Chapter 35 #2
“You sent our guests home with poisonous plants,” says Isolde in some disbelief, and then she and I come to the realization at the same time. “The poisonings last year…the artistic director in DC, the deaths in Vancouver and Tokyo…there was a connection between them all along.”
Mark’s caresses have moved up to Isolde’s ankle now. “Hundreds of guests were there that night, all of them witnessing each other rifle through our wedding’s little poison garden and select souvenirs for themselves, all of them now either complicit or indebted to me—or both.”
Her eyes narrow. “You said poisoning wasn’t your style.”
He sighs, put-upon. “It’s not my style, darling. I can’t help what people want to do with hemlock and nightshade after they take such things home. But that part isn’t important. The wedding gifts were merely the smoke after all. The fire was in the foxgloves.”
We’re both rapt right now, and he knows it. He smiles to himself, enjoying our attention a little too much.
“Do you remember Melwas Kocur?” he asks us. “I’m sure you do, but however much you remember him, I’ll tell you that Embry Moore remembers him much, much better.”
Given that all my deployments were directly or indirectly related to that narcissistic psychopath and his ability to radicalize people even while he was behind bars, I would say I remember him very well.
But certainly President Moore and the First Lady would have cause to remember in a very different way, since Kocur kidnapped Greer Colchester-Moore, and both the captivity and subsequent rescue were a source of private and public pain for Greer, then-President Maxen Colchester, and then-Vice President Embry Moore.
Mark has started running his knuckles up and down Isolde’s leg, and she barely seems to notice, that’s how much her attention is on his words right now.
“It’s annoying to kill someone in a semi-responsible prison—and I promise it’s not a habit of mine—but for the sake of my own interests and Carpathian peace, of course, Melwas Kocur was a problem I was interested in solving.
His medication and food were carefully watched, so I knew I couldn’t simply pay someone working at the prison to poison him.
It would need to happen further upstream.
Luckily for me, Kocur had one indulgence while locked up: tea.
Custom-ordered from a place in France.” Mark massages the muscles of Isolde’s calf, propping her foot on his thigh.
“Do you know how tedious it would be to check every single tea bag that gets pulled from the box? A sealed box exactly the same as all the other boxes that have come before? And anyway, who would think to look at the tea later, when foxglove’s poisonous compounds are the very same compounds in Kocur’s heart medication?
And even if they did look at the tea, who would think to check receipts for some party flowers from half a year ago and half a world away? ”
“So you supplied who knows how many people with the means for murder and had an imprisoned authoritarian killed, all so you could have the president owe you a favor.” Isolde’s voice gives nothing away, and her expression is reserved, but when Mark’s fingers reach her knee, her thighs fall apart as if they’d never been pressed together at all.
“Dear one, when are you going to admit it?” asks Mark. He slides his hand past her knee and stops midthigh, his thumb tracing slow semicircles over the silky skin there. Isolde’s lips have separated, her pulse pounding in her throat, but her eyes are still wary. They are fixed on her husband.
“Admit what?” she asks.
His hand moves, and I don’t have to see his destination. I can hear it. The wet drag of his fingers through the perfect place between her thighs. The careful and deliberate insertion of a finger. She arches under the blanket, her head falling back against the wall.
“That you like it when I do bad things,” he says, twisting his wrist. She inhales. “You like when I take a knife to the world and pare it like an apple.”
She doesn’t want to admit any such thing, but the evidence is undeniable.
When Mark uses his other hand to push the blanket off her shoulders, the berry-pink tips of her breasts are erect and there’s a telltale flush on her chest. I catch a glimpse of her slick and blushing cunt as the blanket starts to come undone around her legs.
“Do you want me to kill more war criminals to woo you into my bed?” he asks in a voice that’s as sincere as it is seductive. He would do it, of course. He’d kill anyone it took to keep Isolde coming back to him.
Maybe he’d do it for me too, except all three of us know the truth—he doesn’t have to. He doesn’t have to do anything at all to keep me coming back.
Isolde’s eyes are glittering from underneath her long lashes, crescents of defiant blue-green. “I guess you’ll have to try it and find out.”
He tuts, his hand moving between her legs. “Forced to seduce my own wife,” he says sorrowfully. “What has become of me? Tristan, come here. Get on your knees and take pity on me in my derelict state.”
Isolde watches as I step closer and sink to the ground; her hips lift and seek Mark’s touch. For his part, Mark nods down at his pants, indicating that I should be the one to unfasten them and draw out the hot, veined length.
I do, nuzzling against it a moment, and I press my face against the gold hair surrounding his cock too, kissing and breathing and just allowing myself to enjoy this part of him that I love so much.
When I finally put him in my mouth, Isolde’s breath stutters. She is a rustle of blanket and bare feet pushing against the window seat, and she is reaching for Mark’s hand, his wrist, to try to get him deeper, to get his thumb against her clit pressing harder.
Mark inhales as I give his tip a slow and seeking swirl and then inhales again when I slide him as far back as he’ll go.
His hips flex a little, as much as they can while he’s on the window seat, and he tries to fuck my mouth like that, an inch back and forth, just the barest amount into my throat and then back out of it.
“Doesn’t he do such a good job, little wife?
” he croons to Isolde, all while his merciless hand continues its work between her legs.
“Doesn’t he service me so well? Look at those pretty green eyes, the way he wraps his lips around me.
Can you see his throat when it—just— ah , fuck, there, there, can you see it?
That bulge? That’s me. He’s letting me fuck all the way in there.
It feels so fucking good, baby. Yes, keep taking it. That’s a good boy.”
My eyes are watering, and I can feel every nerve ending between my navel and my knees, and Isolde is watching us like we’re pornography just for her, and then she twists back against the wall, her entire body arching into one sinuous, shuddering curve as her pussy convulses around Mark’s invasion.
He doesn’t stop fucking my face, but once she’s finished, he pulls his wet hand free and sticks his first two fingers into his mouth, sucking the taste of his wife off his skin.
He comes almost immediately from tasting her, and it seems to be a mean and spiteful orgasm given how he suddenly fists my hair and keeps sucking on his fingers, like he’s afraid someone will make him stop.
His cock pulses thickly, jetting seed down my throat; the hand in my hair keeps my throat impaled the entire time.
He curls over me a little, hips moving reflexively.
Small, mindless thrusts, like I’m a toy meant for use and nothing more.
I can feel the precum smearing across the head of my dick, because that’s what being his toy does to me.
A final spurt and then he slides free, replacing his erection with the fingers that had been inside Isolde and then licked clean. I suck eagerly on them too, wanting to do anything for him, anything to show him what a good boy I can be.
He stares down at me, eyes all black, and then looks over at Isolde, who is panting against the wall with her thighs apart and her slick pink flesh exposed.
“Use it,” he says to me after catching me looking between Isolde’s legs.
“Use it to make yourself come. I know you want to. I know you want to fill it up. It’s so soft, puppy, it’ll feel so soft and tight.
Go, get up now, see how she’s already reaching for you?
She wants it too, don’t you, Isolde? That’s what I thought.
Give him this, and I’ll let you use him later.
We’ll tie him up and you can ride his mouth or his cock—or both.
I think you’d like riding his mouth, wouldn’t you?
Especially if he came inside you first and you were making him lick you clean. ”
His words are a quiet, beautiful weapon, as poisonous as the flowers at their Lyonesse ceremony, as sharp as Isolde’s knife, and I barely make it between Isolde’s thighs before the climax starts burning its way up my legs and begins to yank dazzling, breath-stealing pleasure from the bloody, vital center of my being.
Isolde is sitting on the edge of the window seat, and I’m standing in front of her with her legs locked around my waist, buried to the hilt inside the married love of my life, and it only takes two thrusts inside that tight glove of a cunt before the ripping, tearing pleasure is spilling into her and pumping her full.
I rut through it, using my own cum as lube, and everything is messy and so constricting that it still takes some strength to force my way in, over and over, despite how wet she is. I drive home with a final, bone-breaking thrust, holding myself all the way in for the last few pulses.
I should be embarrassed, but no one could have lasted longer in the circumstances—not with Isolde’s velvet welcome or the absolute fucking obscenity Mark was murmuring to me. Jesus Christ.
Isolde’s hands come to either side of my head, and she pulls me down for a kiss. A gentle one, a pure one, that doesn’t at all match the heavy, sliding flesh between us.
“May I?” asks Mark, and then he’s kissing us too, soft and slow, his hands on our backs and arms and heads.
We are steered to the bed, but we don’t undress any more than we already have, and we don’t fuck.
Isolde is wrapped in her blanket again, and Mark and I are zipped back up, and Mark just…
kisses us and plays with our hair and twines his fingers with ours.
I don’t know that I’ve ever seen him this affectionate . Not desperate, not feral or hungry. But more like he can’t stop touching us. Like he wants to use up a lifetime quota of kisses before sunset. Like he wants the very whorls of his fingerprints to match ours.
“Are you very angry with me about the rings?” he asks us after an hour or two of this.
The sun is lovely, a January memory of summer, and I am drunk on whatever neuropeptides come from having a monster aggressively pet and cuddle you.
I never want it to end, and when I roll my head to look over at Isolde and the dazed way she’s tracing the veins and tendons of his forearms, I think she feels the same.
“No,” I say. “I should have known. But when you switched rings with me at Lyonesse, I thought?—”
“You thought right. It was for us.” His eyes are so much lighter in the Italian sun, the kind of blue that makes you think of floating on your back while birds wheel overhead and happy voices call from nearby. “I would have done the same thing even if there wasn’t a tracker inside the ring.”
“I don’t like not knowing,” says Isolde after a moment, tracing carefully around the inflamed cut on Mark’s bird tattoo. The cut has been cleaned and glued shut, but there’s no doubt it will be an uglier scar than the ones underneath it.
I shudder when I think about the reason for the cut, for those scars, the mental fortitude it would take to birth salvation from your own arm, like a fucked-up facsimile of some Greek god. I shudder when I think of the kind of mind it would take to even dream up such a preparation.
Isolde moves on to Mark’s hair now, combing through it, sanding over his scalp with her fingertips. His eyes fall closed. “If you really want me to be your wife, your honeysuckle queen, you have to treat me like it. Like a partner,” she tells him quietly.
He doesn’t reply to that, his eyes staying closed as she continues stroking that fine hair. But I see his hand twitch a little at her waist, an involuntary flex.
“And I want to go with you,” she says. She says it with a tense, quavering tone, something she’s been working up the courage to say. A request she’s nervous will be denied.
“Go where, dear one?”
“To kill my uncle.”
Mark opens his eyes. He searches her face, chewing momentarily on his bottom lip. It’s such a boyish gesture on him, especially as he’s looking up at her. Right now, he just looks…young. And uncertain. And in love.
There’s a troubled set to his mouth and a new shadow in his eyes when he finally responds. “If you want to be there, I think it’s your right to go. But I’m not making room for mercy, Isolde. Not for him. If you go, then you are attending his trial already knowing the verdict.”
“I understand,” she says.
“Truly?”
“I don’t want mercy. Not—not after everything that’s happened. But I feel like I should bear witness to it.”
Mark turns his head to look at me. I’m lying next to him, our heads on the same pillow, and we are almost nose to nose now. “What about you?” he asks seriously. “Are you comfortable witnessing this?”
Comfortable watching a defenseless old man executed at his dental appointment? An old man who is supposed to speak with the authority of God here on earth?
“Yes,” I say with no hesitation at all. I couldn’t care less that he’s tried to kill me—he has that in common with thousands of militants in Carpathia after all—but trying to kill Isolde ? After years of exploiting her faith as a weapon for his own ends?
No, even if he vowed never to hurt Isolde again, never to even think about her, it still wouldn’t be enough.
The part of me that didn’t feel conflicted in the least about killing Jovian Nantes, that only felt strange about not feeling strange, that part doesn’t care about Mortimer’s age or his papal election or anything other than Isolde living the rest of her life free from his malice.
I think Mark must see all this in my face, because a knowing smile flickers across his lips. “Good.”
A knock sounds, and even though we aren’t indecent by typical standards, something about the last couple of hours feels too intimate to share.
We are all out of bed and put together when Mark answers the door and we hear Ferguson say, “The call finally came through. Tomorrow afternoon, the pope is coming to Nemi.”