Chapter 18 #2
“Her engineering team was brought in to stabilize a bridge that had partially collapsed,” Kayden says to me after she’s passed through the doorway to the playrooms. His voice has grown quiet, uncommonly serious.
“They had to get there immediately to make sure the rescue and recovery teams could do their job safely. There were twenty-seven bodies in the end. She stayed at her firm two more years, long enough to finalize the plans for the replacement bridge and see ground broken. And then she left.”
“That was just about a year ago now,” murmurs Hugo. “I think that she didn’t want to walk away without making sure a tragedy like that could never happen again. But it broke her faith in something. I’m not sure what. She hasn’t been able to get it back.”
I take a long drink of my beer, chest tight with empathy. I hate that she had to see something that horrific; I hate even more that it broke her sense of purpose.
But I understand it. God, how I understand it.
I have another beer, talking with Kayden about his time in the armed forces while Hugo chimes in with observations from his past life in international law.
And then I remember that I’d meant to grab a second security team member for Isabella’s doctor’s appointment tomorrow.
I’ll need to check the schedule to see who’ll be on and if the club can spare them for an hour or two.
I explain myself to the owners, who tell me to take anyone I need, as the club will be quiet during the day anyway, and even if it weren’t, they still want Isabella to have the extra protection. And I go to the office just off the marble-floored lobby, behind the wooden concierge desk.
There’s no one at the desk, which I haven’t seen happen once in my time here, and then also no one inside the office.
I don’t like this—at Lyonesse, there’s always someone at the desk or security office—but I’m still new here, and I don’t entirely know Armorica’s staffing rhythms and quirks.
I pull up the schedule on the computer, half my mind cataloging possibilities for where the concierge could be—dealing with an unhappy member or chatting with the doorman in his little heated vestibule outside or even just using the restroom—and then pause.
The club’s schedule is comprehensive, covering all the staff down to the third shift dishwashers. Armorica’s Dominants and submissives are on here too with their client bookings, which means I can see Isabella’s schedule.
Only one session , she said.
But there are two on here.
I recognize the first name as belonging to the Good MP, but the second name is Kayden Howell .
Kayden who is still ignoring his spreadsheets in the lounge with Hugo.
Kayden who sees Isabella more as a sister in kink than a play partner.
Kayden who wouldn’t need to schedule a session with Isabella anyway.
I’m on my feet the minute I find the room number, darting back toward the playrooms and looking for the security team member who should be posted outside her door. He’s not there.
I knock on the door and try to open it, knocking again when I find it locked.
“Ms. Beroul?” I call in. “It’s Tristan.”
Nothing.
I don’t wait. I don’t run back to the office for the master key that opens all the playrooms. I don’t try to get help. I aim for the spot just next to the knob, and I kick the fucking door open.
The millisecond it breaks and flies inward, I’m charging into the room with my sidearm drawn. Adrenaline stretches the moment into infinity; years of combat bring absolute certainty to every breath.
I see him in person for the first time, someone I’ve only seen in pictures.
Jovian Nantes, absolutely unremarkable in every way—dull pink-beige skin, dull brown hair, designer clothes that still manage to look dull on his average-size frame.
He’s got Isabella pinned to the floor with her face in the imported rug, and one of his knees digs into the back of her soft thigh.
Red bondage rope is unspooled everywhere, a mess of it, but he’s managed to tie her wrists behind her back, and he has a hand wrapped around the mangled knot between her wrists, like he’s about to stand up and drag her up to her feet.
A hunting knife, serrated and mean, protrudes from his other hand.
He’s frozen by my entrance, which gives me time to make sure there’s no blood, that Isabella’s ribs are moving, that there is a good twelve inches between the tip of his knife and her skin. She’s completely naked, with only one white glove half on a hand.
“I’m taking her,” Jovian says. His face is an ugly thing right now—angry and petulant and afraid. “I’m taking her.”
“She’s staying here,” I say, too amped up to sound as calm as I should right now. I am bad at this part, the talking, the convincing, and I have the memory of Sims bleeding from the throat to prove it. I take a deep breath and try again. “Put the knife down, and we can talk about this.”
“I’m not putting it down. Are you fucking crazy?” His fingers have tightened around the rope, and Isabella’s hands are blanching white and bloodless. “You’re letting me take her right now. She should be with me. I want her with me.”
Isabella lets out a low, muffled sob underneath him, and he flinches like I’ve just fired off a round.
Interesting. I don’t think he likes being reminded that he’s the villain here.
On the way to the airport, Goran had given me a short biography of Jovian, as relayed by Hugo’s security team.
The feckless failson of some real estate baron out west, an “entrepreneur” with a string of stupid ideas and bankrupted ventures behind him, Jovian has had a lifetime of being cushioned from consequences.
Until now, that’s mostly been unlimited money and some substance issues being swept under the rug, but that changed when he met Isabella.
The boy who’d never been told no grew into a man who could only hear yes .
He wanted Isabella, and he’d gotten everything he’d ever wanted, so when he told her in a scene that she should quit Armorica and move in with him and be only his forever, he must have expected that she would give him what he asked for, especially when he was asking so very nicely.
That she didn’t, that she found his invitation frightening instead of wonderful…that Hugo had the nerve to strip him of his membership and tell him that he no longer belonged… It might have been the first real no that Jovian had ever heard.
It seems to have cut the last link he had to reality.
“Jovian,” I say, steadying my voice. “You don’t want to do this. You’re a good guy, I know that. And a good guy wouldn’t want to scare Isabella right now.”
I think I sound convincing. Maybe I’ve finally learned how to lie?
But it doesn’t matter. The tip of Jovian’s knife drops a little, closer to Isabella’s waist. His voice is nervy.
Quavering. “It didn’t have to be like this.
You should have let me keep seeing her at least. I didn’t want this to be hard.
You assholes in this stupid fucking club were the ones who made it hard! ”
“We can make it real easy right now,” I say soothingly. As soothing as I can be while I’m standing in a modified Weaver stance with both hands on my gun and my finger on the trigger. “Just set down the knife, and everyone gets to walk away.”
“I thought about making her less pretty,” says Jovian, and underneath the quaking words slithers a chilling soullessness. “I could cut up her face. No one else would want her then, but I would. Then she’d have to go with me. Be grateful that I’d still take her.”
Isabella is trying so hard not to make any noise, not to move, but she can’t help the guttural moan of fear that leaves her.
I could kill him for that alone. For rending that noise out of someone who does her puzzles from the inside out, who made herself build one last good bridge before she left a job that traumatized her, who is kind and open with everyone. It’s like terrorizing a baby rabbit or a daisy.
“I should have done that from the start,” says Jovian slowly. He lets go of the rope around Isabella’s wrist to grab her hair and turn her face toward the wall.
I shift forward, my pulse thumping in hard, steady beats. “Put the knife down.”
“It’ll hurt, but only for a while.”
“Jovian—”
“I’ll leave one eye. I don’t want her blind?—”
A sob from Isabella.
Another flinch from her attacker, and then an expression of frustrated rage, like how dare she not want this?—
“ Jovian— ”
The knife jerks sideways.
I squeeze my trigger finger as I move forward. I squeeze again, and then a third time.
Pop pop pop —heavy, loud, final.
There’s an obnoxious whine in my ears as I drop to a knee and shove Jovian’s limp body off Isabella, grabbing the knife and using it to saw at the rope binding her wrists.
When I finally get her free and sitting up, she’s crying so hard that I can’t make sense of what she’s saying. It isn’t until I see her bare hand that I understand it has something to do with her missing glove. That her hand being exposed is somehow the last thing she can bear right now.
I sit back against the wall and pull her into my chest, taking her naked hand and deliberately trapping it between us, gloving it with our bodies.
And then I crush her against me, shushing and soothing, staring at Jovian’s unlikable, unmemorable face as it starts taking on that masklike quality that comes after death.
I wait for the rotten fruit feeling to come, the one that came after I killed those two men in the basement of Lyonesse, the one that followed the realization that leaving the Army hadn’t meant leaving death behind. But it doesn’t come.
I don’t feel conflicted. I would do it again.
I can’t stand the things I can stand to do , Mark told me in that closet, and I know what he meant now, because I can stand to do this, I can stand it easily, and that’s more upsetting than the fresh corpse by the cane rack.
I don’t want to be someone who finds killing easy to do.
Maybe I’m more like Mark and Isolde than I thought.
When what feels like the entire club—frantically searching for the source of the gunshots—finds us, Hugo sinks to his knees next to me and pulls me and Isabella both into a desperate, clutching embrace, his own tears coming fast and unashamed.
Kayden takes immediate control of the room, his friendliness hardening into the certainty of a soldier as he checks Jovian’s neck for a pulse, notes the time on his watch, and starts delegating calls to emergency services and to other staff members so they can start shutting down the club.
Inside the shared ring of my arms and Hugo’s, Isabella clutches at my shirt, quaking so hard that I’m worried about shock, whispering the same two words over and over again.
Don’t leave. Don’t leave. Don’t leave.