Chapter 29
Twenty-Nine
Mark
Hours later, when the aftercare is finished and a long shower taken—and the inevitable sex enjoyed afterward—I gently disentangle myself from a sleeping Tristan and slide out of bed.
Petitcrieu has decanted herself into a pool of gray fuzz and too-big paws between Tristan’s knees and doesn’t even prick her ears when I draw the covers back up.
I slip on some pants, brush some hair back from Isolde’s face, and then leave the room.
Downstairs, I go straight for the low wooden bar behind the sofa, pouring myself a finger of scotch…
and then adding another finger before stoppering the bottle again.
It’s still dark and will be for a while yet, and even the city has gone still, streetlights changing colors for empty intersections, sporadic headlights moving over empty sidewalks.
I only know she’s coming because she wants me to know.
She doesn’t bother hiding her reflection in the glass, and the blanket she has wrapped around herself hisses on the floor as she walks.
But her feet make no noise, and I’ve watched her long enough to know that she’d be able to stick to the darkness, choose a perfectly oblique angle for her approach, if she didn’t want to alert me.
I might sense her a split second before she wanted me to, but only barely.
I don’t speak as she comes to my side, but I do offer her a drink from my glass, which she takes. I watch the smooth slide of her throat as she swallows. The play of city lights over her skin.
She hands me the glass. “I know what you’re doing.”
I find this idea rather amusing. Even I barely know what I’m doing, least of all when I’m with her. “Oh?”
“I just wish I knew why.” She tucks the blanket more tightly around her.
It’s a thin one that’s normally folded at the bottom of my bed, and it’s not really warm enough for January, not in a glass cavern like my penthouse.
She’s all goose bumps now, and the glow from the window limns the fine gold hairs of her arms, all raised in a futile effort to keep her warm.
Impatiently, I take her hand, tug her to the sofa, and make her sit on my lap once we get there.
I set my scotch down and fuss at the edges of the blanket, grumping under my breath about misplaced masochism and how it won’t matter how much work I’ve put into keeping her alive if she insists on dying of hypothermia instead.
I hate it when she’s cold. So many nights in the hall when the plan was to have her kneeling on the floor and then she’d wind up in my lap instead because I’d look down and see the goose bumps on her thighs.
She’s staring at me as I finish tucking the blanket around her feet.
“You love me,” she says, like it’s a statement of fact, which it is.
“Yes.”
“And you love Tristan.”
Another fact. Inconvenient but incontestable. “Yes.”
“So why are you acting like you’re about to disappear?”
This surprises me. “What makes you think that?”
She doesn’t roll her eyes, but there’s a pointed flick of her gaze that must be the etiquette-friendly equivalent. “The loft. The here’s how to hurt her , here’s how to top him . You wouldn’t go to the trouble if you knew you’d be there to do it for us.”
I don’t respond, mostly because any easy response would be a lie, and any difficult one would be mostly incomplete anyway.
“You said no more lies. You said no more secrets. Remember? On New Year’s Eve? You promised.”
I kiss her forehead. Because I want to and because I need to interrupt her study of my face. She’s too perceptive. I’m adept at giving nothing away, but she’s getting very good at taking what isn’t being given instead.
This is the problem with baby cutthroats, of course. Baby heroes are so much easier to manage.
On the other hand, she’ll understand better than our baby hero in the end why I had no intention of keeping my promises about secrets and lies. She’ll hate me for it, she’ll build elaborate fantasies about throttling me, but she’ll understand.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen next or who will make the first move.
” I speak the words against her temple, moving my lips to her soft, moonlight-colored hair.
“But I do know that you have to take care of Tristan. We know he’s strong, we know he’s brave, and we know he would die protecting you.
But he’ll never think to protect himself.
He’s not wary enough or watchful enough. He’s not made for this.”
“And we are.” The words are leached of all feeling, but I hear the desolation underneath them.
I’ll lie about a lot of things, but I won’t lie about this. “Yes. We are.”
“Even if I don’t want to be.”
This time, I do let her see my face. I take her chin between my thumb and forefinger so that she has no choice but to meet my eyes.
“This again?” I ask softly.
A bitter twist to her lips. “Why not?”
“I cannot tell you to forgive yourself for what you’ve done as a saint. But I can tell you that if what you are keeps yourself and Tristan alive, then you are the best and holiest thing I can imagine.”
Her lashes drop to her cheeks, nothing but silver in the city’s artificial burn. “I am so far from holy.”
I debate telling her what I say next, but I’m keeping so much else hidden that it feels like I should share this at least. “That first night of ours, on your father’s desk—I don’t think I ever fully explained why I left.”
Her eyes snap to mine. “You said it was because you realized you had feelings for me. That you were scared of what they could change.”
“That’s true, but I didn’t understand how much those feelings might change my plans until I found that gift from your uncle in your room. The holy card.”
“Julian the Hospitaller,” she says slowly.
“The patron saint of murderers. And written on the back, Tu me superbus .”
Her voice is hollow when she translates the Latin. “ You make me proud. ”
“I’d known your uncle was preparing you for sainthood—that little dojo of yours has churned out more than a few saints in its time.
But I’d hoped he’d keep you in waiting a little while longer, allow you the rest of your college years at least. I’d hoped you’d get longer than I did after I joined the Army, that your hands would stay clean long enough for your heart to finish growing.
But he didn’t. He made you into a killer at the age of nineteen, and I knew that if he’d dip your hands in blood, then he wouldn’t hesitate to use you against me the moment he was able.
If we were close, clearly in love, clearly intimate, then the pressure would have begun right away.
I wasn’t ready for that, and more importantly, Lyonesse wasn’t ready. ”
I drop my hand, freeing her to look away, which she does.
“I wanted to stay that night with you more than anything,” I say tiredly, “but the game had already begun. Your uncle had made the first move. It was either my obsession with you or everything I’d built my life around since Eliot died, so I chose revenge.
Not that it mattered. I thought of you constantly, wanted you incessantly.
Every time I saw you after that, I knew I was only a sigh or a smile away from checkmate. ”
Sadness haunts the shape of her mouth now. I run my thumb over the seam of her lips as if I could rub all the unhappiness away.
“At nineteen, you had the power to terrify me. Me . I don’t want to boast, but in any other circumstance, the idea of Mark Trevena being terrified of a nineteen-year-old heiress would be ridiculous.
But I knew with a marrow-deep certainty that if you wanted, even if you only half wanted, you could knock me over as easily as a chess piece.
Don’t waste a gift that rare on someone else’s idea of holiness, Isolde.
Maybe you don’t think you’re good, but you’re able to protect good people, and if that isn’t its own kind of virtue, then I don’t know what is. ”
She doesn’t speak, not to agree and not to argue, but she’s allowed me to caress away her pout, and when her eyes drift to the window, she seems pensive rather than miserable. I can’t resist. I tug her chin back toward me and press my mouth against hers.
She makes a noise in her throat and wraps her arms around my neck, fingertips swirling in my hair as I cajole her lips apart and stroke my tongue against hers.
“Clearly, I can still touch you,” she murmurs, and a hand drops from my head to the waistband of the lounge pants I pulled on.
She reaches inside, circles the stiff flesh she finds there, and then I circle her hand with my own.
Together, we work my erection into a flushed, weeping state, until all thought of logic and prudence has left my mind, and all my thoughts are of tight openings and arched throats.
“Bed,” I growl, standing up and lifting my wife in my arms as I do. And I carry her upstairs to bed and to Tristan, who is more than happy to be kissed awake for all the wicked little plots we have in mind.