Chapter 11
Eleven
Tristan
I’m more nervous than I think I’ve ever been, including going to war, including running away from Lyonesse with a furious Mark lashed to a chair. Those were nothing in hindsight, just the unconscious flexure of skill, a blend of panic and courage.
But returning to Mark…
It would be a very stupid person not to be scared right now.
Mark won’t hurt Isolde. I am certain of this much at least. I also think he won’t hurt me, not the kind of hurting that usually inspires fear.
It’s only that the danger isn’t in his violence but in his love. In the crushing, churning star-fusing burn of it.
If he still loves us, that is. And despite his wicked mouth in Rome, I have my doubts. What kind of love can survive this? Us?
There aren’t any guests in the lobby this early, but Ms. Lim is behind the desk, a ring of keys at her waist. Her expression doesn’t change as we approach, but she does step out to greet us.
“Mr. Trevena is expecting you,” she says. “Follow me.”
I glance over as we follow Ms. Lim up the stairs.
Isolde doesn’t need the railing, climbing the stairs with that prep school poise of hers, and like everyone I’ve chosen to surround myself with these days, her face betrays nothing at all.
She looks like she’s walking into Lyonesse after a morning spent in those expensive stores where they keep almost nothing on the shelves. Like she never left.
I wish I had her mettle. Her certainty.
What is it that Mark said to me? When you’ve been where I’ve been, on those roads, in those pits of hell, you come to know that you can only be certain of yourself.
Perhaps Isolde feels the same. She must. She’s been walking very similar roads to Mark since she was nineteen.
Embarrassment snaps at my belly as I think of the martial arts on the yacht, the cherished knife, the meetings in Belgrade.
I hadn’t seen what she was until Samhain—I hadn’t understood that I’d prostrated myself at the feet of yet another killer.
I’d thought her a princess, a lonely queen, a kindred spirit, but all along, she’d been kindred to Mark’s spirit, not mine.
Her loneliness had been chosen with blood, and her crown was soldered with sin and set with the jewels of heaven…
and until Samhain, I’d thought she priced old bowls for a living.
But I love her.
I can do nothing else.
Like the first time I walked through this club, I keep my eyes on Ms. Lim’s heels as they click up the stairs and down the corridor leading to the hall’s first tier of balconies.
That time, it had been good manners. This time, it’s to fight the urge to check on Isolde.
To stare at her with worry or possessiveness or anything else that might set tongues wagging.
As if that will make a difference. I glance up to see a group of guests descending the staircase from the speakeasy-style bar above, presumably from a late lunch, and I watch as awareness of her festers through the guests like an infection.
Isolde’s wearing a wool dress today—navy—with long sleeves, a high neck, and a skirt that flutters below her calves.
Her hair is in a loose braid of pearl and gold, pulled over one shoulder, and her stockinged feet are clad in black heels, tall enough to be stylish, short enough to be appropriate in all but the most particular of churches.
She is above all else completely unobjectionable, the Laurence heiress, the unflashily but tastefully clad daughter of a banker, and I know she chose this dress as armor, as a statement.
You cannot make me into the whore of your imagination , the clothes and hair say. Try to accuse me of all the sins you think I’ve committed. Just try.
But it doesn’t make a difference. That only her hands are exposed simply eroticizes them, draws attention to the slender fingers and the now-tainted wedding ring.
The dress hugs the tidy lines of her shoulders and pert curves of her chest. The braid—messy and soft and gleaming and tuggable—is patently obscene.
If she were naked, she could hardly stir a person more.
The club members seem to agree, because under the glances of disgust or distrust or mockery, there is leering hunger. She’s no longer Mark’s darling pet. She’s clearly unfaithful and therefore valueless to Mark, so why can’t they have a turn with her?
It’s reflexive and stupid of me, but I step between the members and Isolde and block their view. I give them the blank look I’ve learned to wear as Mark’s bodyguard and gesture for Isolde to go on.
They stop gawking, but I don’t miss that they clock me, my protectiveness, and I know by tonight, the club will be churning. Mark’s wife is back, with the bodyguard, and you won’t believe how audaciously they were acting around each other, in broad daylight no less…
I can’t control it, and I don’t know if Mark will even care, but it makes me clench my teeth all the same.
They don’t know anything about what’s between Mark and Isolde or Isolde and me.
They don’t know that on Samhain, we’d held a fragile, glimmering possibility between the three of us.
That for a few hours, it felt like we were the only people in the world.
On our way to the hall, we pass two employees and three members coming from a playroom, and it’s the same story.
They all look at me, a skimming of mild disapproval, and then look at Isolde with an antipathy that is no less carnal for how censorious it is.
The blame of it all, the stain of adultery and betrayal, have settled on her.
Not me. Not Mark, whose secrets and lies lit the fuse just as surely as anything else. Oh no. Only her.
And I know it won’t get any better after we get to the hall itself and I hear two very unwelcome voices: Andrea and Sedge.
Mark, who’s standing with them and Dinah in his usual nook, looks over to see us approaching. When he notices how I move between him and his wife, his hand flexes at his side.
“Sir, Mr. Thomas and Mrs. Trevena are here,” Ms. Lim says crisply.
Andrea stares at us with open dislike. Sedge doesn’t look at us at all, his face a freckled cipher, angled toward his tablet as he writes something down.
“Thank you, Ms. Lim,” Mark says. His voice is serious, his face serious too. He’s wearing all black today, just like he was in that Roman park, and in the silver daylight coming in through the glassed roof, his eyes are blue enough to glow.
It’s only been three days, but the shock of those eyes—that gold hair, those forearms exposed by rolled-up sleeves—is nearly enough to make me turn and run in the other direction.
It’s one thing to meet in the twilight, already sundered, already hopeless, but to be here in daylight, hopeful, hoping —it’s like walking right at the enemy with nothing in your hands but a white flag.
Ms. Lim leaves in a jingling of keys and a tattoo of heels on concrete, and then Mark looks out over the floor of the hall.
Turned like this and with the benefit of daylight, I can see the things I couldn’t in Rome: a hollow curve under his cheekbones, a new shadow under his eyes.
The last six weeks have taken a toll on him, and I can’t scoff at the word heartbreak now, can I? Not when he looks like this.
Guilt is a hook behind my ribs. We had no choice on Samhain, but all those justifications feel strangely distant right now. Like they couldn’t have been worth this.
“I know we’re not finished with the Saturnalia planning,” he says, “but I’d like a few moments alone with Mrs. Trevena, if I may.”
I start to move, but he stops me.
“You stay, Tristan.”
I don’t know what would be easier to bear, the jealousy if I was sent away or the dread I feel now at being asked to remain, but either way, Dinah gives me a small, encouraging smile as she moves past. Sedge looks at neither of us as he leaves, and Andrea saves her venomous glare for Isolde.
So much animosity rolls off the treasurer’s blazer-clad shoulders that I think she might throw Isolde off the balcony as she passes.
And then we’re alone, save for the staff downstairs currently unwinding protective padding on some very convincing Roman statues.
Mark braces his hands on the railing. “So,” he says to the hall and not to us. “You’ve returned. I’m glad.”
Before I can talk myself out of it, I ask, “Are you, sir? I’d rather be hiding from you for the rest of our lives than leave Isolde here if she’s going to be treated like she’s been treated so far today. So tell me that you are glad, that you aren’t just offering her a haven but a home too.”
Isolde draws a deep breath next to me but doesn’t speak. I can’t tell if she’s relieved I’ve dragged this into the open or if she wishes I’d shut up.
For his part, Mark turns and leans his side against the railing, crossing his feet at the ankles so that one dress-shoed foot is propped up on its toe. I catch the very faint, very fast flicker of amusement around his mouth. “Hiding from me for the rest of your lives?”
He doesn’t have to say the rest. As if you could is written all over his face.
I won’t squirm, even if he’s right. Waking up to his knife between us, the note tucked neatly underneath it, was like waking up to yellow eyes in the dark.
The mammalian parts of my brain could only process it as the most immediate kind of danger, as a failure of vigilance.
I slept through my watch, the wolf crept in, and now we would surely die.
“How did you find us?” Isolde asks. Her voice is pitched low so that it won’t carry any farther than the balcony railing.
“I have my ways, and to answer your earlier question, Tristan, I am glad .” A catch on the word glad , and then a flicker of muscle along the side of his jaw.
Like gladness isn’t the only feeling burning inside him.
He meets Isolde’s eyes. “I take your presence here to mean that Tristan passed along my warnings about your uncle?”
Isolde’s posture is as upright and graceful as Mark’s is careless and slouching, but I know them well enough now to know that they would be circling each other if they could, a skeptical lioness and an arrogant lion scenting the air.
She lifts a hand in a gesture that I take to mean to an extent.
“What you told me in your note…what you told Tristan. You understand that it’s nearly impossible for me to believe.
That my uncle is the head of some secret society while also being the Vatican’s head of intelligence.
That my uncle would plan to kill me.” Her voice doesn’t shake, but I hear the wavering at the far edges of her words.
She pulls in a deep breath. “You are asking me to believe the very worst of someone who was a father to me in every way that mattered and with no evidence save for your word. Your word , Mark, and you know how cheap a currency that is right now.”
“But you’re here now,” Mark observes in a soft, silky voice. “So really, how cheap can it be, little wife?”
Isolde clamps down on whatever emotion ripples through her before it can do more than rouge her cheeks. She looks down and to the side, and I can practically feel her fighting inside herself.
“I went to see him,” she says. Mark doesn’t bother to hide his displeasure at that, and she looks up and laughs joylessly.
“Tristan wasn’t happy about it either. And funnily enough, my uncle wasn’t happy about Tristan.
He called me foolish and weak for running away with him, so there’s unhappiness all around, it turns out.
I told him that I wanted a second chance to rob your treasury.
That it would take some time to regain your trust and that of course you’d need to stay alive until the prize was stolen.
He wants what you have badly enough that he’ll change his plans to get it, so he agreed. ”
Mark watches her. “And you believe him? You don’t think that he said what he needed to say to maneuver his lamb back into the pen for slaughter?”
“I do believe him,” she says, “because he strongly implied that same slaughter if my time here resulted in any more failures.”
Mark doesn’t reply, and I can offer nothing, because I’m just as clenched with anger and ferocious vigilance as I was when Isolde first told me.
I want to build an outpost around her right now.
I want air support and an entire company of troops on the way.
I want to patrol her perimeter, and I also want to find her uncle and end this.
“So as you see, I’m here,” she says tightly.
“I don’t want to believe you, and yet I’m here.
I can barely stomach the idea that everything I’ve known to be true about my family, my faith, and my work as a saint is wrong, and yet I’m here.
You’ve lied to me from the moment I met you, but my uncle has been lying to me since I was born, and I suppose that has to be worse. ”
Mark straightens and walks toward Isolde, who stays completely still.
He takes her hand. “You betrayed my only request. You left me and took the sole other person I love with you when you went. You are the niece of my enemy and the one person in this world who can do me the greatest harm. And yet I’m here too. ”
Her lips tremble as he drops his mouth to the backs of her fingers. It’s a cold kiss, I think. More like the kiss of an enemy than a husband.
“I’m not your uncle or your God, Isolde. I don’t need your faith. Just stay until the gates of hell are shut. We can make it that long, I think.”