Chapter 27
Twenty-Seven
Mark
I watch Cashel on my phone, coming to the balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square and breaking tradition by smiling at them with his vulpine smile, showing off the rakish gap in his teeth and the friendly dimples marked into his cheeks.
He waves, he prays. Once, after he speaks, his hand jerks upward, as if to touch the side of his jaw, but he catches himself and drops it back down.
I tap a response to the text I received just an hour ago from the clockmaker in Manhattan. I have a repaired mantel clock waiting for me to pick it up from the shop, according to the message.
“I need to go to the penthouse for a couple days,” I tell the table during a late breakfast in the speakeasy the next morning. “I have some business in New York.”
“I’ll come with you,” says Isolde in a polite but firm sort of way that’s difficult to quibble with in front of our guests.
“Here might be more comfortable, and it will only be for a short time.” Translation: You’ll be safer here, and I’ll be back as soon as I can.
My wife meets my eyes with hers, large and blue-green and unmovable. “I’ll be comfortable wherever you are,” she says calmly.
“Gosh, I’ve been wanting to shop in the city for a while,” Isabella comments dreamily.
Hugo turns to her and strokes her hand fondly. “There’s no reason you couldn’t, pet. You don’t have appointments at Armorica for another week. I’m sure Tristan wouldn’t mind staying with you?”
“I’d be honored to,” Tristan affirms.
“I can stay too,” offers Kayden. “I know Hugo is eager to get back to Edouard, and since Hugo will be at Armorica anyway, I’m sure he won’t mind sparing me for a few days.”
“Are you also dreaming of Madison Avenue and ribbon-handled shopping bags?” inquires Hugo, amused.
Kayden gives a handsome pout. “Obviously.”
I incline my head, as if I think it’s fabulous that four extra people are coming to Manhattan when I need to accomplish something incredibly sensitive and tenuous and secret. “There’s a hotel next to my building,” I tell them. “I’ll make the arrangements, and we can leave this afternoon.”
The others are settled in their respective hotel rooms, and Isolde and I walk into the penthouse with flurries caught in our hair and Petitcrieu jumping at our heels.
We unhook her leash, watching as she tears through the new space, sniffing and sniffing and sniffing, like the leg of every chair and the base of every cabinet hold the sum total of the world’s knowledge.
I take Isolde’s coat and enjoy the warmth of her through her cashmere sweater dress as my fingers brush against her.
A faint blush tinges her cheeks, and I wonder if she’s remembering the first night she came here.
She’d been armored in every way possible—with clothes, with quiet resistance—and it hadn’t mattered.
She’d crawled a few feet and tumbled into subspace faster than a stone flung into a pond.
She’s still standing in the foyer when I return from hanging her coat in the closet, and I drag the back of my knuckles up her neck.
“I want you to take me upstairs,” she says quietly.
“To the loft?”
“Yes.”
I nuzzle the spot behind her ear. She smells like heaven—honey and flowers and earth. “Are you sure?”
There are plenty of reasons not to: everything unresolved between us, all the secrets I told her I wasn’t keeping anymore.
She won’t thank me later when she discovers the truth, and my secrets aside, we’ll both be missing the shape of Tristan between us.
Dispirited from the strange twin to infidelity that is the two of us without him.
But there is one very good reason to take her up to the loft, and that is the lovely curve of her shoulder as framed by the city lights through the window.
I stare at it as she replies, “I’m sure, sir.”
Ah, that sir . Rarer and rarer but sweeter and sweeter, because I know she means it when she says it.
I am only a man. I take her up to the loft.
Two hours later, Isolde is face down in bed with her head pillowed on her arms, her shoulder blades striated in thin, crimson ridges, and her breathing as deep and even as I’ve ever heard it.
I’m sitting on the edge of the mattress and running my fingers over those ridges, trying to bargain with myself.
It can’t be wrong if it makes her feel better—it won’t matter once I’m gone—what would a little more hurt —et cetera, et cetera—the predictable haggles of a sinner against his sins.
But it doesn’t matter now. The entire affair will be drawing to a close very soon.
Cashel will have his inauguration within the week, and once his pallium and ring are in place, he’ll have a week more of audiences, interviews, and administrative undertakings before he turns his eye to his niece or to me. And then the final gambits will start.
I have the florilegium, my great work, but my trust in its usefulness is layered with doubt.
Its success would rely on the earnest actions of politicians—some of whom are in the pockets of Ys—and it would depend on a curious and vigorous press.
The same press that cheered for me and my fellow soldiers as we boarded planes for Carpathia, that waved away concerns about the instability there, about the infeasibility of us simply popping in, mowing down some baddies, and leaving with a jaunty wave to the tossed flowers and blown kisses of the Carpathians.
I know what I need for my final play, and I know what I have. I need Brittany Hill, and all I have is a scribbled list of old books and an address for someone named Regina Springer.
An address and, of course, my new houseguest.
I take Petitcrieu for a quick and chilly walk in the rooftop pet area, deposit her back in bed with Isolde, where she coils neatly in the hollow shaped by Isolde’s waist, and then return to the elevator, which I take one floor down after keying in the code.
The elevator doors open to Goran at a kitchen table with a scatter of cards between him and a woman in her early thirties, who is sitting with one leg drawn up to her chest and a vape pen dangling from her hand.
Nat is fast asleep on the couch, an arm flung over her eyes and her hoodie rucked up enough to show a knife sheathed at the waist of her utility pants.
“Fuck,” concedes Goran with typical military grace. “You fucking got me again.” He tosses down his hand, and Cara Sims wastes no time in scraping the bottle caps piled in the middle toward her side.
“Sorry I’m late,” I say by way of greeting.
Cara twists to look at me, the Architectural Digest –featured chandelier over the table casting every faint line around her eyes and every crease in her lips into unflattering relief.
Dark roots have grown into her bottle-red hair, her fingernails are brittle and bitten, and there is a hunted look in the shadows of her cheekbones and under her eyes.
That said, her eyes are feline and quick and sharply lucid.
The lackeys of Ys were fools to underestimate her.
I know CIA officers who wouldn’t have lasted a day with the kind of tail she had, but she’d lasted nearly a year after her brother’s failed attempt to kill the Carpathian prime minister elect.
And it wasn’t even Aaron Sims’s botched, blackmail-driven assassination that put Cara in the crosshairs of Ys—it was that he’d made the mistake of telling Cara, presumably on a line that Ys was listening to.
I’d wondered why—when Ys seemed so interested in becoming a legend in certain circles—they cared if some dead soldier had told his sister about it.
His unconnected, peripatetic sister whom no one would have believed anyway.
Why go to the trouble of trying to harass her into silence? Why start chasing her?
It must be that Aaron knew something else, something more. Something beyond the blackmail and illegal weapons.
Or he knew someone who did.
“You must be Mark,” Cara says. Her voice is wary, but it’s possibly an inborn wariness and not one I’ve earned outright.
I’ve done my best not to give her any reason to distrust me since Nat and Goran scooped her out of a bus stop near Grand Central Terminal.
I made sure they explained thoroughly that we were friends of Tristan and that we knew she wasn’t safe.
Made sure that even as Goran and Nat kept her here in my apartment, below the one I actually use, she had all the amenities of a cherished guest.
But she would be foolish not to be wary. I applaud her for it.
I walk over and offer my hand. When she thinks it over for a moment and then takes my hand to shake it, I do only that.
A firm, reassuring shake—no kiss on the knuckles, no winching myself closer, no knowing smile.
She’s not a mark or a potential agent or anyone other than the unlucky sister to an even unluckier brother.
“Can we speak for a minute?” I ask, inclining my head toward the loft area.
She glances over at Goran, who gives her a steady look, and then nods. “All right.”
Goran makes a show of giving us privacy, clearing up the cards and turning on one of his true crime podcasts.
“Still enjoying your murder shows?” I ask him as Cara stands up and carries her glass into the kitchen.
“I’m waiting for them to cover those poisonings from last year,” he says earnestly. “The ones in Tokyo, Vancouver, and DC. We talked about them during one of our meetings, remember?”
I remember.
“Poisoning was the only thing they had in common, Goran,” I reply. “People are poisoned all the time, for all sorts of reasons. There was nothing else linking the murders together, not geography, not their jobs—not even the kind of poison.”
“There’s nothing linking them together yet ,” Goran says with the conviction of a podcast subscriber.