up now. Tonight’s visit might not be a complete waste, after all.
He closed an eye and peered through the lens.
This room was the nicest of them all, everything trimmed in marble and traces of polished gold. The bed was the largest he’d ever seen, its frame and high poster columns carved from ebony. On the bed, he saw the visiting American banker, Jonathan Barrett, stripped naked and furiously mounting a girl Niklaus couldn’t clearly see, but she was blond. He assumed it was a nurse or typing pool girl the visitor must have picked up. Whoever it was, she shuddered, screamed, snorted, and writhed, shaking and lost in pleasured agony as he took her faster and faster, to the sound of a Wagner overture on the phonograph.
Niklaus wanted to laugh at the girl’s grunting and howling. The guy was really reaming her hard. He’d never known a woman could make sounds like that.
Then she turned her head, and he recognized that the squirming girl with her knees locked around Barrett’s hips was his own cousin Alise.
His smile vanished, and he felt his heart shrivel and turn cold. He felt it like a fist in his gut. He’d been with Alise several times now, even though each time, when he finished, he told himself he would never do it again. The part of him that stewed in guilt and shame kept losing out to the part that still lusted for her—he’d never been able to turn her down when she came to his door.
It stung to see her with another man, especially lying back spreading herself wide for him, when she’d always insisted that she be on top with Niklaus, never letting him truly take her. Now she gave herself freely to this foreigner, making sounds like he’d never heard. With him, she had always just panted a little, then panted a little faster near the end. With Barrett, she thrashed and cried out like a wild animal.
He saw, too, that Barrett was substantially thicker and longer then he was, filling Alise far more fully than Niklaus ever could. His cousin seemed enthralled, in a state of ecstasy, looking up at Barrett with droopy lids. She’d certainly never given Niklaus a look like that...a look of surrender.
He quivered where he stood, opening and closing his fists. He had an urge to charge in there, scream at his cousin, and maybe put his Luger to Barrett’s head and shower his brains all over the wall. No, Niklaus thought. I won’t start with his head.
Before he could do anything, the door to the conjugal room opened. Gruppenführer Kranzler was there, arms crossed, eyes looking coldly at Alise and the foreign man. Niklaus froze where he was, wondering how Kranzler would react to seeing Barrett on top of his best aide.
Kranzler just watched for a minute, while Alise and Barrett continued on, faster and louder, wrapped in their own world.
“It’s a useless effort,” Kranzler finally said, startling the two on the bed. “She’s as barren as a rock in the desert. Trust me.”
Barrett paused, sweating and catching his breath. He looked from Kranzler to Alise. “Doesn’t feel useless to me,” he finally said.
Kranzler glared at Alise for another long moment, and Niklaus recognized the expression. Jealousy. So she’d been fucking Kranzler, too. Niklaus wanted to punch his fist through the wall.
Finally, Kranzler snarled, “You may continue entertaining our guest, Alise.” He slammed the door as he left. Barrett looked down at Alise.
“Keep going. I’ll show that ugly bastard who’s barren,” Alise hissed.
Barrett started up again, and Alise soon clenched her eyes and screamed in pleasure again as his oversized cock slid in and out of her.
Niklaus felt a shining, glittering hate for his cousin Alise, recognizing that she had no real love for him at all. She was only using him. She wanted to get pregnant, and she didn’t seem too picky who the father might be.
He stalked away down the hidden passage, the sound of Alise’s high-pitched cries following after him, mocking him.
Instead of bursting in on them, he paced up and down the male residential corridor. He should be relieved, he told himself. He should never have thought of Alise that way in the first place, never fantasized about her, never given in...She had brought out the worst in him, as she always did.
Someone else had been on his mind, in every way Alise’s opposite, small, quiet, looking as fragile as Niklaus often felt on the inside. Evelina, the Slavic girl who