“You have something to say to me?” he asked, trying to keep his voice even.
Sam sat back in his desk chair. “I said I was getting used to not seeing you. You’ve been a ghost for the past month, which would be fine if you were busy and happy. But you don’t seem happy, and something tells me you’re avoiding me. It’s a little hard to be an assistant when you have no one to assist.”
“I don’t need assisting right now.”
“Don’t need assisting? You have this grand plan to open an S and M kingdom before the end of the year, and we don’t own a building for it yet. We don’t have renovation plans yet. We don’t even have a fucking name for it yet. And you’re telling me you don’t need assisting?”
“What’s with the ‘we’?” he asked. “It’s my club, not our club. There is no ‘we’ here.”
“Your club is never going to exist if you don’t start doing some work on it.”
“I’ll do what I want when I want to do it. And I don’t have to explain myself. To you or anyone.”
He walked away from her toward his bedroom. He should have fired her. Why hadn’t he fired her? He had every reason to fire her. No, he had no reason to fire her, which is why he hadn’t. She’d told him a comforting fiction when she’d said if she would be with any man it would be him. How many times had he whispered those sorts of seductive nothings into a woman’s ear before? You’re the best lover I’ve had…the most beautiful woman I’ve been with…if I could stay with you I would stay with you… He had no reason to be this angry still even after a month. And yet he was.
Alone in his bedroom he undressed and crawled into bed. He hated sleeping alone, but his exhaustion was profound. He ached all over from lack of sleep. He’d sought refuge in the pain Felicia gave him from the pain Sam had given him. What hurt worse than anything—worse than Sam’s lie and worse than Felicia’s erotic brutality—was the simple terrible fact that S?ren had been right. Kingsley didn’t know anything about Sam. He’d been too quick to trust her. And now he regretted it.
He fell asleep the second his head hit the pillow, but terrible dreams poisoned his rest. In one dream he was a prisoner in his own bed, and it burned all around him. In a second dream some faceless enemy had S?ren trapped in a labyrinthine prison, and Kingsley had sixty seconds to find him and save him before he was shot. The dream morphed a final time, now he was the prisoner, and a man stood before him with a chain in his hand. He wrapped the chain around Kingsley’s throat, tightening it until he couldn’t speak, couldn’t fight, couldn’t breathe.
He woke with a cough that wrenched his lungs and his stomach. He gasped for air and couldn’t get enough of it. Finally the coughing fit ended, and on shaking legs he got out of bed. It was midnight according to his clock. He’d slept an hour and a half, and yet it seemed like days as his nightmares had been so vivid and brutal. The images stayed with him even as he dragged on his pants. He tried to banish them with other thoughts, but the panic stayed with him. He almost called S?ren to reassure himself the dream of S?ren’s captivity and imminent death had been nothing but a dream.
Alcohol. That’s what he needed. He hadn’t had more than a glass of wine or two a day since meeting Felicia. He’d been drunk on her body and her pain for a month. But he should drink now—heavily.
He pulled on a shirt but didn’t bother buttoning it. He walked down the back servants’ staircase to the wine cellar behind the kitchen. Wine might not be strong enough tonight, but he discovered all the hard liquor in the house had disappeared. S?ren’s doing? Or Sam’s? Both of them treated him like a fucking child these days. He wouldn’t put it past either of them to hide the liquor. Fine. He’d drink wine. A bottle of pinot would put him to sleep and subdue his restless mind.