The King (The Original Sinners: White Years, #2)(32)

“Why were you drinking tonight?” S?ren asked, standing in front of him. He didn’t seem to mind that he was fully dressed in his clerics and soaked to the skin. If Kingsley passed out and fell forward, S?ren’s chest would break his fall.

“Same reason I drink every night.”

“Which is?”

“It helps me sleep.”

“A sleeping pill would help you sleep. Tell me the truth.”

Kingsley raked his fingers through his wet hair, slicking it back. He breathed into his hands before looking at S?ren with a half smile.

“You don’t want to know.” He shook his head. “You think you do, but you don’t.”

“I know I don’t want to know,” S?ren said. “But you need to tell me.”

“Why do you care?”

“Because I care.”

“That’s a tautology. You like the word? I remember philosophy class at St. Ignatius.” Kingsley released a weary, mirthless laugh.

“I care about you, because I care about you is a fact.”

“You don’t give a shit about me. I took her back to France alone.”

“I offered to go with you, and you said no. You didn’t want me with you.”

“You let me go, and you forgot all about me.”

“I never forgot about you.”

“You did. You let me go to France and you forgot—”

“I never forgot you.” S?ren shouted the words. They echoed off the tile f loor, off the walls, and slammed into Kingsley like a fist, sobering him up instantly. He’d never heard S?ren raise his voice like that. Ever.

Kingsley smiled tiredly.

“Now you are yelling at me.”

“You want me to yell at you? Fine. I will yell at you, Kingsley. Maybe if I yell, you’ll finally hear me. I never left you. And when you went back to France, I tried to find you.”

“You tried to find me?” Kingsley’s eyes slowly focused on S?ren’s face. “When?”

“I waited for you to come back to school. When you didn’t, I went to find you. I left two days after the semester ended. I didn’t even tell my own sisters I was leaving the country. I packed, ran one very important errand and left for Europe. I went to Paris, Lyon, Marseilles—every city you ever told me you’d visited in France. I went to your old neighborhood. I found your father’s former business partner. I hunted down every single f*cking Boissonneault in France.”

Kingsley blinked. S?ren said “f*cking”? He must be furious.

“You looked for me?” Kingsley repeated, not quite able to believe S?ren’s words.

“I looked everywhere for you. I looked for you before I even looked for my own mother whom I hadn’t seen since I was five years old.”

“You looked for me,” Kingsley said again. This time it wasn’t a question.

“And I didn’t find you.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you looked for me?” Kingsley asked.

“What does it matter?” S?ren was quiet now, but his voice still resonated. “I didn’t find you.”

“It doesn’t matter that you didn’t find me.” Kingsley shook his head. “It matters that you looked.”

“After six weeks of searching in five different countries, I gave up,” S?ren said. “I assumed you were hiding because you’d didn’t want me to find you. I took it as a sign from God that I was supposed to become a priest like I’d dreamed of since I was fourteen. My last and final prayer to God the night before I entered seminary in Rome was, ‘God, if this is not your will for me to become a priest, then let me find him tonight.’ I didn’t find you. I became a priest. And you…” “I joined La Legion.”

“I never considered you the military type. Although in retrospect, I should have. You were certainly good at taking orders.”

“My commanding officers had nothing on you. You should have been in the army.”

“And follow in my father’s footsteps? No, thank you.” S?ren’s voice was cold and bitter. “Why did you join the military?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it was the next best thing to suicide.” Kingsley laughed, although he wasn’t joking. “Anyway, it was good not to have to think for myself for a while. I needed that.”

“Believe it or not, I understand,” S?ren said. “The discipline of a religious order has the same comfort of routine. My own thoughts scared me after everything happened, after you were gone. It was better to let someone else direct my existence for a few years.”

“I was too good at taking orders. And too good at hitting targets. And too good at speaking English without an accent. Someone in the government thought I’d be more useful working in a less official capacity.”

“What did you do?” S?ren’s voice was even and calm, but Kingsley heard the smallest note of suspicion hiding under the surface of the words.

“Everything they ordered me to. I hunted who they told me to hunt. Spied on who they told me to spy on. Killed who they told me to kill. And then someone caught me. I was a prisoner for a month. See? I still have scars from the shackles.”

He held up his wrists. Two matching swaths of scar tissue marred the skin on the sides of his wrists. They rubbed against the bone, the shackles had. Like a trapped wolf, he’d wanted to gnaw off his own hands.