That sounded like Maxence.
Mairearad shook her head. “That first day when he came in, though, he’d taken a razor blade to his forearm just that morning. It broke my heart when I saw that.”
Drew couldn’t stop.“He tried to kill himself?”
“Oh,no.No, he didn’t. I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t mean to scare you. I don’t think he’s ever been suicidal as far as I know. The cuts were too shallow for that, and they were perfectly parallel. They were farther up his arm, not near his wrist.” She rubbed her own forearm over her flexors and brachioradialis muscles. “Evidently, the night before, he’d been Arthur’s designated driver and chaperone on an epic pub crawl in Los Angeles and he hadn’tslipped,as he called it, so he’d taken it out on himself to release the dopamine that morning.”
Dree covered her mouth and closed her eyes.
A gasp.“Dree, did you not know?”
Cover it up.“I didn’t know the extent of it, and I didn’t know about that day.”
Mairearad rushed to say, “He wasn’t my most extreme client, you know. Not by a long shot. He was pretty average. It’s not even that unusual. We’re all just a few odd neuron pairings away from getting turned on by a spanking from a man we call Daddy.”
When Max had bent Dree over his desk last week, taken her panties, and spanked her until her bottom turned pink with sharp, stinging slaps on her ass, she’d wanted the spanking as much as him caressing her clit afterward. He’d whispered that she was a good girl for letting him do it to her, and he wondered what else he could get away with as his slick fingers had drifted to circle her asshole, but it had all been a tease and he hadn’t let her come.
Her neurons were getting paired, too.
Mairearad mused, “True dominant masochists are so very rare. Maxence was so dominant thathedidn’t have a safe word,I did.”
“Oh, okay,” Dree said.
“And because he was so dominant, there was always that element of inversion, you know? There always had to be ‘a reason,’ even though it was always a scene. With Maxence, it was usually about how much he could take. It was a test of strength, a trial by fire. He works out like that in the gym, too, I’ll bet, making his trainer push him harder and harder. You can tell just by looking at him.”
Yeah, you could. Maxence usually went to the gym before Dree got up in the morning, and he always returned exhausted.
“Maxence wasn’t the only dominant masochist I worked with,” Mairearad said. “There was one other guy who sticks in my mind. He nearly went to jail for assault before he found the Devilhouse. He kept getting into bar brawls, because that’s how he got the pain he needed. After he found us, he’d hire four or five girls for the night, and he brought in cast iron frying pans or baseball bats or cricket bats, because cricket bats are flat on the front. And he’d chase us girls around and grab at us, yelling and screaming, but he always ‘missed.’ And then we’d beat the hell out of him. But he stopped getting into bar fights, and he was never arrested for assault again. It kept him out of jail.”
“Oh, that poor guy,” Dree said.
“Yeah, he was more extreme than Maxence, but Max is gettingwhat he needsfrom somewhere, right?”
Dree didn’t know. She didn’t think so, and now she was worried about him. “He’s doing fine. He’s getting everything he needs.”
The waiter came over with the check.
Dree handed over the credit card Maxence had given her, holding the black rectangle with her fresh scarlet manicure.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Prayer IV
Maxence
Maxence walked into his closet and closed the door behind himself in the dark.
Dree was shopping with Chiara for the wedding. She wouldn’t be back until later.
He parted the clothes hanging on the rod in the back of the closet, exposing the raw, wooden crucifix still hanging there, and he fell to his knees.
Unfurling his arms at the height of his shoulders, Maxence poured every ounce of his soul into his prayer.
I accept this is my path, but is it the right one?
If the power of being the Sovereign of Monaco tempted Marie-Therese and Jules to attempt mass murder, and if it drove Pierre to suicide, should there be a sovereign at all? Pierre was willing to do unspeakable things to gain the throne, and he killed himself when he couldn’t have it.
If power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, how long will it be until I am corrupted?
