Chapter 38
Thirty-Eight
Isolde
My uncle dies smiling, with blood smeared on his teeth, with his hands folded neatly over the wound in his chest as if in prayer.
Before his last breaths burbled out though, Mark leaned down and whispered something in his ear. My uncle, with a knife jammed between his ribs, couldn’t truly laugh, but it was a reflex he couldn’t seem to stop either. “Clever Minch,” he mumbled. Bloody foam flecked his lips.
“It fooled me,” Mark told him. “For years.”
“Just as you’ve fooled them. Will you tell them?”
Mark didn’t look up from my uncle, but I could tell by the care with which he stood up that my uncle had meant Tristan and me. Will you tell them?
God, what more could there be to tell?
My uncle didn’t seem to expect an answer from Mark, and he didn’t get one. He instead rolled his gaze up to my face. The knife was planted in his chest like a tree, and the rubies glittered like small, hard fruit.
“You are so like her,” he choked between sucking, drawing gasps.
The words were only wet, airless suggestions of themselves.
They were his last words, and his smile was the same smile I’d seen a thousand times before, gentle and wise, as if nothing had changed between us.
But his eyes, before they dimmed, seemed to hold an entire host of malformed emotions—regret and anger and maybe even longing.
Or maybe—after Mark said It’s over, Your Holiness. You can stop at last —maybe his eyes held a profound and exhausted relief.
I don’t know if I’ll ever entirely understand why he did any of it, but I’ve seen the effect of power on a person, stronger than any opiate, the burn of it more irresistible than liquor.
I don’t think it matters whether he started this nightmare out of misplaced faith or impatience with the system or ordinary ecclesiastical ambition—once the power came, there was no other answer, no other longing, no amount other than more more more.
There is no time to linger over his body and reflect, however.
Mark yanks my knife free with one forceful pull, Tristan guides me away.
Palmer and Ferguson come in, and we’re shuffled down to the lowest level of the office, through a door to another building, out to a waiting car, which takes us to an airfield where a cargo plane is ready.
We are shown to a run-down crew area with flat, hard beds, and I mean to stay awake, I mean to talk, but Mark makes both of us lie down, and then he sits in the chair nearby, watching us with a blue, inscrutable stare.
I fall asleep thinking about my uncle’s mismatched eyes slowly filming over in death, and I don’t dream.
Mark still has a warrant in the United States, so we land well outside DC on a quiet airfield, and while manifests are being presented and import processes are begun, we’re discreetly smuggled off the plane and taken to a car with the keys left inside.
There’s a moment when Mark gets behind the wheel and pauses, and I know he’s thinking of Jago. His hands tighten on the wheel once, and his long lashes dip and then lift again. He turns the key in the ignition, and the three of us are bound for Lyonesse.
It’s not a terribly long drive, but the silence is centuries’ worth of silence, eons of it, and yet no one moves to lift it.
It’s too heavy to lift, too laden with the truth, and where would we even start?
When Mark hired Tristan? The alley in Kraków?
The scream of rubber on an Irish road at the end of my mother’s life?
It doesn’t matter how much sleep I’ve had on the plane; it’s not enough to bring any kind of clarity to the brittle snakeskin of secrets we’ve shed in the last twenty-four hours.
It’s strange and heart-twisting to pull into Lyonesse’s garage without Jago.
I didn’t see him die, but I did see him trying to give us suppressive fire as we ran toward the car, and I wish—I don’t know.
I wish I knew more about him. If he had a family, if he enjoyed working for Mark.
If he knew that something as simple as driving a car for a kink club owner might end in his death.
Mark parks the car, turns it off; the interior lights come on with a bluish glow. He still has flecks of dried blood in his hair, and while the swelling has gone down around his eye, the bruise makes him look reckless and brutal. He looks like Hades himself right now in the otherworldly light.
“We have a guest,” he says, nodding toward a spate of black SUVs parked at the front of the garage. A man in a dark suit and coat stands in front of one, his hands linked in front, an earpiece visible.
“Is that…the Beast?” Tristan asks hesitantly. “Like the president’s car?”
Mark is already opening the door and climbing out. “Sure is.”
“Is it a good thing or a bad thing that the president is waiting for you, sir?”
I’m getting out of the car myself and see when Mark waves a hand—the nails dark with whatever blood couldn’t be washed off on the plane.
“Probably a bad thing,” he says, sounding deeply unbothered.
“He’ll lecture me about how he can’t just be killing popes whenever I ask, I’ll remind him of how much he enjoys Melwas being dead, and so on. The usual back-and-forth.”
“You’re really not afraid of the president being angry with you?” Tristan asks as we walk toward the doors leading to the club.
A scoff. Like Tristan had asked if Mark was afraid of his high school band leader.
“I’ve seen that man go off in his pants while watching Maxen Colchester fish an ice cube from a glass.
No, I’m not afraid of Embry Moore.” Mark says all this as we pass by the Secret Service agent standing by the Beast, and the two exchange nods.
Then he adds, “You should shower and change while I’m indulging the president’s pique.
Afterward, I’d like to speak with you both. ”
His voice has shifted from its unruffled, dismissive tone to something a little more closed off, something shrouded, and worry nips at my tired bones once again.
Will you tell them? my uncle had asked.
The club is always quiet during the day, but today it seems utterly empty, and when we reach the lobby, Ms. Lim meets us and quietly informs Mark as to why.
Lady Anguish—Nimue—has opened the club for weekend hours only until Mark’s warrant and asset seizure are completely put to bed, mostly to limit the guests’ liability should the FBI come knocking, trying to interview people or squirrel themselves into other caches of information.
But to counter the perception that the club is truly in danger, Kayden and Isabella have come back down from Montreal to help Anguish charm and schmooze the guests when the club is open, to reassure them that while Anguish is in charge, their privacy is safe and Lyonesse will persevere.
“They are waiting in the hall now,” Ms. Lim finishes, gesturing up the stairs.
Mark nods and then waves Tristan and me to the elevators instead. “Shower,” he commands. “We’ll address everything else after that.”
Tristan and I shower together, a dazed, tired affair that nevertheless ends with him wedged inside me, his mouth open against my neck.
I think I might be too wrung out to come, but Tristan coaxes me there anyway, to a quiet climax that leaves me slumped against the shower wall while Tristan uses my pussy to finish.
We dress—Tristan borrowing Mark’s clothes, me in trousers and a sweater—and we go down to the hall with skin free of dried blood and damp hair.
“How are you feeling?” Tristan asks in a gentle voice as we leave the elevator. “About what happened in Nemi?”
What happened in Nemi is too big a category to accord only one emotion. Right now, it’s defined entirely by its lack of emotion: I feel almost nothing.
“I should feel more,” I answer. “I should feel worse. I loved him more than I loved my father, and even after everything that happened this fall and I knew my uncle had started to see me as a liability, I never thought I’d—” I stop.
It still doesn’t feel real. The crunch of bone, the runnels of hot blood over the hilt.
The wheeze of punctured lung and the blood-smeared smile.
Like something from another life, even though it was only yesterday.
Tristan doesn’t say anything but finds my hand, holding it tight.
“But how can I feel more? How can I feel worse?” I ask, not really asking him or myself or anyone at all, just issuing an empty inquiry up to the sky.
“Trying to kill me is one thing, but my mother? She was so good. Really good. I think not putting that knife into his chest would have been the greater sin, but I’m scared that I can’t tell sin from sin anymore, much less sin from righteousness. ”
“I felt the same way after I killed Isabella’s attacker,” says Tristan.
“I still feel that way. How many people have we killed in the last week, Isolde? How many people have been killed for the sake of our rescue or survival? They chose it, they chose to risk death in order to deal it to us, but I know I should feel something more, something like that slow rot I felt in the Army, and I don’t.
Maybe because I know there was no other choice…
but it still feels wrong not to feel wrong. ”
We are coming to the hall now, to the balcony where Mark is talking with President Moore and Lady Anguish.
Isabella, Kayden, Dinah, Andrea, and Sedge are waiting near the entrance to the hall, and a handful of Secret Service agents are scattered between them and the three people conversing in Mark’s usual nook.
“Ah, Isolde,” Kayden says, coming forward to take my hand and kiss it.
Next to me, Tristan doesn’t physically react, but I can practically feel the air hum with jealousy.
Fitting, because when Isabella gives Tristan an unhesitating hug—her glossy blond-red waves bouncing, her amber eyes large and limpid—I have the childish urge to yank him back.
The vagaries of jealousy are infinite, because the jealousy I feel in regard to Isabella is immature and stifling, but when I think of Tristan and Mark together, the jealousy is like a cathedral. Capacious and holy.
And yet on New Year’s Eve when Mark poured all sorts of poisonous fantasies into my ear about Tristan fucking Isabella, I came hard enough for my muscles to ache the next day.
My husband waves us over as President Moore straightens up.
Mark is slouched against the railing, blood-spattered and still wearing clothes that could be described as need-to-know chic .
Lady Anguish is in a green pantsuit with a white silk blouse, a snowdrop brooch pinned to her jacket, and she smiles enigmatically at Tristan and me as we mumble quick apologies to the Armorica visitors and walk through the cloud of Sedge’s and Andrea’s disapproval to the nook.
“I have more to protect than just a presidency,” President Moore is saying to Mark. He sounds a little grumpy but perhaps a little mollified too, like whatever Mark has been saying to him has sanded the edges off his irritation at being roped into a papal assassination.
“I know you do,” says Mark affably. He could be the devil of Lyonesse on any other night, wooing a prospective member into unlocking coffers of the darkest, strangest things they know. “I have no intention of endangering your wife or your husband, Embry. You know I like them both.”
Tristan and I both pause, our fingers twitching against each other’s, the same question arcing through us.
Your wife or your husband? President Moore only has one spouse—the First Lady, Greer Colchester-Moore, née Galloway.
The president searches Mark’s face for a moment. “I don’t think I like you knowing as much as you do.”
Lady Anguish trails a slender hand on the railing and says meaningfully, “Embry.”
It’s a little chiding, a little auntlike, because she is his aunt, the much younger sister of Governor Vivienne Moore of Washington.
But it’s not the weight of blood, her years in the political maelstroms of Olympia and DC, or her marriage to the political powerhouse Merlin Rhys that layers her voice with authority.
It’s something deeper than any of those things, something older, and I think of the dream I had on my wedding night, of her standing in a forest with torches burning in a circle around her.
President Moore flicks a petulant look her way, but he does press his mouth together for a minute while he seems to master himself.
He turns his head toward me and Tristan as we come to a stop, and his eyes, a blue I’ve only seen before on the petals of wildflowers, soften the tiniest bit as he looks at us.
“Don’t make me regret helping you,” he says finally to Mark. “You’ve been a good friend to us and to my aunt—and I haven’t forgotten what you’ve done for my sister and her husband—but a disgraced war criminal is not the same as a newly elected pope. You owe me.”
Mark bows his head. The gesture is courteous, completely conciliatory.
It doesn’t seem to make the president any happier, but there’s nothing else he can do, and he knows it. With an afflicted noise, he leaves, striding away on long legs and waving at the Secret Service agents who scuttle after him with flapping coats and gleaming shoes.
Lady Anguish smiles at us, a small, enigmatic smile. “My nephew can be skittish when it comes to protecting his family. The potential blowback from something like this isn’t something to be taken lightly.”
“They understand,” says Mark, straightening up. “Just as they understand that Palmer and Ferguson are the best at what they do. This won’t be laid at anyone’s feet at the end of the day, much less Embry’s.”
Anguish nods. “That’s correct, it won’t be. But he’ll still worry in the meantime. He’s never been as good at hiding his worry as Maxen. Or you.”
Mark grunts.
“And on that note, I’ll be in the lobby for the next hour or two, speaking with Ms. Lim. If anyone should need me.” The last part she says with a delicate emphasis, her eyes shifting to mine. Her gaze is penetrating and clear.
I can’t help the small shiver that races up my spine and then plucks with lingering fingers at the nape of my neck. It lasts even after Anguish has left the balcony and the hall altogether.
Mark watches her go and then looks down at his hands briefly, a war in his face, a man watching the enemy overrun his trench and choosing to stay anyway.
“Let’s take a walk,” he says.