Chapter 40
Forty
Mark
A clinically stupid amount of scotch is the next order of business, but I left the bottle in the apartment, and I don’t plan on returning anytime soon, so back to the hall I go.
I’m aware that I need a shower and clean clothes and above all to sleep , but sleep doesn’t feel like enough to numb the end of my marriage, numb the end of whatever I have with Tristan, because he’ll leave along with Isolde, of course he will, and?—
And I remember one last thing I need to do before I can curl up somewhere and embrace my self-inflicted misery. I see my final chore alone in the hall, standing at the balcony with her hands braced on the railing and her head bent, the others gone.
I come and stand next to my old ally. When I put my own hands on the railing, I see blood streaking my ring on the hand closest to hers. Andrea catches it immediately.
“Is that his?” Her whisper is almost reverent.
“It is.”
Her eyes linger over the dull rust of it, her lips parted. “Did you make him hurt?”
“I thought of every way I could flay him raw in the short window of time we had and all the ways I could keep him alive long enough to pluck out his right eye and cut off his right hand. I wondered if I could get creative and extremely literal with thirty pieces of silver.” I stare down at my hands a moment, flex them on the railing.
I would have enjoyed doing any of those things—or all of them—immensely.
“I gave his death to Isolde in the end. Of the three of us, he wronged her first and he wronged her the most, because he stole her future right along with her mother’s life. ”
“He stole all our futures,” Andrea counters. “Anything we were, anything we were going to be, it all stopped that night in Kraków, and we couldn’t do anything else but destroy him.”
“ We couldn’t, maybe,” I say, looking up at the hall itself, a cathedral of glass and concrete—a cathedral I built not for the glory of God but for the sweetness of revenge.
“You and I aren’t built to forgive and forget where others might have.
Others might have had futures with regular jobs and mortgages and healthy marriages.
But you were twenty-four when McKenzie and Eliot died, and I was twenty-eight—we were old enough to choose what we did next.
Isolde was a child when Cashel took her under his wing, and a child already prone to thinking love and pain were the same.
I know you don’t like her, Andrea, but at least believe me when I say that I sincerely thought she had the greater claim to his life. ”
Andrea sighs and looks out at the hall.
Her way of conceding the argument.
“It feels better than I’d hoped,” she says after a minute. “I see the news reports about the crash, the cardinals rushing back to Rome, all these obituaries, and I feel so good . I hated him so much, Mark. I hated him, I hated him, I hated him.”
Her words lift into the air like an offering, like a liturgy.
I let them linger awhile before I speak.
“All that’s left now is the Scales.” I’m a little surprised at the weariness I hear in my own voice.
All I’ve wanted for eight years is to destroy Ys, and the hard part is done now.
There is so little that remains, and yet .
Yet my appetite for revenge is changing. Shrinking. It’s like being brought a heaping plate of food after you’ve already eaten your fill.
“Ys is in disarray. So is the Church. The Scales won’t be hard to flush out.” Her voice carries through the empty air around us, full of energy and will. Her appetite for revenge is undiminished.
I’m envious of it—I wish I had anything burning inside me, anything at all, to distract me from missing Tristan and Isolde.
“Did Lox call you? I asked her to while I was in Nemi.”
“She did.” Andrea looks over at me with sharp, assessing eyes. “I don’t doubt her work, but it contradicts everything we’d thought about Ys. Everything we’d heard and from sources we trust too.”
“Cashel admitted it when he was dying,” I reply. “It’s true.”
She blows out a breath between thin but flawlessly painted lips. “It makes me feel a little gullible, actually.”
“That’s the genius of it. No one likes feeling gullible, so they don’t question it.
But everyone likes thinking they know something deep and secret, so they swallow it whole.
Cashel knew how to play us all, friends and foes alike.
” I push back from the railing with an exhausted breath.
I might have to skip the scotch and just go straight to sleep.
“And Isolde?” Andrea asks, not tentatively—she’s never been tentative about Isolde—but a little carefully. Perhaps out of respect for our fellowship, which has been steadfast, if mostly pragmatic at its core.
“I gave her the papers,” I say, and then I close my eyes against the sudden burn there.
Shit. I hate crying. Fuck.
“I’m sorry,” Andrea says a little awkwardly, as if she has to remember how sympathy works.
“You don’t have to pretend.” I still have my eyes closed, but it’s not helping. My throat has clamped shut, and I can’t breathe right.
How long has it been since I cried? And I’m going to do it here , in front of Andrea ? What the hell?
Andrea’s words are deliberately chosen. “I know it’s not her fault that she’s Cashel’s niece, just like I know it wasn’t actually Tristan’s fault that he couldn’t save McKenzie’s life.
I try to…remember that. That they are only tied to my tragedy, not responsible for it. ” She pauses. “Will you be okay?”
I huff a laugh. It’s short and strangled. “Does it matter? This was always the plan. Them together, me alone, whether I was still alive or not.”
When I dare to open my eyes, I see Andrea’s face turned back down to her hands on the railing.
Her hair is gathered in a sleek ponytail, exposing her troubled profile, the sudden sparkle of tears on her lashes.
The shift is so abrupt that I can’t actually account for it, even after knowing her for eight years.
“I didn’t mean to infect you with my romantic despair,” I say as I swipe at my cheeks with the heel of my hand. I really have to get out of here. “I’ll be fine, Andrea.”
It’s a lie. I don’t think I’ll ever be close to fine again, but it doesn’t matter. She barely hears me.
“Sorry,” she says thickly, turning her head away.
“It just hit me that we’ve done it, we’ve killed him.
And this is what’s left. Finding the Scales.
Being alone. They say revenge won’t bring someone back, and I knew that…
but maybe I didn’t realize that I was filling the hole McKenzie left behind with punishing the people responsible.
And I never liked Isolde or Tristan, but I did like seeing you happy.
It made me think that maybe one day I could be?—”
She doesn’t finish her sentence. She doesn’t have to.
I put my hand over hers on the railing. The dried blood on my ring stubbornly refuses to reflect any light, polluting the gleaming bands of silver on either side of the black.
“Live now, Andrea,” I say. “Don’t let Cashel take any more of your future.
If we wait on justice for happiness, we’ll never smile again. ”
And then I leave her to her tears so that I can finally go spill my own.
I don’t sleep, even though I should.
I go to the garden, to Isolde’s favorite spot by the cherry tree, and I sit under its bare branches while the outdoor heaters glow nearby and stave off the worst of the chill.
I can’t seem to stop crying—the kind of rib-jerking, breath-stealing crying that fizzes my vision with static, that makes thinking impossible—and there is a shaking deep in my body, like my bones are trying to wrench themselves free.
Isolde is right to believe love is the same as pain, because this fucking hurts .
It hurts like nothing has ever hurt—no injury, no other loss, not even walking away from Eliot’s grave with only his watch on my wrist.
It hurts like a broken sternum with every shuddering breath; it hurts like blistered skin with every exchanged molecule of oxygen in my capillaries.
My nerves are exposed to the open air, my organs are in a glistening pile at my feet, and my brain tears and rips at itself, gnawing on every memory of starlight hair and green eyes, of chess matches and hymns sung in a haunting tenor.
If I could bury myself alive with my bare hands, I would, but what would it fucking matter when I already have ?
I buried myself with my own fury, my own stubborn pain, and I might have carved a cancer from the world, I might have made it a safer and better place with Cashel’s death, but I cut myself apart to do it.
I cut other people apart. I took a saw to any chance of happiness and didn’t stop even when I got to gristle and bone.
I always wanted to be the one burying the embers at dawn. I should have known that the last embers I buried would be my own.
I have no idea how much time has passed—have had no grasp on time since the saints took Eliot’s watch off my wrist—when I hear footsteps on stone.
Short strides, a softer footfall. My shredded heart jumps, barely, weakly, and my lungs refuse to inflate when I see the garden lights glint off golden hair.
Hope—it’s a fire, a knife, it’s soil in my mouth. The last red kiss of a funeral pyre in the dark.
But the glinting is more copper than gold—and of course, the footsteps I want most I would never actually hear. Isolde never makes noise unless she wants to.
It’s Isabella Beroul coming toward me now, wrapped in a soft, camel-colored coat, her hair loose around her shoulders. She’s wearing red gloves with the white line of nitrile just barely visible above each wrist.
I’m not enjoying this habit I’m making of crying in front of people whom I’m not particularly close to—my club treasurer and now Isabella—but I don’t think I could disguise what I’ve been doing even if I tried.