Chapter 42
Forty-Two
Mark
“Ah, the great Mark Trevena, laid low by love.”
I look up from the folder of reports that I’ve been unable to focus on to see Nimue come through the door of my office.
She’s been working downstairs in her own office whenever she comes in, which has been less and less now that I’m back, though I’ve insisted she keep full ownership of the club.
Even with Embry and his stepsister, Vice President Morgan Leffey, quietly squashing the FBI’s interest in me, I think it’s safer if I remain hidden for now. Organizationally at least.
“I don’t look that bad,” I say, but the protest is half-hearted. I look like shit and everyone knows it. Side effect of my fun new hobby of crying in the dark—and my other new hobbies: not eating or sleeping.
The only times I even get close to sleep are when I can wrap myself around Tristan like a vine and allow the steady beat of his heart to soothe my own.
“How is the florilegium coming?” she asks as she sits down in the chair across from my desk. Outside, the morning sun is bright and cheerful, apparently having forgotten that it’s February in the Mid-Atlantic. It catches the odd silver strand in her dark hair.
I flip the folder closed. “We’re almost ready. Next week, I think; Andrea is still working on the mechanism of the leak. We want to make sure nothing can be traced back to the club or our members.”
“Good. And don’t forget to rest afterward,” she admonishes. “Also, I brought you something.”
“I love gifts,” I say tiredly. Petitcrieu, finally repatriated from Manhattan, snuffles in sleepy agreement from her bed under my desk.
She also has a bed by the window, two beds in the apartment, and a bed by the front desk downstairs, as she’s taken to following Ms. Lim around the club, drawn away from my side by the sound of clinking keys.
She has approximately a hundred and seventeen toys littered between here and the garden, because I can’t seem to stop buying them.
Nimue leans forward and sets something on my desk. A slim book bound in yellow leather, with a title in peeling gold letters debossed on the front. The Tragicall Story of Tristram and Iseult of Lyonesse .
“I thought you’d find this edifying,” says my business partner.
A small needle of amusement manages to pierce the gray haze surrounding me these past two weeks. “My mother’s family was Cornish. I’m very aware of the legends we share our names with.”
“Quite,” Nimue says. She looks like she’s fighting back a smile.
I open the front cover and see hand-painted endpapers.
Hazel and honeysuckle, a delicate pattern repeated over and over, bright green and pale pink.
I run my fingertips over one of the honeysuckle petals, feeling the negligible ridge of the paint.
Something hums through my fingers, almost like electricity, almost like sound, but not quite either.
My imagination more likely than not. My dreams these days are strange.
“I’ll give it a read sometime,” I say diplomatically.
“Good.” She seems almost on the verge of laughter now.
“What?”
She gives me a look like you know what , but I genuinely don’t.
“You were like this before too,” she finally explains.
“Before what?” When she doesn’t answer, I say as I push away from the desk and stand, “You’ve been with your husband too long. You’re speaking in riddles.”
“That’s a little rich coming from the man who engraved quarto optio on the inside of his lovers’ rings,” she croons.
I study her a moment with narrowed eyes. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that Tristan or Isolde told her about the engravings, but it’s also not incredibly likely.
She’s clearly enjoying herself now. “But what can it mean? What is this mysterious fourth option?”
I continue to look at her. Mistrustfully.
“When diplomacy or war won’t do, the president turns to the third option: covert action.
But what does Mark Trevena turn to? What does he do when the third option leaves him with a husband to bury and no hope of making amends with the dead?
” A smile spreads across her face, fine lines bracketing her mouth.
Her eyes sparkle with mischief. “Oh, I know. He decides to burn it all down.”
“To the ground,” I confirm, but my eyes are slitted now. I haven’t told anyone but Melody what quarto optio means to me. “And how do you know this again?”
Her brows lift in a picture of angelic benevolence. “I’m a good friend, Mark. That’s how I know things. And that’s also how I know this: you’re absolutely right. You should burn it all to the ground. Today, if possible.”
I gesture to the folder in front of me, the latest from Lox and Andrea about the Scales and their possible whereabouts. “That’s what I’m trying to do.”
“Great,” she says brightly and gets to her feet. “I hope you enjoy the book. It’s expensive, though, the only known edition in the world. I’d keep it in the safe for now.”
She takes a few steps toward the door, and then she looks back at me. “You know, when I told you that good rulers were merciful, I never meant that mercy only flowed one way. You deserve mercy too.”
“Me. Mark Trevena. Deserve mercy.” I stare at her.
“Yes,” she says.
She’s wrong. I shake my head, ready to argue, but she holds up a hand.
“Consider that I’m right. Consider that you’ll never be able to temper power with mercy if you don’t know how it feels to receive it. If you don’t humble yourself enough to receive it.”
I make a dry, broken noise that’s supposed to be a laugh as I wave at myself. “You don’t consider this humbled?”
A look that could etch steel. “A humble person doesn’t reject what fate has given them.”
“I don’t believe in fate,” I say, but now she’s leaving my office, like I haven’t spoken at all, like anything else I’d have to say is completely irrelevant. She really has been around Merlin too long.
After my office door swings closed, I lean down to stroke Petitcrieu’s ears, and she rouses enough to dozily lick my hand.
This morning, she came to lie next to Tristan on the bed, and I was able to pet her while holding him at the same time.
It wasn’t peace or happiness, but for a moment, it was the absence of pain. Relief from it.
My phone rings, and I pick it up.
“Sir,” Sedge says, “Ms. Lim has offered to take Petitcrieu to the vet for you today since the club is closed to guests. Would you like to bring her down?”
Right. The vet appointment. For the dog I got Isolde, which is now my dog, because Isolde’s no longer in my life, and she didn’t take Petitcrieu with her when she left.
As if she senses I’m thinking of my wife, Petitcrieu lifts her head from her paws to lick my hand again.
I caress her fur, thinking of how happy Isolde was when I’d brought the puppy upstairs on Christmas.
I think of her smiles, her laughter, such rare gems, whenever Petitcrieu pranced or tumbled over or licked her face.
“Thank you,” I tell the puppy, scratching behind her ears now. If nothing else, I have more of Isolde’s smiles to remember than I would have otherwise. Petitcrieu looks up at me with giant, liquid eyes and then tries to help me scratch behind her ear with a clumsy, oversized paw.
I get her collared and leashed, and before we leave my office, I stick the old book in the safe. And then I walk Petitcrieu down to the lobby, where Ms. Lim greets her with coos of praise and belly rubs.
“Thank you for taking her,” I say.
“I’m happy to, and I think you’re needed in the treasury anyway,” she says, not bothering to look at me while she ruffles the puppy’s fur. “Andrea sent me a message saying she couldn’t get ahold of you? She’s having trouble with the door.”
I glance at my phone. I haven’t missed anything from her, but the signal from the basement is notoriously terrible, so that doesn’t mean much. “I’ll go check it out. Have you seen Tristan, by the way? I haven’t seen him since this morning when he was going on a run.”
Ms. Lim shakes her head as she stands and takes the leash’s handle from me. “I got here not too long ago, so I probably missed him coming in.”
“Right.” There are any number of places he could be, and it’s only been a few hours since we woke up together, but I already miss him. Like someone has grabbed something vital from behind my ribs and walked away with it.
He doesn’t seem to mind, but I’m aware that I’m exploiting him rather shamelessly, venting my sadness and longing on his body.
He’s dotted with love bites from the neck down; bruise- colored stripes decorate his skin from his hips to his knees.
I can’t go very long without touching him, kissing him, pinning him down and feeling his skin against mine, exchanging inhales and exhales and proving to myself over and over again that he is here , he is here .
He misses her too. He understands. There is no cure, only a treatment that keeps death at bay, and the treatment takes several doses a day to be anywhere close to effective.
See, Nimue? I’m accepting one gift from fate at least.
I give Petitcrieu a final scratch behind the ears before Ms. Lim takes her out the front door to where our new driver waits.
There’s a fist somewhere below my throat that squeezes and gradually releases as I watch the new driver help Ms. Lim into the car.
I’d missed Jago’s funeral while being smuggled back into the United States, and I wish…
I wish so many things. That he’d been spared meeting me, that I’d never asked him to come work at Lyonesse.
That he hadn’t been so good at his job, that I’d known the church in Albany would turn into an ambush.
More debts to lay at the dead’s feet—bills that can never be paid now.