Chapter 36 #2
“Sir…” I start. “That can’t—that can’t be right.
” I dredge up the memories, of McKenzie dead on the ground, the snapping of bullets back and forth.
“We’d had a report of insurgent activity there, weapons drops.
The intel came down straight from Stuttgart, and when we got there, it seemed exactly like the report said it would be—and no one called back that they were friendly?—”
I try to remember exactly how it unfolded, all of it a messy, drizzled blur.
We heard voices while on patrol, saw the two dimly outlined shapes at the end of the alley.
We called out, announced ourselves, and a gunshot cracked through the air.
McKenzie was the first to return fire, and then I got my weapon up just in time to see the flash of a silver wristwatch; I squeezed off three shots.
McKenzie had dropped to the wet ground, the other soldiers with us were hit—I didn’t see the wristwatch again, but the bullets still came—and I had to keep firing.
I had to call for help. I had to render aid after the shooting finally stopped.
And when help came, there’d been no one in the alley—no bodies at all, only blood, like it hadn’t even happened.
Except it had happened because McKenzie was dead.
I’ve always wondered how they’d managed to vanish like that, if they’d been hit but not killed, able to drag themselves away.
I’ve wondered why I didn’t hear anything else afterward, why I was lauded and praised and also not deemed worthy enough to know what the fuck McKenzie had died for, whether they had been insurgents or petty criminals or what.
I’d wondered if any tiny, infinitesimal difference in the sequence of events would mean that McKenzie could still be here today—if we hadn’t heard anything in the alley, if she hadn’t been the first to return fire, if she’d been angled literally in any other direction when that fateful bullet struck.
I’ve wondered about so many things when it comes to that night, but I have never ever wondered about that silver wristwatch.
And I can’t make myself believe it; right now, it is simply the most ridiculous fucking thing I can think of—that the wristwatch from that night is the same wristwatch I never saw Mark without, that the person I was trying to kill was the handsome grinning man from Mark’s pictures.
That Mark’s grief, Mark’s revenge, founding Lyonesse, marrying Isolde—every fucking thing that’s happened for the last eight years—every bit of it was because I saw silver glinting in the dark once upon a time.
I stare at Mark, and finally, finally , he looks back at me.
And for a split second, his control is burned away. I see every last bit of what these eight years have done to him. Fury and anguish and heartbreak. Hatred and obsession.
Love.
For eight years, he’s built an entire kingdom to destroy the crown of one man, and for eight years, he’s done it knowing exactly who robbed him of the one thing he’d held close to his heart. Who pulled the trigger and how many times.
I think Mark loves me. But staring into his vast, turbulent, heartless eyes, I suddenly come to understand that he hated me long before that. That he might still.
Mark blinks and he’s back to his cool composure, expression betraying nothing, and I am shaking; I can’t make myself stand upright. I slump back against the desk.
“You hate opera music,” I say in a broken mumble, scrubbing a hand down my face.
It’s only barely on the fringes of my memory, the soloist’s tragic voice floating into the night air.
Just one more way that McKenzie’s death was too fucking absurd to exist inside the ordered and valor-laden coherence of the reality handed to me by my father and West Point.
“I hate opera music,” Mark agrees.
Isolde can’t hide her own shock—a rare thing for her—but there it is, in the splotches on her cheeks and her flicking gaze, as she stares at both of us.
“You said you hired me because you knew I’d do the right thing,” I say. I say it like I’m pleading with him.
“And once, eight years ago,” he says softly, “you did the wrong thing.”
The third box in Mark’s safe makes sense now, the articles and clippings and pictures going all the way back to the Distinguished Service Cross.
So this was why he’d been following my career like a silent panther after its prey, watching as I became exactly what the Army wanted me to be—a hero—and as being a hero shattered whatever was left of my will and my mind and my resolve.
You are the only candidate , he said when he interviewed me for the job.
And now I know why.
“How?” I ask Mark in a whisper. “How have you been able to keep that hidden all this time? How have you been able to look at me—kiss me—and at Morois—” Oh God, Morois.
When he’d shut himself away with his grief, and I’d shamelessly wriggled my way in, offering him the relief of my body when I’d been the one to create the need for relief in the first place.
When I’d begged him to let me help him mourn, and all along, I was the reason for mourning.
He’d fucked me into the carpet knowing I’d killed his husband.
He’d let Eliot’s killer dress him and wash him and kiss his feet.
“It wasn’t precisely planned ,” replies Mark, who’s now looking at the lake.
A muscle jumps in his jaw. “I wasn’t supposed to care about you.
I wasn’t supposed to want you. I’ve been around handsome men before, Tristan—I can generally hold my own.
And then you ruined it. You ruined everything by being so good and sweet, my own little Maxen Colchester but better, because you let me right into that tender heart with no fight at all.
Years spent stalking the man who killed my husband, only to find that I loved him like I’d never loved anyone before.
You see what a fucking mess that made, right? ”
“I’m sure he’s beginning to see it now,” says Mortimer, interjecting with the silky, inveigling curl of incense smoke.
“He’s a smart boy. He’s putting together that there would only be one reason to hunt him down, one reason to trap him in your cage once he escaped the Army’s, and it wasn’t for the pleasure of providing him with health insurance.
You didn’t stalk him for eight years only to offer him a job—you stalked him to kill.
You stalked him to stop that tender heart from beating at all. ”