The King (The Original Sinners: White Years, #2)(116)

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

Kingsley mentally f lipped his brain back to English. He hoped.

“What am I speaking now?”

“English,” S?ren 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.”

S?ren 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?” S?ren 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,” S?ren 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.”

“Hyg ge,” S?ren 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,” S?ren said. “Even other Scandinavians struggle with it. Did they want you to learn it for your job?”

S?ren 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,” S?ren 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 S?ren from the f loor.

“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. S?ren 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 f*cked 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 S?ren’s eyes. “I was your slave. You remember that?”

“I remember.”

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

S?ren gazed at him steadily. Kingsley was certain S?ren 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 f loor.

“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 S?ren.

“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,” S?ren said. “And more than that. Eleanor has scars on her arms from where she burned herself. Seconddegree burns.”

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

“Someone does, yes.”

“I could teach her,” Kingsley said. “I’m good at it. Didn’t know I was until I started teaching Irina. I used to do all this dirty work for a living—spying, tracking, guarding important people… I have all these skills. I wanted to put them to good use. You know, for us. We need that in this city. Someone to watch over us. Someone who can protect us. Someone to stand between us and them. What’s the word for that?”