The Chateau: An Erotic Thriller Read online

  “Always.”

  “This game is called Choke.”

  The boy pushes Kingsley to his knees in the forest and no one has to tell him the rules to this game. Because it is a dream, he doesn’t need to fumble with zippers. Because it is a dream, the blond boy’s beautiful cock is in his mouth in an instant. The boy’s hands are in Kingsley’s hair, rooting him to the spot. He cannot move, cannot run, cannot breathe. He doesn’t want to move. He doesn’t want to run. He doesn’t want to breathe. Kingsley sucks deep and lets the full unyielding length into the back of his throat. The boy in black presses in deeper with his hips. Though the core is hard as iron, the surface texture is smooth as satin, heaven on Kingsley’s tongue. Kingsley wants to keep sucking it for eternity. If he were to be trapped in a dream for all eternity, he would want it to be this dream, this eternity.

  “This is how it could have been,” the boy in black says as Kingsley sucks him. “If you hadn’t run away from me. What more did you ever want than this?”

  Kingsley can’t answer in words, but he can shake his head slightly to indicate he doesn’t know.

  “You do know,” the boy says. “If I know, you know. Ask me to tell you and I will.”

  Kingsley can’t ask. He can’t speak. The boy in black only laughs and shoves his cock in deeper. Kingsley tries to move away, to free himself but he can’t. He starts to choke.

  “See?” the boy says. “I win again.”

  And the forest is filled with two sounds—the sound of one man choking and the sound of one boy laughing.

  29

  Manhattan, New York. 1989.

  With a gasping cough, Kingsley woke up. The sound was loud enough to wake up Maggie, who rolled over in bed and sat up, wide-eyed with concern.

  “King?” she asked. “You okay?”

  “I think so.”

  “Bad dream?”

  “No,” he panted.

  She put her hand on his erection and stroked it. “Good dream,” she said, chuckling to herself. “I hope she was cute.”

  “Cute isn’t the word I’d use for him,” Kingsley said, and Maggie laughed a little louder.

  “God, you’re even a pervert when you’re unconscious,” she said. “Marry me.”

  “Suck me off and then we’ll plan the wedding,” he said.

  “Lay back,” Maggie said. “If you please, my sir.” She’d told him early on she’d felt silly calling him “monsieur,” even if it was French. But since “monsieur” meant “my sir,” they’d come up with that as a compromise.

  Maggie grabbed an elastic hair tie off the bedside table and pulled her thick hair into a ponytail. She did that sort of thing before a blowjob, to keep her own hair out of her mouth. He loved that about her, how practical she was even in bed. She made practical look sexy. She had pert, well-formed breasts, and she was still wearing the leather cuffs on her wrists he’d put on her last night (before he’d secured her spread-eagle to her bed, cropped her, flogged her, and ridden her pussy into the mattress). Memories of last night’s encounter flooded his mind as she prepared herself to take him. There were worse things in the world than waking up to a naked woman preparing to give him a blow job.

  Oh yes, fucking Maggie was one of life’s simple pleasures. Although considerably older than him, she was a natural submissive. He barely ever gave her orders. Didn’t have to. She reminded him of the stereotype of the perfect English butler. She knew what he wanted before he had to ask for it. And what he wanted was her soft, warm mouth wrapped around his cock…and that’s exactly what he got.

  She licked him and licked him and licked him, wetting every inch of him from the base to the tip and all around the sensitive tingling head. Kingsley kicked the covers off his legs as the temperature in the room shot up to a thousand as Maggie worked her magic on him. Her lovely lithe hands caressed his stomach and sides, and Kingsley gently pumped his hips, fucking her mouth. They were in her luxurious bed in her luxurious Manhattan penthouse apartment overlooking the Hudson River. City lights filled the floor-to-ceiling window opposite the bed, blinking blue and white and red. And a beautiful naked woman had his cock deep in her throat and she was sucking it like she’d been poisoned and this was the only way to get the antidote. In seconds, the dark forest was gone. The blond boy was gone. The dream was gone. Creeping across the sky was the first light of morning, sending the night and all its inhabitants, including dreams, fleeing for cover. By the time the sun showed its face, Kingsley had almost forgotten he’d dreamed at all.

  He was close to coming, very close. He stopped Maggie by pulling on her hair. His perfect submissive, she stopped and moved into position on her elbows and knees. He took her by the waist and entered her from behind. Her vagina yielded to his penetration easily, letting him in deep and surrounding him with her warm, soft wetness. She grunted softly as she took his rutting thrusts. Some women tolerated rough deep fucking. Some hated it. Maggie got off on it. She wouldn’t come from it, most likely—he’d take care of that later—but she did adore being used. He knew how she felt.

  Although Kingsley knew no one could see them fucking unless they had a telescope trained on Maggie’s bedroom windows, he still liked to imagine that the entire city was watching them. He’d never quite recovered from that night when Madame had watched him take Colette’s virginity, that moment Madame had stroked his side and back and hips and thigh with the flat of her small soft hand. He’d never forgotten that intimate moment when their eyes met, and she saw him, really saw him. He’d craved that sensation and sought it here in New York.

  Then he’d found Maggie in a kink club in the Village. An hour after meeting her, he’d fucked her on a table while the entire club—at least twenty people—had gathered round to watch. It wasn’t quite the same as that night with Colette, but it was close enough he’d gone home with Maggie that night and hadn’t spent more than a night apart from her since. It wasn’t love. Just sex and kink and mutual respect. And out of his deep and abiding respect for his lover, Kingsley pulled out of her right before coming so he could ejaculate all over her beautiful bare back.

  When he was spent, he collapsed onto his side on her bed. Maggie rolled onto her back next to him. He slipped his hand between her thighs, wetted his fingertips inside her body, and stroked her swollen clitoris until she came for him. It didn’t take long. It rarely did with Maggie, especially after he’d fucked her. Her body tensed and her head fell back and her clitoris pulsed and throbbed against his fingers as she came.

  She gave him a little drunken sleepy laugh and rolled her head onto his shoulder.

  “Good morning,” she said happily.

  “It is,” he said. Kingsley pushed two fingers into her for no reason other than he could. Maggie had given him ownership of her body. Whenever he wanted to put his fingers inside her, he did and she didn’t complain.

  “You should dream more often, my sir,” Maggie said.

  “I dream every night,” he said.

  “This must have been a good one then. Was it?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t remember anything from it now.” This was a lie but he didn’t have the energy to tell her the whole truth. He kept too many secrets from her, he knew. It was something she hated, barely tolerated, but there was nothing for it.

  “You sure about that?”

  He blinked the sleep from his eyes, kissed Maggie’s upper arm.

  Maggie was about to ask another question when her alarm clock went off. Six a.m. again. She started to reach over to the nightstand to shut it off, but Kingsley’s fingers were still buried inside her.

  “King,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “Do you mind?” she asked.

  “Very much,” he said. “But that noise is horrible.”

  He extracted his hand from inside her, and she closed her legs, rolled over and slapped her hand down on her alarm. “Come on, my sir,” she said as she crawled out of bed. “Join me in the shower, please?”

  “I’m go
ing back to sleep,” he said. “I’ll fuck you in the shower tonight after we get back from the gym.”

  “Promise?”

  “Swear,” he said and rolled over, ready to sleep if only for another chance to return to that dark forest.

  Meanwhile he heard Maggie in her kitchen, putting on coffee and calling the night service to get her messages. He’d never fucked a corporate lawyer before. He’d quickly found it had its upsides. Maggie was filthy rich for starters, but that wasn’t the best part. As a corporate attorney, she had to be the big bad boss all day long. When she got home at night, all she wanted to do was submit. When they went out on dates, he picked out her clothes. When they dined, he ordered for her. When they played, he was king, and she his willing slave. Last week she’d even made a joke that she found him so attractive she could happily suck his cock for two straight hours without complaint. He’d made her prove it. Longest two hours of his life, but he still smiled when he thought of it. Maggie had no idea, none, that he too had a submissive side. He never showed it with her. Maybe he’d left it in that château.

  “King?” Maggie said. “You have mail.”

  “When the master is sleeping, the servants are silent,” Kingsley said, his face still turned to the pillow.

  She raised her voice a few decibels and tried again. “I said, KINGSLEY EDGE, YOU HAVE MAIL.”

  He looked up at her. There was an overnight envelope in her hand. Maggie respected him enough not to press him for any information about the work he did. She was an attorney. She knew better than to ask any incriminating questions. But she wasn’t dumb. She knew he did something important and secret. This wasn’t the first overnight envelope for “J. Kingsley Edge” he’d received since he’d started living with her five-and-a-half months ago.

  He held out his hand and took the envelope.

  “I’ll be in the shower if you need me,” she said with a wan smile.

  She disappeared into the bathroom and left him alone with his envelope. He ripped the strip and opened the flap. A minute later he was opening the door to the bathroom to join Maggie in the shower.

  He took her slick, naked body into his arms and kissed her under the steaming water.

  “I thought you said you were going to shower with me tonight,” Maggie said as she pressed her firm breasts into his chest. He took them in his hands and cupped and massaged them. He didn’t say a thing.

  “Got it,” Maggie said. “There is no ‘tonight’ anymore, is there?” She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and rested her chin on his neck. “I should have known having my own personal live-in French pervert was too good to be true.”

  He’d warned her this could happen, that he might have to leave without much notice. It didn’t make it easier for either of them. He kissed her without saying a word because the only word he had to say was “Adieu.”

  By midnight, he was back in Paris.

  30

  Kingsley was not in a good mood for the next week. True, he had no cause to complain. He’d completed his assignment in Manhattan, therefore it was no real surprise they’d recalled him. He thought, at first, that they’d brought him back because they needed him for another job. Oh, but no. They’d brought him back because they were done paying for him to live in New York. They could keep a closer eye on him in Paris. He’d learned from Bernie that his superiors worried he was a “risk” since he had dual U.S./French citizenship. Better to bring him back to France and remind him who he worked for than to leave him in New York in the bed of a rich, beautiful woman who was happily letting him take advantage of her money, her penthouse, and her body. They did have a point. In Paris, he had to pretend to be an American as part of his cover. In Manhattan, he could be as French as he wanted. He felt more French there than here.

  And he fucking loved living in New York. If the feds had come knocking on his door and offered him a job, it would have been “Au revoir, Gay Paris” and “Bonjour, Big Apple” in a heartbeat.

  C’est la vie, this was the job. No one had lied to him about what he was getting into when he’d signed up for it. Once more he was John Kingsley Edge, struggling American writer trying to live out his Hemingway-in-exile dreams. Picking up university students and taking them back to his garret apartment as he waited for his next assignment to come down the pike, as his American grandfather would say. Kingsley had never figured out what “the pike” was, but apparently things to do came down it.

  And every night he dreamed of the dark forest where the boy he loved and hated in equal measure met him and hurt him and made him regret his every waking hour. He despised the boy for invading his dreams, but despised himself even more for not despising the boy enough. Finally, on the eighth morning after eight nights of dreaming, Kingsley gave up and called Madame.

  He didn’t know why he did it, other than he wanted to see what would happen if he went back to that phone booth and dialed that number again.

  The phone rang.

  And it rang.

  And it rang.

  And it rang.

  After the fifth ring, Kingsley hung up. He stared at the black phone in the cradle and tried to tell himself he was glad no one answered. Perhaps he could let go of that part of him that wanted to submit and to serve, he could finally let go of that part of him that still loved that ice-cold boy who lived in the forest in his dreams. Life had given him so much pain and suffering, it made no sense to him that he craved more of it. Maybe that’s why he’d called Madame. Because if anyone knew the answer to why he craved pain when life had given him more than enough of it, it would be her.

  But it wasn’t meant to be. Perhaps Madame was done with him, after all.

  Kingsley left the phone booth and started to walk away. He made it five steps before the phone rang behind him.

  He froze. The phone rang again.

  He turned.

  The phone rang again.

  He ran.

  On the fourth ring he answered it. “Looking glass.”

  “You’ve been missed, my boy,” Madame said.

  Kingsley sagged with relief at the sound of her voice. “You’re the one who kicked me out.”

  “You were never kicked out, nor were you kicked. Carried. But not kicked.”

  “Why did you make me go?”

  “It’s our—”

  “Way, yes, you said that.”

  “We couldn’t have Colette getting enamored of you.”

  “And she was?”

  “Far too much and far too quickly. She’d been talking about you nonstop since the moment she spoke to you in the phone booth.”

  “And that’s bad? I like her, too.”

  “Yes, you like her. She adored you. She pined for you for months after you left. How long did you pine for her?”

  Kingsley didn’t want to answer that question. He’d had sex with someone else two days after leaving the château.

  “Not months,” Kingsley finally said, wrinkling his nose as he answered.

  “Too much partiality can fracture a community such as ours,” she said. “Time apart is best to cool the blood.”

  “Is Colette’s blood cooled now?”

  “I can’t read her heart, but she has stopped asking me about you every day,” Madame said. “But don’t think for one moment she’s forgotten you. You made quite an impression.”

  “I haven’t forgotten her either,” he said, though in truth he’d given her little thought since meeting Maggie. It was Madame who’d haunted his waking hours. She was the puzzle. She was the enigma.

  “Is that really why I had to go?” Kingsley asked. “So Colette wouldn’t fall in love with me?”

  “Or perhaps so that you wouldn’t fall in love with Colette. Considering it’s taken you months to contact me, it seems to have worked.”

  “I was gone,” he said. “On assignment.”

  “Welcome home.”

  “How’s Leon?”

  There was a pause. “Content.”

  “No one else has co
me around asking about him?”

  “You threatened to leak highly-classified details of your agency’s operation to the press, after all. Not necessary, I assure you, but truly appreciated.”

  “I don’t want to see any women or children getting hurt. I suppose that sounds old-fashioned.”

  “Polly tied you to her bed and anally penetrated you for her pleasure and yours. I believe we can safely say you are not a man bound by tradition.”

  “Only bound by lovers,” he said.

  “Why are you calling, Kingsley? The first time you called me, it was for your work. What is it you want now?”

  Kingsley considered the question carefully.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “What is it you are missing that you think I can help you find?” Madame asked. She didn’t sound angry or impatient. Merely curious. She was probing him, looking for chinks in his armor, he imagined. Chinks she could sneak through, slip a finger through. Slip a knife through…

  “I thought,” Kingsley started. “I thought you could tell me something.”

  “Ask.”

  “It’s human nature to flee from pain, yes?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Then why do I miss being hurt?” Kingsley asked.

  “We never hurt you here,” she said.

  “He hurt me. And I miss it. Why? Do you know? I think if anyone might know it’s someone like him.”

  “The boy who hurt you was a sadist. Don’t you think it’s strange you’ve come to another sadist for help?”

  “Makes perfect sense to me,” he said. “Takes a thief to catch a thief? Takes a sadist—”

  “To beat a sadist?” she asked.

  Kingsley laughed softly. “Something like that.”

  “If I let you come back, I will hurt you,” she said.

  “Good.”

  “I will play games with your mind.”

  “I’d be disappointed if you didn’t,” he said.

  “You’ll be devastated when I do,” she said. “You understand this, yes? And you accept the risk?”

  Kingsley tensed, swallowed, exhaled.