Chapter 39 #2
“I don’t—” Tristan is struggling with this, I can hear it in his voice. “You didn’t make me have sex with her. I did it all on my own. I felt fucking awful about it.”
“Tristan,” I whisper, looking back. This is all so long ago, and yet the bitter self-hatred in his voice is enough to pollute the room, it’s still that strong.
Tristan ignores me, his eyes firm on Mark’s. “I violated my own ethics, my professionalism, my sense of loyalty, my own feelings for you. I did that.”
There’s pity in Mark’s face now. “But I knew you would, puppy. I set you up to fail in every way possible. I made sure you left for Ireland angry with me and hurt and betrayed too. I put you on a yacht for three weeks with a sad damsel full of secret sharp edges—catnip for my hero, my masochist. I filled that yacht with your favorite books, with dresses for Isolde and translucent swimsuits too, with chapels and martial arts studios and basketball courts. I pampered you with ridiculous meals. I had you move rooms next to each other. I told you over the phone to woo Isolde in my place. I watched those cameras every day and night, you know, the ones on the yacht, needing to see my plan succeed. I was in agony when it finally did.”
“But your shoulder,” Tristan protests weakly. “You couldn’t have planned to get stabbed…you couldn’t have planned for the stitches to rip after.”
But Tristan underestimates the resolve in Mark, the kind of resolve that can spend almost a decade with this kind of single-minded vengeance as its only animating force.
I stared into those ocean eyes in that abandoned church, and I saw the unshakeable, burning determination there.
The determination to fight for us, to die for us.
If ever a man were to get stabbed on purpose, it would be Mark.
“You are correct,” Mark allows. “I didn’t plan on getting stabbed. I was going to manufacture some kind of business that would mean I couldn’t go to Ireland, but when Drobny attacked the club, I saw a better chance, a stronger excuse. I took it.”
Tristan closes his eyes. “I’ve known since Samhain that you’ve been pretending to be bad at fighting, but it still hadn’t occurred to me…”
“That I would intentionally allow myself to be stabbed? It was one of my more adventurous ideas, I’ll grant you, and I knew I’d have to be careful if I wanted use of that shoulder later. But it healed too quickly anyway.” A heavy sigh.
“So you ripped open your own stitches.” Tristan opens his eyes. He looks horrified. “We thought you were moving furniture, ignoring your doctor, but you tore them open yourself. Mark, Jesus Christ.”
There’s a flash of fondness in Mark’s expression when Tristan speaks his first name. “Thank you,” Mark says, gratified, even though Tristan hadn’t actually complimented him. “I do consider that moment to be a high-water mark for me, at least as far as commitment to a goal goes.”
“I don’t understand.” My hands are on either side of the chessboard, my thumbs framing the bottom and my pointer fingers pressed against the sides.
They shake enough to rattle the pieces ever so slightly.
“You were so angry in Belgrade. You were livid , Mark, the kind of livid that can’t be faked.
You were hurt . How could you have been wounded when this was your miserable fucking plan all along? ”
He doesn’t answer for a long moment, his eyes on the fading sky outside.
When he does speak, his voice is tattered and low.
“I arranged for all this before I fell in love with Tristan. And it had been long enough since I’d seen you, Isolde, that I’d started to hope that I’d love you less this time.
That maybe what I felt for you had been overblown in my memory, and you didn’t really have such power over me. ”
A rueful smile.
“But then I did fall in love with Tristan. Then you came back, and it turned out what I felt for you before had only been a ghost of the real thing. Yes, this was my miserable fucking plan, for the two of you to fall in love, but I didn’t count on loving you two quite so much, you understand.
I have never, ever wanted two people to be so entirely mine, to the point that I sometimes can’t think straight for how much I crave you both.
I’d rather tear my own stitches open again than watch the two of you be together without me, and yet it’s my own doing. ”
I stare, lips parted.
Mark looks down at the chessboard, at the spot that’s still missing its queen.
“And I guess I’d hoped,” he says in a quiet voice, “that our vows would mean something somehow. Our promise to stay faithful to each other. That even though you and Tristan had fucked on the yacht, even though you pined for each other after our wedding, that you’d wait until our marriage had ended to take up with him again.
It hurt when you didn’t. I know that’s childish of me, but it’s the truth. ”
No one speaks then, with Mark’s honesty burning the air, his deceptions and his obsessions crackling and searing the very atoms between us.
Even this , I think distantly, a little hysterically.
Even this.
Loving Tristan, something I’d thought was my very own sin, my very own miracle, had been manufactured. Like everything else in my life—my mother’s death, my uncle’s role as mentor, my sainthood, my marriage—all of it might as well have been chiseled in stone by fate itself.
Is nothing in my life my own? Not even my secrets and mistakes? Will there never be someone I can point to and say They chose me. All on their own, they chose me, and I chose them back.
Can I really say I’m not alone when the two men I love are only with me by design?
I’m reeling from this, floating several queasy miles above my feet, as Mark leaves the apartment and then returns with something in his hands. A folder, expensive-looking, the front cover made of a matte black and the back cover of a glossy white.
I think—dizzily, strangely—of the sails of Theseus’s ship. Like my fate is folded between those two colors, and tragedy will follow if I pick the wrong one.
“You’ll find everything in order,” says Mark, handing me the folder.
I manage to let go of the chessboard and take it. When I flip it open, I see the words Petition for Dissolution of Marriage at the top.
I am really floating now. Uncomprehending. “Divorce papers,” I say numbly.
“Per our prenuptial agreement, you are retaining all Laurence assets and taking half of my liquid assets that aren’t tied to proprietary information owned by Lyonesse. Petitcrieu isn’t in here, but she is yours. She was a gift.”
Tristan steps forward. Stops. “Mr. Trevena…”
Mark looks at him. “I’m giving you both a choice, Tristan.
What I should have given you a long time ago: the freedom to walk away and the freedom to survive me.
Let’s tally up my lies, shall we? I’ve hidden that Tristan killed Eliot, that I wanted to kill Cashel, that I knew Isolde was a saint, that I planned to kill you both.
I knew and didn’t say, for however short a time, that Cashel had killed Isolde’s mother.
I put the two of you together like dolls, the seeking one and the lonely one, and made you fall in love, and then I punished you both for it.
In the last week, you’ve been shot at, attacked, kidnapped, and made to kill a pope.
” He nods down at the folder and papers in my hands.
“Isolde, divorcing me is the only logical option. But as a counterargument, I will offer this: every word I’ve spoken today is the absolute truth.
Loving the two of you is like tearing open my flesh, and I would pay any price to continue doing it for the rest of my life.
I love you and want you to be my wife. I love Tristan and want him to belong to both of us.
But because I love you, I’m telling you the rest of the truth, and it’s that I’m sorry for what I’ve done.
This is the plain black ink of my apology. ”
He leans down and presses his nose into my hair, and despite everything, my pulse leaps. Then he takes the folder out of my hands.
“I’m putting this on the desk of my office,” he says. “Lady Anguish is downstairs, and she’s been instructed to take you wherever you want to go if you want to leave. All you have to do is take the folder and walk out the front door.”
I tilt my face up to his to see his expression better, and he drops a hard kiss on my lips. I taste scotch and old blood.
“I love you,” he confesses. “More than anything. But I’m sorry. I can’t watch as you leave me a second time.” He steps over to Tristan and cups his hand around the back of Tristan’s neck. “Take care of her and yourself,” Mark says. “I love you more than anything, baby.”
Their kiss is softer than ours was but still intense, and Tristan is panting when Mark breaks it off and walks out to his office, presumably to leave the folder on his desk.
He doesn’t return.
And for the first time since I met him at the age of seventeen, Mark Trevena is as good as his word.
For the first time since I met him, I am free to leave.