Luckily for him, Marie-Laure didn’t have the good aim Nora did. The blade left a flesh wound on his side, a deep one, but nothing fatal. Only painful and now...
“Fuck...” He sighed as he pulled off the gauze. The wound had opened again. No more denying the obvious. He needed real medical attention, not his own feeble field efforts.
“Oh, good,” came a voice from the doorway. “Someone in this house is in worse shape than I am.”
“I don’t know about that, Maîtresse,” he said as Nora came up to him and examined the damage on his side. “You look like merde yourself.”
“I know you said I look like shit but it still sounded sexy. Why does everything sound better in French?” She carefully ran her finger along the outside of the injury. “You want some help?”
“S’il vous plaît.”
“On the bed, slut,” she said. “If I hurt you enough, I’m going to expect payment.”
“We’ll put it on my tab.”
Kingsley laid on the bed on his uninjured side. Nora returned in a few minutes with rubbing alcohol, a towel and a needle and thread.
“Good thing Anya’s a sewing freak. She’s got every kind of thread in existence in this house.”
“You’re going to stitch me up?”
“I am. Either you let me do it now, or I’m taking you to the hospital.”
“No hospitals,” he said, recalling his last hospital stay that would have been his last stay anywhere had it not been for a priest showing up and scaring the merde out of the doctors.
“Thought so. Now hold still.”
Kingsley winced as Nora cleaned the wound. The alcohol burned deep and he breathed through the pain.
“Want some real alcohol? The drinking kind?” Nora threaded the needle with black thread and soaked the thread in the alcohol. “This is gonna hurt like a motherfucker.”
“You remember who you’re talking to?”
Nora laughed as she bent over his wound.
“Good point. Speaking of points...” She pushed the needle into his skin and Kingsley closed his eyes, fighting the urge to wince or flinch. “Jesus, King, you got beat to hell. Some of these bruises look old.”
He raised an eyebrow at her. Nora rolled her eyes.
“That horny priest. I leave to go f**k somebody else for one week, and he jumps you the second my back is turned.”
“Not true. I seduced him, and he did make me wait a few days.”
“He’s such a sadist.”
“He almost killed me, if that makes you feel any better.”
“It does.” She pulled the thread through his skin and brought the needle back down. “But we both know that’s how you like it.”
“I wasn’t complaining, I promise.”
She worked in concentrated silence for a few minutes as Kingsley clung to the rung of the headboard to steady himself.
“Where did you learn how to do sutures?”“Mistress Irina.”
“Ahh...yes, my Russian. She was quite the good sadist, too.”
“That client of mine with the medical fetish...what was his name? Rhymed with Fucker.”
“Tucker.”
“Him. He liked having his lips sutured. Paid me five hundred per stitch.”
“I don’t recall you making nearly that much off him.”
“It was off the books.” She winked at him.
He started to laugh but stopped himself. No laughing during stitches. He learned that the hard way once.
“I knew you were skimming.”
“You were, too.”
“It wasn’t skimming,” he protested. “It was creative arithmetic.”
“Times like this,” she said, tying the end of the thread, “I miss working for you.”
“We were a good team, you and I, Maîtresse.”
“We were. Especially when we teamed up on Blondie.”
“He’s his own army. We needed a unified force to defeat him.”
“He still always won.”
“Only because we let him,” Kingsley said, and Nora grinned broadly. She wore nothing right now but black panties and a black tank top so all her bruises were on open display. But even with the bruises, the cracked and healing lip, she was still a thing of beauty any man would lay down his life for. Even a priest. Even a king. “At least, that’s what we told ourselves.”
“You think we could do that again?” Nora asked, pausing to dab an alcohol-soaked cotton ball over the bleeding stitches.
“Do what? Gang up on him?”
“Be a team again.” She looked at him without smiling. “Friends, maybe? Or maybe at least you could stop hating me?”
“I never hated you.”
Nora flicked his open wound with her fingers. Kingsley gasped in pain.
“Liar.”
“Fine. I did hate you. A little.”
“Why? We were good once, King. You and me. When I worked for you, we were almost even friends.”
He exhaled heavily.
“When you left him the first time, I knew why. I understood, and as much as it hurt me to see him so broken, I didn’t even blame you. Quite honestly, I was shocked you lasted as long as you did in his collar.”
“I took great pleasure in imagining creative ways of murdering him.”
“This does not surprise me. Any true slave or submissive wouldn’t have minded his tests. But I knew what you were and I knew how hard it must have been for you to deny that half of yourself that wanted to be the master.”