“With you.” My tongue felt thick. “Where else would I be?”
He laughed. “That’s a good answer, but it doesn’t quite distract me. I thought we had an agreement.”
“Luke didn’t leave me. You lied.”
“Of course,” he said simply. “What else would I do?”
My eyes drooped shut, and my head lolled against the leather seats as the SUV started to move. He spoke to me distantly, his thick voice washing over me in waves of nausea. I tried to focus, but whatever drug was affecting me was still in my system, clouding everything, even my thoughts.
Henri was talking, telling me about an angry man and a woman caught, but all I could see in my mind was my mother’s face speaking to me. She was telling me a bedtime story, I realized. Or a cautionary tale. Had she really done that? I couldn’t remember, but the picture seemed so clear, more refined now that I was drugged than it had ever been in my waking hours.
There was a king, and a queen so beautiful that none could equal her. On her deathbed, she made the king promise that he should only marry one as beautiful as she, one who had the same golden hair.
He grieved for her upon her passing but eventually scoured the land for a new wife who fulfilled his promise. Although many beautiful women were found, none could compare. The king’s daughter, on the other hand, had grown into a woman. She was beautiful like her mother, with the same golden hair.
So the king decided to marry her, despite the protests of his counselors. Determined to escape her fate, the princess ran away from the castle with only her gold and dresses. She traveled far, and when night came, she hid in the hollow of a tree.
The next morning, a different king was hunting on his lands. The king’s men found the girl and brought her back to the castle, setting the orphan to help in the kitchen. There she toiled each night and day, miserable and lonely, her beauty obscured by the dirt of her work.
One evening, she washed herself and joined the festivities in her old fine dress. The king was much taken with her, but at the end of the night, she disappeared back into the kitchens. She cooked the king’s soup during the day and danced with him at night.
One night he slipped a ring on her finger, but again she disappeared. The next day he demanded to meet the new cook who made the wonderful soup, and then he saw the ring on her finger. He washed the soot from her cheeks, and she was beautiful again, so he married her.
“You’re mine again,” Henri said. “We can put this whole thing behind us.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I mumbled, though I spoke to a ghost.
“So you’ll understand,” he said. “This is for your own good. You are nothing without men and our desire to use you. You have nothing without me. Do you understand?”
In the story, the king had valued the princess without knowing her beauty. At the end of the story, the two parts of her were merged. At the end of the story, she finally made her escape.
“I know what you are thinking,” he said. “You think your detective will save you.”
There were those damn instincts again, right on the money.
“He and I have a lot in common,” Henri continued. “We both appreciate a beautiful thing. We both understand the darker impulses, sometimes to curb them, other times to unleash them.”
Luke wasn’t like that. He had a dark past, but only out of necessity. He was a protector, not an aggressor…wasn’t he? The lines had blurred for me, lumping all men together in one bloodthirsty heap.
“Oh yes. He knows…greed, lust, revenge. The last one especially.”
“You’re wrong.” Luke didn’t want material things. He didn’t want revenge either. All he wanted was to protect women like me, to find his sister. Good intentions, honest ones.
“What does he want, then?” Henri mocked. “If he’s so concerned about your safety, then why are you in the car with me?”
A mistake. He had been overpowered, outnumbered. Any number of excuses could explain it, without him having been hurt or having betrayed me. Please let one of them be true.
“Ah, yes. You see it now. I gave him the one thing he couldn’t resist. The answer to all his searching. I gave him the truth about his sister. No, more than that. I gave him proof. As you and I talk, your Detective Cameron is on his way to Chicago with a tape of his sister. And me. It was rather brutal. Of course the statute of limitations has run out for rape. But he hopes to make a case for murder, considering she is presumed dead and I am shown hurting her. He isn’t going to win. But you can understand the temptation.”
“I’ve spent twelve years of my life fighting for the law to take him down.”