“I’m here, little one,” came a voice made for coaxingsecrets from the heart. “Sleep now. We’ll talk when it’stime.”“Yes, sir,” she said, now knowing where she was. Shesurrendered to sleep again.The most familiar darkness…her darkness…she washome.”

“I’ll come back,” she promised. “I’ll always come back to you.”“I know,” he said with cold, calm arrogance. “If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t let you go.”“Believe it. It’s true.” She took a step back. Then another. “Always.”“Eleanor, if you have any mercy in that dark heart of yours, when you leave right now, you willwalk and not run.”... ...crawl and she didn’t fly.She ran. Down the hall she ran as if the hounds of hell nipped at her heels. She ran as if Godhimself had ordered her to. She ran as if her life depended on it and in that moment she mighthave sworn that it did.She didn’t know why she ran. She didn’t know who or what waited for her in the White Room.She only knew she had to get there as fast as she could and whoever it was, he was worthrunning to.”

“You are my heart,” he said. He’d said those very words to her that morning. But that morning, they’d sounded affectionate and playful. Now he said them as if he were stating a fact of anatomy. “I will not lose you. I’m sending you away to keep you safe. Do you understand? Say ‘Yes, sir.’”Nora nodded and swallowed a sudden lump in her throat.”Yes, sir.”Soren bent his head and kissed her long and slow before pulling back.”

“But I wasn't done," she pouted, no longer hungry for anything but him. "Yes, you were.""Yes, sir.""Lay down on your back.""Very yes, sir.”

“Adrift and unmoored, she had tried again and again to throw him a rope to save him from the raging waters. And now he no longer felt like a drowning man at sea. Nora... the siren and the goddess, the ship and the wine-dark sea. She would either save him or end him.”

“Once upon a time,” Nora said, as she fluttered a series of kisses over his shoulders that sent every nerve in his body reeling, “a very poor girl from a fucked-up family became a famous writer with a wicked pen and an even more wicked tongue who made seven figures a year. And she went everywhere she wanted to and did everything she wanted to. And nobody ever tried to stop her. And she had her own pet Angel who needed to learn how to talk. So guess what she did?” “What?” Michael asked. He laughed in surprise as Nora slammed him down onto his back and slid on top of him. She brought her mouth onto his and forced his lips apart. “She gave him her tongue.”

“How easily you forgive, Eleanor. How freely youabsolve the sins of others. Tell me, little one, when thetime comes, how will you absolve yours?With the first lash of the whip Nora felt a strip of fireburn across her back. She cried out from a pain soferocious she nearly choked on it.Like this, Søren, she dared answer only in her mind.This is how.”