Chapter 15
Fifteen
Isolde
“He’s gone,” comes a voice from behind me.
I turn from the glass railing and see Mark approaching the balcony from the shadows of his room.
Even with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up, he looks collected and crisp, an investment portfolio with blue graphs, an ad for leather luggage stitched by hand in Italy.
His face gives me nothing of how he feels, and neither does his voice.
He is, however, holding a glass of scotch and not water masquerading as gin, so he’s not as collected as he might appear.
I look back to the river and the city beyond, the crouched stubbiness of it, barely softened by twilight and the glow of the streetlights deeper in. Only the Potomac’s bridges and the spires of Georgetown make the view bearable.
Sometimes I miss Manhattan so much it’s like a suppurated wound tucked away in my mind. Even London—the city that always felt more like my father’s than mine—I would take a thousand times over this place.
Mark joins me at the railing, bracing his forearms on it, the drink cradled between both of his hands. Tiny snowflakes flutter around us; they melt and die the moment they touch the amber liquid inside Mark’s glass.
I return my eyes to the grim, utilitarian city in front of me. “Did you tell him that my uncle would kill him if he stayed?”
“You know as well as I do that telling him such a thing would’ve only have made it harder for him to go.”
He’s right. It’s why I didn’t tell Tristan either, in all that time I spent curled in his lap, allowing myself a half candle’s worth of make-believe.
Because Tristan would have felt compelled to stay at the mere hint of further danger from my uncle, even if the danger was directed toward himself.
Because Tristan would hear about someone trying to kill him, say oh, only that?
and think it a small trade for staying here at Lyonesse.
Because Tristan—for his medals and his combat badges, for that Bronze Star nomination still working its way through the cubicled guts of Fort Knox—doesn’t actually believe his life is worth very much at all.
“He’ll put it together soon,” I say a little tiredly. I’m not usually beholden to jet lag, but today has been about more than time zones. “Although even I didn’t think of it until your office. The ‘any more failures.’”
“I’d suspected your uncle would see Tristan as a distraction—or worse, as a liability, given what he might know.
But if what you relayed about your conversation with your uncle was accurate, then it’s better for him to think of Tristan as harmless and forgotten and certainly not important enough for you to keep close or confide in.
My other reasons for sending Tristan to Armorica were important too, but this was the most compelling one. ”
He moves his hand toward me, and I realize he’s offering me his scotch. My hesitation is brief, an instant at most, but he notices. Of course he does.
“Poison’s not my style,” he says with amusement, and I cast him a brief glance so that he knows that I think that’s probably bullshit, historically speaking.
“Okay, okay,” he amends. “It’s not usually my style.”
I take the glass and treat myself to a long drink. I don’t actually think he’d poison me, at least not right now, but distrusting him is reflexive now. As it should have been from the very beginning.
It’s when I hand the glass back to him that I see it: the ring he’s wearing on his left hand. It’s not the ring I gave him at our wedding.
Mark sees me looking, but he doesn’t offer an explanation, and I don’t ask. And I don’t bother trying to straighten the deep, wrenching twist in my stomach. Whatever happened with the rings…they deserve that. The two of them.
But the memory of Samhain burns like a faraway fire on a hill, because there was a version of us that didn’t need rings or candles or glasses of scotch. There was a version of us that wasn’t atomized, blown apart, splintered with loneliness and spite. For one night, we had it.
For one night, we had everything.
“I’m having my things moved into Tristan’s apartment,” Mark says casually. “You may keep the use of this one. I thought it would be more comfortable for you.”
More comfortable…without chess games, without Mark deftly chopping aromatics under a canopy of copper pots, without waking up inside the heavy, warm, perfect circle of his arms.
I suddenly wish for another swill of his drink. “And why are you moving downstairs?” I ask.
“We are presenting the image of a fractured partnership, Isolde. The more fractured it appears, the more time we buy back from your uncle’s impatience.”
I am careful not to move too much, to keep my face the way I want it—a mannequin, a portrait of a queen who seems to display whatever emotion or quality the viewer wants her to display. “Is that all it is, Mark? A presentation? An appearance?”
“Are you asking if our marriage is fractured for real?” His voice could be made of the Potomac in December for how much warmth there is in it. “Or would you like to know if there’s a point to repairing it?”
I look at him, the scar near his temple, the slightly uneven bridge of his nose. The mouth that can do more damage than anything else in this island shrine to sadism and pain. “I won’t beg,” I tell him. “I know how this works. We’ve done it before, the night you took my virginity, remember?”
He glances away and finishes his drink. “If that’s how you like to think of it.”
“And if we’re doing this all over again, then what? Am I still expected to sit with you in the hall? Am I supposed to perform contrition? Present myself for spanking at every turn, knowing you detest me? What, Mark?”
“All you have to perform is whatever will give your uncle the idea that it’s better not to have you killed for the time being.
Do the spankings or not, Isolde, it’s your choice, but at least apportion your antipathy in equal measure, not forgetting your uncle or yourself.
” He cuts me a look. “But you’ll need to be better about performing contrition if you expect any of the serpents of Lyonesse to believe it. ”
“So that’s it,” I exhale. “You lied to me for years, manipulated me, used me against my uncle, and somehow it’s my job to convince your serpents that I’m so very, very sorry.
Somehow I have to stand here and listen to you imply that I’ve broken our marriage with the sin of…
of what? Discovering the truth? Refusing to kill you for it like I should have? Daring to love the same man you do?”
His eyes narrow, his mouth pressing together, and he angles toward me, leaning in, all tailored clothes and muscled threat.
And then he stops. His eyes are caught on my braid, on the flurries netting my hair, and then he drags his gaze up to mine.
“Our marriage should have never existed in the first place,” says Mark. “Broken is all it ever was. And you should go inside. The snow has stopped melting in your hair.”
He leaves without another word and also without a sound, the noiseless tread of a killer. The damp footprints and the sting of whisky in my throat are the only proof that he was here at all.