Serving Mr. Stevens, Part Four: The Price of Pleasure -- An Erotic Romance (Part 4 of 5) (2 page)

“Katarina,
breathe
,” I implored her. “Please. Just breathe.”

My words were meant to calm her down, but I didn’t get the response I was looking for. Instead she burst into tears and ripped off her mask, throwing it on the floor and then crushing it under her heel for good measure. I’d never seen her lose her composure like this. Her mascara was all over her face, and her lipstick was smeared down the corner of her mouth. Her cheeks were blotchy with the force of her crying. She was a beautiful woman, but in her current state of devastation, she looked like a different person entirely. “I don’t know what to do!” she cried, sobbing. Her voice was shaky, on the verge of frantic. “Where
is
he?”

It was the question on both of our minds:
where
was Mr. Stevens? For now, it seemed I would have to be the voice of reason, even though inside I was just as panicked as she was. “Look, we’ll figure it out, okay? We’ve got time. It will take a while for Carl to get here. We’ve got time to try and find him.”

Katarina shook her head. “We can’t go back in there.”

“We’re not going back in there. Let’s just go downstairs and try calling again. Come on, let’s walk,” I coaxed her. “Slowly.”

She nodded, her tears subsiding a bit. She carefully walked down the stairs, slower now, and steadier on her feet. Now that I had calmed her down a little, I had time to think for myself a bit.

Peter Kearns, dead?
It seemed unbelievable. I’d been speaking to him an hour ago, with Henrickson at his arm. They’d been a creepy pair, that was for sure. I immediately thought of the stories I’d heard from Carl of Mr. Stevens’ past. How his mother had held the company together, or tried to, while that conniving Kearns tried to make it his own. If anyone would be glad to know Peter Kearns was gone, it would be Mr. Stevens’ mother…

Or Mr. Stevens himself.
As soon as the thought came unbidden into my mind, I squinted my eyes against it and tried to force it away. He’d been with me – I had to trust my instincts about that.  I knew it was him, mask or no mask. But even so, he’d left me alone in the mirrored room – and I’d taken my time after his departure, staring into the mirror and collecting myself as I always had to do after our passionate encounters.

Could that have been enough time for him to find Kearns and kill him? Or, even more unbearable – had he killed Kearns
before
coming to seduce me?

I pushed these horrible thoughts out of my mind and tried to stay calm as I followed Katarina down the long stairwell. It seemed to be endless, and far too dark – a complete mismatch for such an opulent building. When we got to the ground floor, Katarina headed straight for the sidewalk. If she noticed the looks she was getting, the attention that her streaked mascara and tear-stained face brought from passers-by, she paid no attention.

The car pulled up just as we came out onto the street. Carl stepped out, his eyes immediately widening with alarm.

“…Miss?” he asked, his face clouded with worry. He rushed around the car to open the passenger door, but he didn’t get there in time – Katarina had already opened it and climbed into the back, saying nothing. Carl looked at me, asking a silent question.

“We’re okay,” I said quietly. “Just drive.”

Carl nodded and stepped back from the car, waiting for me to enter. He closed the door behind me, and Katarina and I looked at each other as he came around to the driver’s seat. As soon as he sat down, we almost immediately lurched into motion.

“Where would you like to go?” he asked from the front seat, somehow keeping a level tone. He seemed unfazed and in-control. I wondered what other dramatic scenes he’d witnessed over the years as the Stevens family driver.

“Let’s go back to my place,” I blurted out. It was an impulsive decision, but it made sense. The Stevens building seemed too risky, for some reason, and I longed for the familiar comfort of home. I pulled out my phone, tapping quickly through the address book to find the number I was looking for.

My fingers shaking, I whipped off a frantic text to Mr. Stevens:
Where are you? What happened? I took Katarina home for the night. Please get in touch with us. Tell me what you want me to do.

My phone offered up a shrill, hollow ‘beep’, indicating my text had been sent. It was such a small, pathetic noise, not comforting at all. Worry gnawed at my stomach. How could things change so much, so fast? There was nothing left to do for the time being. Now, all I could do was wait.

“What a horrible end to a perfectly wonderful evening,” I mused to myself in the backseat.

On the ride back to my apartment, Katarina sat very still on the far side of the car. She didn’t talk, didn’t look at me – she didn’t even seem to be thinking, just staring blankly ahead. I caught a reflection of her face every so often, illuminated by streetlights in the car window. Her eyes were distant and dull, staring off into space. From somewhere in the recesses of my memory, I recalled that soldiers and burn victims could fall into a state of shock after a trauma, and that it was imperative to snap them out of it if you could. I wondered what in the world I could do to break her out of this. I had never been confronted with something like this before. Three days ago, I’d been a barista. I nearly let out a bitter laugh at the thought. Life had taken many twists and turns since I met Mr. Stevens, but this was by far the sharpest turn yet.

Carl didn’t talk much during the drive, seeming to sense that we both wanted silence. At one point, stopped at a red light, he looked back at me and seemed poised to ask a question. “…Kearns is dead,” I said sharply, cutting him off before he could ask. “And we don’t know where Mr. Stevens is.” He blinked a few times, but said nothing. We looked at each other for a long moment. He turned his eyes back to the road ahead, not asking me to elaborate.

When we turned onto my street, I could feel the weight lift somewhat from my shoulders. Katarina, too, seemed to be doing a bit better. We stepped out of the car together, Carl and I helping her step to the curb gingerly.

“Can you stay here?” I asked him. “We might need the car later… if he calls, or…” I trailed off, realizing all over again how little we knew about what to do next. But Carl, bless him, put up his hands as if I didn’t even need to ask.

“Of course, Miss,” he replied. “I’ll be here with the car if you need me.”

Once upstairs, Katarina seemed to come around. She went to the bathroom to clean up a bit, and I started a pot of coffee. It seemed the only thing I could do that made any sense. I kept the phone on the counter, with the ringer on high, so that I could hear it in case Mr. Stevens sent a text back to me.
Of course he’ll text you back,
I scolded, trying to convince myself. The fact that he hadn’t contacted either one of us yet worried me more than I wanted to admit. And the more worry Katarina saw in me, the more frantic she might become. One of us, at least, had to try and remain calm.

But even so, my heart was racing as I thought about the things that might have happened. I tried to assess the situation logically. With Peter Kearns dead, the first person the police would look to would be Mr. Stevens. There was some definite history between the two of them, very public, and the bad blood went back for decades. No investigator would possibly let that be overlooked. I tried to prepare myself for the fact that Mr. Stevens would most likely be a ‘person of interest’ in the crime, at least at first – even if he had done nothing wrong.

But what if he had?

The question that had been nagging at the back of my mind had come back in full force now that I was alone in the kitchen, despite my best efforts to push it away. I hadn’t known Mr. Stevens long, but his raging temper was already crystal clear – I’d seen that from our very first conversation. And besides, the way he’d looked at Kearns during the party left little room for doubt about his feelings towards him. If I’d been able to see that, surely other people had seen it too.

But
murder?
Was Mr. Stevens capable of such a thing?

Just then, Katarina came out of the bathroom. She looked to be doing much better, now that her makeup was washed away and she’d combed her hair. If not for the tears, she would have appeared almost as put-together as she did when she’d greeted me at the party. But when she sat down on my couch, I saw that her hands were still shaking hard. Following my gaze, she pressed them between her knees in an attempt to keep them under control.

“Nice place,” she said, in an effort to return to normalcy. Her eyes flitted around and took in everything about my place, but still she somehow seemed to be a million miles away.

“Thanks,” I said. “Coffee?” I had already poured her a mug. I held it out to her and she took it carefully, as though she didn’t trust her hands just yet. She blew over the top of the coffee and ventured a delicate sip.

Her eyebrows raised in surprise. “This is… delicious,” she said.

I laughed. “Yeah, I know. You forget I was a barista before I signed the contract with Mr. Stevens. Great coffee’s just one of the perks of the job.”

She gave me a weak smile. I sat down on the couch beside her and watched her as she took another sip, this one a bit heartier than the last. Some color came back to her cheeks, and she closed her eyes to savor the taste of the coffee. To my relief, she was finally coming out of the shock of discovering Kearns’ death – and that meant I finally had some hope of getting some answers from her.

“What happened back there?” I asked her.

Fresh tears seemed poised to pop into her eyes, but just then, a miraculous thing happened. Katarina took a deep breath, straightened her back, closed her eyes and pulled it all together. I watched as the change overtook her. It only took a few moments. All of a sudden her hands stopped shaking, her mouth set in a firm line, and her shoulders straightened up, strong and tall, as though she was ready to march into a room with the full force of Mr. Stevens’ authority behind her. She opened her big blue eyes and turned them to me.

“Did I ever tell you about meeting Mr. Stevens?” she asked, then laughed. The laugh held the slightest bit of shakiness that remained in her, but she pressed forward. “Of course I didn’t,” she continued. “We haven’t had much time to talk, have we?”

I looked at her blankly. I was completely confused. “Katarina, what does this have to do with the murder?”

“I don’t want to talk about that,” she replied, shutting her eyes and grimacing. “I can’t…I can’t talk about that. Let’s just wait until Mr. Stevens calls, and then we can talk about that.” She was starting to babble, suddenly, and perhaps she realized it, because she immediately shut up and squared her shoulders again.

“It was five years ago,” she began. “I was working in a department store on the Upper East Side. It was the same old story, you know? Small girl, big city. I had come to New York with the idea that I would make it big on Broadway, but before I could blink I was flat broke – struggling to make ends meet, selling fancy clothes to rich people. That’s where I met him. He came into the store to purchase a gift for a friend. I don’t remember who, or what. All I remember from that first meeting is the way he looked at me.”

As she spoke, I remembered the moment I saw Mr. Stevens looking at
me
for the first time. It was etched in my memory as clearly as Katarina’s experience was etched in hers.

Her eyes took on a faraway look as she continued. “He made it clear from the start what kind of man he was. Dominant, but charming... stubborn, but caring. He was the kind of man who made me want to be with him despite the fact that I knew absolutely nothing about him.” I found myself nodding along with her as she spoke. “I’d never met anyone like him before. For that matter, I’ve never met anyone like that
since
. He gave me his business card and demanded that I call him. It wasn’t a request or a question. He handed that card to me with such clarity of purpose that I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this man was certain he would be obeyed.” She smiled. “So… I called him. I never thought about
not
calling him.”

I knew that look in her eyes. It was the same look I had seen in my own eyes when I looked into the mirror. She took another sip of coffee before she went on.