“The little mermaid fails to win her prince’s heart and returns to the ocean,” Søren continued. “When she dies she finds she has a soul, a reward for all her suffering.”

“But she doesn’t get her prince?”

“No. Being transformed into something she isn’t fails to win the prince. A good moral. Very Danish. Don’t try to be something you aren’t.”

“And what are you?” she asked.

“I am a priest,” he said. “Which I always knew I was. I knew I belonged in the church when I fell in love with you. I knew I was born to be a priest whether I wanted to be one or not. If I’d left the church to marry you, I would have felt the pain of it with every step I took...” He made a second small cut in the heel of her other foot.

“Yes, we could have been together on land,” he continued, “but at what price? You didn’t let me leave the ocean I belong in and in a way, I’m grateful to you. Especially since you’re here now.”

“Of course I’m here,” she said, reaching down to take the razor from his hand. She set it on the counter and placed her hands on either side of his strong neck. “I know how to swim.”

Søren kissed her, kissed the words on her lips that she knew had comforted him even more than a promise of attending his Final Vows would. She kissed him back with equal ardor, brushing her lips over his now smooth chin. Cutting her feet had aroused him. She slipped her hand into his pants and wrapped her fingers around his erection.

“Eleanor,” he said breathlessly, “what are you doing?”

“Solving the crisis in the priesthood,” she said. “I met a nun once who said the secret was giving priests daily hand jobs. It’s not intercourse—not anal, not vaginal, not oral—but it can get a priest off. I might join a religious order if I were guaranteed daily orgasms hand-delivered by a handsome oblate.”

“I should run that idea by the superior of the Paraclete order.”

“What are they?”

“An order of priests and sisters dedicated to helping and comforting other priests.” Søren wrapped his left arm around her back and pressed closer to her.

“Then consider me your Paraclete.”

“I always have.”

He bit her earlobe while she continued to stroke him. She loved hearing his labored breathing in her ear. His left hand, the uninjured once, dug hard into the small of her back. Nora didn’t mind. The pain he gave her stoked his pleasure. He was brutally hard. Hard and soft, aroused and yet putty in her hand. But that’s how men worked. Even dominant sadists like Søren. He’d teased her that morning that their little kingdom would be aghast to see their fearsome Red Queen hiding in a closet from a ficus-delivery boy. Well, wouldn’t they be equally amused to see their god of pain melting against her, at once tense and loose, over nothing more than a well-timed hand job?

Nora wet her hand under the tap. Søren gasped a little against her neck as she took him in her grasp again, rubbing him with warm wet fingers. His hips moved, but only just into her grip, tiny pulses that were more erotic to her than hard thrusts because she knew how badly he wanted to stay in control and he couldn’t entirely master himself. But he could master her.

“Don’t stop,” he ordered.

“No, sir.” She could tell Søren hadn’t come in some time. Fluid dripped from the tip onto her hand and she massaged it back into the frenulum. His chest rose in sharp breaths. It pleased her to be able to distract him from his own pain for a few minutes. It soothed her aching conscience. She knew leaving him had been the right thing to do, and she knew going back to him would be a mistake. But Kingsley had trained her well as a dominatrix. It went against her nature to hurt someone who didn’t ask for pain. Søren not only hadn’t asked for the pain she’d given him, he hadn’t paid for it up front.

“I love touching you,” she said. “I didn’t get to do this very often when I was in your collar. You always tied me up and touched me while I lay there dying to touch you.”

“You should have begged a little more, and I might have let you.” Of course he would tell her this now, years after it mattered. Such a talented sadist, he could torment her in the past by giving her secrets in the present.

“If I stopped touching you now, would you beg?”

“No.”

“What would you do?”

“Finish with my left hand.”

She laughed and felt his smile against her skin. She wrapped her foot around his left leg for no reason other than she wanted to be closer to him while she touched him. Now she concentrated on the head, the thick tip, rubbing her thumb over the little slick indentation at the top. Her hand roved down against him, clasping him firmly at the base before dragging her hand all the way to the head again. She did it again, pulling harder this time, making Søren shudder slightly. She gripped him tightly but moved slowly. He wasn’t the only sadist in the room.

And because he wasn’t the only sadist in the room, right when she had him, when she knew he’d come any second, she stopped.

She stopped and smiled at him, leaning back on the bathroom counter onto her hands.

“Okay,” she said, “finish with your left hand.”

He narrowed his eyes at her.

“If you insist.”

With his left hand he grabbed her by the arm and drew her roughly to him. Even with his right arm remaining mostly out of commission, he was still stronger than Nora. In an instant he had her turned around. He grabbed the back of her neck, pushed her onto the counter and held her there. She heard the sound of fabric moving only seconds before she felt him inside her. Touching him had made her wet, and he entered her easily. With cruel thrusts he slammed into her as she lay helpless, pinned to the tile countertop by his left hand on the back of her neck.

Nora should have known better than to think she could get the upper hand with him. As roughly as he held her down, there was no chance for escaping. Unless she said her safe word. But then he’d stop and where was the fun in that? His thrusts were deep and long and in this position she felt exposed, open, helpless. She loved it. She hated it. She hated that she loved it and loved that she hated it because hating it meant she wasn’t completely his yet. There was still hope she could escape him completely. Someday. Eventually. But not yet. Not while he felt this good.

Delicious tremors passed through her hips and up into her back and down her thighs as he fucked her. She felt filled by him, stretched open, owned and mastered. When she came she did so silently, a final last rebellion against him. When he came in her, she sighed, grateful for the warm wet heat she’d missed so much. She made her other lovers wear condoms. Not Søren, though. She could never be with him with something between them.

Søren pulled out of her and let her up. The back of her neck ached where his hands had gripped her. Without a word to him she walked out of the bathroom, heading to the bedroom to put on her clothes leaving bloody footprints behind her.

“Where are you going?” Søren demanded.

“Getting out of the ocean,” she said. “I’m done swimming.”

27

A New Client

MISTRESS NORA’S DUNGEON is a happy dungeon. That was her motto. Men came to her broken in all the wrong ways and she sent them home smiling, broken in all the right ways. But in the days after Søren told her his news, Mistress Nora’s dungeon wasn’t a happy dungeon because Mistress Nora wasn’t happy. She told Kingsley to send her masochists that week and only masochists. With a scalpel she carved her name into the back of a handsome world-famous violinist, her penmanship careful and elegant as she knew her name would remain in his skin for months before it healed and faded. In an upstate home that was more fortress than house, Nora whipped a retired four-star general into near-unconsciousness. He tipped her a thousand dollars for being the first woman to beat him as hard as he’d dreamed of being beaten. The next day Kingsley sent her to a hotel suite, all gilt and red and velvet, a Rococo monstrosity from a Sacher-Masoch fever dream. In the suite she presided over a rite in which the client was tied to the bed on his back spread-eagle and branded with a branding iron on his biceps and inner thighs. Four dominatrixes. Four brands. Permanent scars. He wept with gratitude after the scene as Nora cleaned the deep wounds. In the absence of pain, the client was impotent and he’d had his first orgasm in a year when they’d branded him. The client was the wealthy twenty-five-year-old son of Hungary’s ambassador to the United Nations. Nora had kissed his forehead and called him a sweet little boy. He kissed the soles of her boots and called her his queen for life.