Chapter 13
Thirteen
Tristan
Tonight.
I leave tonight.
“What time tonight?” Isolde asks for me, as if she knows I can’t speak right now.
“Jago will escort Tristan to the airport in two hours. Goran will go too so he can give Tristan a quick briefing on Armorica on the way there.”
So it’s already been arranged, all of it settled. I should have known—Mark would never have broached the subject if he didn’t have a course charted and the sails trimmed awaiting a tilt of the rudder. Sea Hound indeed.
“It’s discourteous of me to separate the two of you with so little preparation, I admit, but I believe it’s the safest course of action for Isolde.”
“ And your vendetta against Ys,” I say, the acrimony seeping up from my stomach and stinging my tongue.
But I can’t stop myself. “That’s what it’s all been for, right?
Marrying Isolde? And now splitting us apart?
It’s all for your revenge. Yours . Even though none of it would’ve been necessary if you had just left the two of us alone in the first place. ”
“I regret that I’ve put the two of you in this position.” The words are diplomatic, but his bloodless knuckles around his glass are anything but. He looks like he wants to hurl his drink at the window and then demand I square up. “And I regret that any of this was necessary to avenge Eliot.”
“You don’t regret it,” I say, getting to my feet. Not to fight but so that he can hear this properly before I go. “Not enough that you’d do it differently if given another chance.”
A merciless smile. “How well you read me, Tristan. How well you know my mind, because you are correct . I would not do it differently, not if I thought there was no other way to find Ys and strangle it to death. But this is why you stayed a soldier and why they pulled me out of a war to do the things even generals blush to think about. Because I am willing to put three hearts on the scale and offer them in payment for the destruction of a shadow that has stolen from me, from you, from Aaron Sims and Cara Sims, from the people of Carpathia, and on and on and on. I have watched people pay far greater prices than heartbreak for far, far fucking less, so yes, I would do it again, because I think it’s a goddamn bargain. ”
The glass makes a sharp crack as Mark sets it on the credenza.
He doesn’t look like a man who’s found a bargain at all.
He looks like we’re robbing him and leaving him for dead, like a traveler from Jerusalem on his way to Jericho.
Like he’ll never have a Good Samaritan pass by no matter how long he waits.
It doesn’t cut my anger, but the joyless resignation in his face complicates it. I think Mark believes what he says, but I think he hates it too.
I think he has to remind himself to believe it sometimes, because it hurts so much.
“Did you mean that as a kind of comfort?” inquires Isolde, and there’s scorn in every curve and angle of her body. She wears it well, like a designer dress. “We’re supposed to hear that we’re cheap tender for a debt we didn’t know existed and be glad ?”
Mark looks at her sidelong. He taps his fingertips on top of the credenza.
“No,” he says finally. “I wouldn’t ask that. Hate me as much as you wish.”
There is a candelabra at the edge of the credenza, something that I’ve never seen before in his office, with its sumptuousness of minimalism and richness of emptiness.
But the candles appear to be the same ones that were being wheeled into the hall earlier.
Supplies for Saturnalia, whatever that means.
They are all half-burned, maybe as a test to see how long they lasted or how much wax they dripped, and Mark produces a matchbox from the cabinet next to the place where the liquor is stored.
“I imagine you’ll want to say goodbye,” he says.
The match catches with a tear and a hiss, and he uses it to light the candle in the middle of the candelabra.
And then a second one. “I’m afraid you don’t have long, only until this burns down.
” He takes the second candle from the holder.
“I’ll have its twin with me here. You take the candelabra into the apartment.
I’m sure you remember how soundproofed it is.
Your privacy until the flame dies is complete. ”
And with that, he carries his candle over to the window and looks out at the water, deliberately giving us his back. Giving us the chance to say goodbye.
I don’t even care if it’s a trap. I stride over to the candelabra and then offer my hand to Isolde.
With a conflicted look at Mark’s back—the candle sending gold dancing in his hair, making his reflection in the window flicker—she takes my hand and allows me to lead her into the apartment.
But she doesn’t close the door behind her.
I also don’t move to close the door. I’m not entirely sure why, and I’m not sure why she doesn’t either.
Privacy should be all we want—separation the best gift we could be given.
But should has never had much power around Mark Trevena.
Even angry, even hurting, I want to be near him.
That a man so cold has somehow become the sun of my life is a very bleak thing, but that doesn’t make it untrue.
I set the candelabra down on the kitchen counter and follow Isolde to where she’s drifted to a small table near a window framing choppy water and ruffled gray sky.
Her fingers light on the chessboard on the table, the quartz and crystal practically glowing in the silver light and the obsidian glinting darkly.
She drags a finger to the empty square where the queen used to be; Mark hasn’t replaced it on the board.
There’s a large armchair by the window, and I take a seat. Isolde comes to my lap immediately, sliding an arm around my neck. She reaches up with her other hand to toy with my hair a little—it grew out at Morois, and it’s started to curl at the edges. I’ll need a haircut when I get to Montreal.
Our eyes meet, and I know we won’t need words for this. What more can we say that we haven’t already said? We love each other, and it’s hopeless.
She shifts so that she’s got her head against my chest, and I stroke a hand down her back, feeling the subtle interplay of her muscles.
I found her so strange when I met her, this princess who pretended violence in her dojo, and now I find her stranger still, because she’s more like violence that pretends at being a princess.
Blood and death, the burbling, foamy hell of it, the chemical change from the quick to the dead—I tried so hard to run away from it.
I left the Army, took a job in a building where hurt and harm were separate things, and none of it mattered, because death found me anyway.
Blond-haired and lethal and secretly tender, destruction both tall and short, a husband and a wife.
I wish it felt worse to hold Isolde knowing what she’s done. I wish that it bothered me more knowing what Mark plans to do.
But now all I feel is my old sickness, an obsession marrow-deep.
We’re arranged so that we’re both facing the door, and I know we’re both hoping for the same thing.
That he’ll come in, that he’ll sweep his frigid ocean eyes over us and then make the farewell that we truly want.
That he’ll take his still burning candle and drip his name onto my skin with scalding wax.
The idea of it, the hope , makes me thicken and swell.
I know Isolde feels my response underneath her, and I can guess that she feels much the same, given the careful way she presses her thighs together…
but neither of us do anything more. To thwart Mark’s obvious assumptions or to silently cajole him in, I don’t know, but we don’t do anything more than sit together.
There’s no frantic, heedless fucking of the forbidden lovers about to part.
Because even holding Isolde is painful right now, even feeling her listening to my heart.
Screwing her while Mark’s within earshot—while he gives us permission to screw, like someone allowing a habitual drinker to drain the last of his liquor before calling it quits—that’s never been what this love is.
This love is aching for him on a yacht in the middle of the ocean. This love is the moonlight catching on Isolde’s tears.
This love is nightmares and the way she talks about lumpy old bowls and the way she looks standing over me, grinding her foot into my cock while her graceful, effortless balance betrays years of creeping across rooftops under the stars.
We weren’t real in the dark, but now we’re more than real in the light. We’re doomed in it.
I toy with Isolde’s braid, finding a strand that’s worked its way loose and rubbing it between my fingertips, reveling in its softness and its shine.
There’s an old story from a collection of fairy tales I found at Morois about a king who’d vowed not to marry.
He went outside his castle walls and saw a perched bird with three strands of lustrous hair caught in its beak, and the hair was so unusual, so beautiful, that the king amended his vow.
He’d consent to marry so long as he married whomever the hair belonged to.
I can’t remember how the story ends now, but it doesn’t matter. I know how the king must have felt as I look at Isolde’s hair. The color and gleam of nacre, the feeling of silk. I also would have broken a vow for it.
I suppose I broke someone else’s instead.
The candle is burning low when Isolde finally says in a whisper, “I’ll miss you, Tristan.”
“I’ll miss you too.”
“I’ll miss the way your heart beats so steadily. Like it was made for the rest of us to keep time to.”