off a brass hook. It was red, bloodred, and about two feet long. A shorter crop had less give to it. It hurt more than one with more swish in its swing. She knew this instinctively, not from her few weeks as a dominant, but her years as a submissive. She’d long been on the receiving end of a riding crop. How good and right it felt to wield it by the handle.

She spun it in her hand like a baton. She hadn’t twirled a baton since she was a little girl pretending to be a majorette, but it all came back to her. Pure muscle memory. It danced lightly over her fingers as she turned it. Testing out the old skills she walked the perimeter of the room, twirling it in her hand as she walked. A few times she almost lost it, but she caught it and soon the rhythm was hers again.

Her own dungeon. She would have a room like this soon enough. All the toys she could ever want. A dream come true. A dark and decadent dream. A secret dream like playing Daddy’s girl with Søren. She’d had the dream of being a domme all her life. She remembered sexual fantasies from long before she’d met Søren. When she was fourteen, she’d snuck into an R-rated movie and saw her first sex scene with a woman on top. That fantasy had given her some of her earliest orgasms.

Wasn’t it strange that Søren had never picked up on those domination fantasies of hers? He could read her so well that he could sense from her fascination with the couple at the club that she had a Daddy’s-girl fantasy. Why hadn’t he known she’d had this side to her? He was a smart man, a brilliant man, an insightful man. There’s no reason he shouldn’t have known. Kingsley had known.

“Oh, you son of a bitch,” she said out loud. “You knew.”

“Who knew?” Kingsley asked from the doorway.

She turned and faced him.

“I came for a flogger,” he said. “I thought you were going to bed. Tell me...who knew?”

“He did. He knew everything about me. The more private it was, the more personal, the more humiliating... He knew it. He could read me like a book. He knew I wanted to be a domme. He had to know.”

“Of course he knew. I told him when you were sixteen that you were a dominant or a switch.”

“Why didn’t he tell me?”

“Did he have to?”

“It would have been nice if we could have talked about it,” she said.

Kingsley gave a little scoffing laugh as he plucked a large black flogger off the wall.

“If you’re looking for someone ‘nice’ you picked the wrong priest.”

“I can’t believe he knew all this time, and he never said a word.”

“I can,” Kingsley said. “He loved you. He didn’t want to lose you. He’s a dominant and a sadist. If you were a dominant, too, he couldn’t switch for you. He knew he’d lose you if you let your domme side out to play. I suppose we proved him right.”

“That’s why you didn’t want me to tell him I topped you.”

Kingsley nodded.

“I didn’t leave him because I have a domme side,” she said. “I left him because he tried to leave the church for me, and because he ordered me to marry him like my feelings didn’t matter one fucking bit to him. Oh, and he did this.” She threw her riding crop against the wall. “That’s what he thinks of me.”

“I warned you he had this side.”

“I know you did.” She looked at Kingsley and shook her head. “He made me promise him forever. Did you know that? I had to obey him forever just because he got me out of going to jail when I was fifteen. Did he really think I owed him the rest of my natural life because of that? I would have gotten out of juvie at twenty-one. Maybe I shouldn’t have made the deal.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“No,” she admitted. “But sometimes, I do wonder...”

“What do you wonder?” Kingsley asked, coming to stand in front of her.

“When I was with my mom at the convent, we talked one day about my dad. She told me something I didn’t know, and it’s been bugging me ever since she told me. Now I know why.” She paused, gathered her words. She wasn’t sure why Kingsley needed to know what she was going to tell him, but he did. He had to know.

“Go on,” Kingsley said gently. She had his complete attention.

“I was still a baby when my parents divorced,” she began. “My mom asked for full custody of me, but the judge said my dad could have me on the weekends. But then Dad got caught stealing some car parts. Spent three months in jail. But there were about four weekends I stayed with him at his place before he got arrested and my mom got full custody. Do you know where he lived back then?”

“No.”

“A shitty apartment at the edge of West Harlem. Barely two miles from Riverside Drive. Two miles from this house. King.” She smiled, shook her head, laughed at the mad world they lived in. “It’s funny... If he hadn’t gotten arrested, I would have grown up two miles from this house. Dad started jacking cars and running a chop shop full-time when I was about ten. When I was fifteen he made me help him. Remember that?”

“I do. It’s what brought him to my doorstep to save you after you were arrested.”

“If I lived with my dad and wanted to steal cars, my first stop would have been Riverside Drive. A Rolls-Royce two miles from my place? Very tempting target. I would have stolen your Rolls if I’d grown up with my dad instead of my mom. I know it. I know it for a fact. I don’t know how I know it so don’t ask. But when I go back in time in my mind I can see where that one little event changed the course of my life. I would have stolen your Rolls that night I helped my dad jack cars, and I would have gotten arrested. And what would you have done when you found out a fifteen-year-old girl had been the one who stole your Rolls?”

“I would have gone to the police station to get a look at this girl. Like I did with Mistress Irina when she was arrested for trying to poison her husband. I wouldn’t have been able to resist seeing the little girl car thief.”

“So you, not Søren, would have met me first. If I’d lived with my dad on the weekends, then I wouldn’t ever have gone to church with my mom on Sundays, right? No Sacred Heart for me,” she said. “It was like God flipped a coin and it landed on heads instead of tails, on Søren instead of you. It could have landed on tails.”

“And you would have landed on me.”

She nodded, not laughing. It wasn’t a joke. She saw it all happening. Kingsley would have walked into the police station interrogation room and it would have been him sitting across from her when she opened her eyes. She would have said, Who the fuck are you? and he would have answered, That’s for you to decide, chérie. I’m either your best friend or your worst enemy. He would have wanted her. Kingsley was no saint. He would have had far fewer qualms about fucking her as a teenager than Søren had. Kingsley wasn’t a priest, didn’t care what happened to him. Instead of at age twenty and with Søren, she would have lost her virginity at age fifteen or sixteen to Kingsley. Although it hadn’t happened that way, it was as if she had the memories of her other life on that other path. Her first time with Kingsley would have been nothing like her first time with Søren. She would have been scared with Kingsley, and he wouldn’t have hurt her first. No flogging, no caning. She would have been on top to minimize the pain and to remind them both what she was—a switch. Because he would have recognized her as the switch she was from day one and would have trained her accordingly—to hurt and be hurt, to dominate and to submit, to rule and to serve. And where would Søren have been in all this? At Sacred Heart, praying, working, without realizing the girl he could have owned was tied to the bed of the boy he’d once loved.

“You told me once what would have happened if you’d seen me first. But I never told you what would have happened if I’d seen you first,” she said.

“What would have happened?”

She met his eyes. “I would have fallen in love with you. I still remember that night I first saw you. The night of the wedding at Sacred Heart. I thought I’d never meet a man who tempted me like Søren did. And then you waltzed in whistling and wearing those boots and your bad attitude and you threatened to lose your watch in me. The reason I didn’t fall in love with you that night was because I’d already given my whole heart to him. But if I’d seen you first...and wasn’t in love with him, I would have loved you.”

“Yes,” he said. “I believe that. And I would have fallen in love with you.”

“Do you think that’s what was meant to happen? You and me in love?” Nora asked. “Søren came to see you because he needed your help to get me out of jail. But if I’d stolen your car...”

“I might never have seen Søren again,” Kingsley said. “I was in a bad place when he showed up here in my music room asking me to help him help you. And he helped me pull myself together. But if I’d seen you first in that police station, fifteen, scared, alone...I would have pulled myself together to take care of you.”

She’d seen the way Kingsley treated his assistant, Calliope. He protected her, adored her, watched over her... He would have done the same for her had she moved in with him at age sixteen. She would have, too. A father in jail, a mother who was a religious fanatic...easy enough to get her legally emancipated. By age eighteen she would have been Kingsley’s second-in-command. His second, his partner in crime, his dominant, his submissive, his lover, his everything. Kingsley had never fallen in love with her because she was always Søren’s. But with Søren out of the picture...

“And it all happened because my piece-of-shit father got caught stealing a hundred bucks’ worth of spare parts from a junkyard. Something he’d done a thousand times before. One choice, one mistake, one tiny twist of fate...”

“Chills the blood to think of it, doesn’t it?” Kingsley asked, and she could see it did trouble him to realize how tangled was the thread that tied their three lives together.

“If he’d never met me, he would never have broken his vows. What if that’s how it should have been?”

“Is that what you wish had happened?” Kingsley asked. “Do you wish we’d seen each other first?”

“All I know is that looking back I can see where the road forks. But I also see that if I’d ended up on the other path, with you...I still would have found my way to this moment. I’m saying this feels like destiny, like both paths would have brought me here, like every path would have brought me here. But I could have been here so much sooner if he...”

Her voice trailed off. Anger choked her throat, strangling her words. Her hands clenched and unclenched. She wanted to hit someone, something. Set fires, burn the old world down and rise up from the ashes. If Søren were here right now she would teach him a new pain...

Nora saw the flogger in Kingsley’s hand. She took it from him and walked to the towel still pinned on the wall.

“Søren knew I was a switch the whole time, and he never said a fucking thing to me about it. If I’d never met him, I would have been doing this since I was sixteen.”

With all her anger and sorrow and bitterness, she threw the flogger with a fearsome snap.

The towel went sailing to the floor. It sat limp and defeated at her feet. She wished it was Søren’s heart.

Nora turned to face him.

“Well, look at that,” Nora said, smiling at Kingsley.

“By George, I think she’s got it.”