Epilogue
Two Years Later
“You have to stay still, puppy, and show her how good you can be. Otherwise, we’ll have to stop, and wouldn’t that be a shame?”
Sweat-sheened muscles ripple as Tristan strains against his own urge to squirm. His eyes squeeze shut, open, shut again. Looking makes it worse, of course, but how can you not look?
I let my fingers drift over Isolde’s back, across her shoulders, toying with the delicate straps of her lingerie whenever I find them. I lean forward to murmur in her ear. “Lower the candle a little now. That’s right.”
Isolde tilts the candle in her hand, and pale pink paraffin splashes against the shimmering skin of Tristan’s stomach. The muscles bunch and tense as the wax rolls between the corrugations of his abdomen to streak toward his navel, cooling into waxy rivulets on the way there.
“The lower you go, the hotter it’ll be,” I purr, wrapping my hand around hers.
We’ve put the candle in a bamboo holder that ends in a kind of spout, meaning it’s easier to control where the wax goes.
I aim it just above where the tip of his swollen cock bobs above his stomach, a string of glistening precum stretched between the two. “Let’s try right…there…”
Tristan moans as the wax spills and burns, and he writhes on the table—not restrained, only commanded to restrain himself. Which is cruel of us, we know.
I’m pressed against Isolde’s back, and I can feel her slow, shuddering inhale as she watches him move beneath us, his erection lifting and seeking, his fingers twisting into the plastic draped over the table.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” I ask her as I nuzzle down to her ear. “Such a simple thing, and you’ve completely undone everything he prides himself on. His self-respect, his restraint, his need to be good for you… Let’s do another, a little higher this time. Let’s give him a moment to breathe.”
This time, Isolde makes a delicate arc of wax from Tristan’s ribs to the shallow valley where his pectoral muscles attach to his sternum.
He still pants through it, but he’s able to keep his eyes open this time, staring up at Isolde with flushed, desperate worship.
His pupils are so big that it’s hard to see the ring of green around them, and the sparkle of a tear or two is caught on his lashes.
His gaze slides to my face, and he starts trembling anew. “Please,” he whimpers. “Please.”
“Please what, baby?”
“You too,” he breathes. “I want you to do it too.”
“What do you think?” I ask my wife. “Should I play with him too? Do you think he can handle both of us?”
She turns against me, enough to look up into my face. She has her hair up tonight, with a few tendrils having escaped to hang against her neck and wave against her temples, and I can see every flicker of excitement, nervousness, and sweet, blossoming sadism move across her features.
“I think he can,” she murmurs and then drags her fingers up his oiled stomach, over the pink and blue patterns of wax we’ve already left streaked on his skin. “I think he wants to be good for both of us. Don’t you, Tristan? Don’t you want to earn a reward?”
As if this isn’t its own reward for our little wax tart, but Tristan nods eagerly anyway, lips parted and wet, as if we’ve extended the promise of clemency to a soul in purgatory. “Yes,” he begs. “I do, I do.”
I palm the half-covered globe of Isolde’s backside and kiss her shoulder. “Climb on the table,” I tell her, quietly enough that only she can hear me. “Straddle him and torture him a little while I get another candle ready.”
She dips her eyelashes once. “Yes, sir.”
I walk over to the far side of the playroom we’ve rented for the evening, a space in a sleek and glassy club in the heart of London, and squat down to pull supplies out of a well-stocked cabinet.
The minute my hand finds a fresh candle, déjà vu laps at my feet like an incoming tide: the foaming memory of playing with Tristan at Lyonesse, of my own stocked cabinets and plastic-covered tables.
It’s disorienting to feel a candle in my hand, to hear Tristan’s soft noises behind me, and then look up to see walls of frosted glass instead of wood paneling.
To have the space lit by recessed LEDs instead of hand-finished sconces spilling warm, golden light.
But Lyonesse is gone, burned from the bottom up by its own treasury, nothing but a shell now. A broken crown made of crumbled carbon and shards of glass.
When I woke up in the hospital three days after the fire with a broken rib, a newly repaired gallbladder, and a liver that would appreciate some time off, I knew the truth before anyone had to tell me.
I’d felt it even bleeding on the grass between Tristan and Isolde, listening to the sirens get closer.
Lyonesse was gone and, with it, eight years of myself, eight years of work and secrets and lies.
Let it burn , I’d wanted to say as the fire trucks wailed to a halt on the shore of the Potomac. Let it die.
I didn’t need it anymore, and neither did anyone else.
But as I lay in the hospital bed, my broken rib shrieking whenever I dared too deep a breath, Tristan and Isolde collapsed into rumbled, behoodied piles in the vinyl recliners nearby, I allowed myself a twinge of sadness.
I missed it already, my expensive sanctum, the wickedness and the sins and the sinners themselves.
It had been built as a tool, as a fortress to spit in the face of my enemy, but I had grown to love it for its own sake.
For the power and pleasure thrumming through its rooms, pulsing under the glass ceiling of its hall.
For Dinah and Goran and Nat and Andrea and Ms. Lim and Evander and Arjun and Christopher and—and Jago.
And Sedge.
One morning, after a final blood transfusion and me shooing Tristan and Isolde back to Blanche’s for a shower, Nimue came in wearing a flowing dress and her hair in two long braids.
Thin silver chains glinted from the braids, matching the small key hanging just below her collarbone and a necklace with a sword pendant just below that.
Looking at her in the daylight, you’d never recognize Lady Anguish, in her suits or sharp smiles.
Nimue sat in a recliner facing the bed, gave all my medical equipment a skimming glance, and asked, “So. Will you build it again?”
There could be no question as to what she meant. “You’re the full owner of the club, Nimue,” I answered tiredly. “The choice is yours, not mine.”
“Then I’ll leave it as a ruin and pocket the insurance money.” A pause. “How does that make you feel?”
I thought about it a moment and then closed my eyes. “Fucked up. Relieved. Lost.”
When I opened my eyes again, she was giving me a fond smile. “Lost is the best place to be found, Sea Hound. Especially for those two to find you.”
She wasn’t wrong.
Before she left, she pulled a slender yellow book from her pocket and set it in my lap. “It’s a good thing you put this in the safe,” she said, standing up. “It would have burned in the fire otherwise.”
It was hard explaining things to the staff, especially Dinah, who’d loved Lyonesse even more than I had.
I gave her everything I could, every contact I had, seed money, my blessing, for her to start her own club.
Goran and Nat would go with her, as would Ms. Lim.
Andrea had decided to step away from DC altogether, and after she leaked the florilegium to the press, she took a job at Armorica, something like what she did at Lyonesse but more like an actual treasurer this time.
Kayden wouldn’t have to look at his spreadsheets after all.
Not one of us mentioned Sedge when we spoke.
The bodies of Father Adam Wray and Veronica Ramos had been recovered from underneath the club, and Veronica had been taken home by her grieving sister, but no one had come to claim my assistant.
He had been so many people—Father Adam, Sedge, the Scales—but in the end, he had no one.
Any anger we might have felt for him was tarnished by pity and made brittle by the answers we’d never get.
The florilegium worked, however. By the time I was deemed well enough to be fussed over in a place that didn’t have whiteboards on the walls, the revelation that a number of notable people counted themselves members of a secret society whose ultimate aim seemed to be war and mayhem had rocked the news.
As had the concurrent revelation that the secret society was, in fact, quite made up.
Every single person who had joined Ys had joined thinking they were being inducted into a centuries-old consortium of power and intrigue, an edgier version of the Freemasons or the Illuminati, when in reality, they were joining a troupe of the easily fooled and ridiculously rich, anyone with enough access or enough money to turn Cashel’s stratagems into reality.
Ys had never been the mysterious, exclusive guild of the most special among us but instead the opus of a clever cleric who understood the allure of secrets and the finer touches of marketing.
It had been a Ponzi scheme, where the currency in question was influence and persuasion, and the payday was Mortimer Cashel in red shoes.
The press ate it up.
Embry finally had the leverage he needed to clean house, as did anyone who suddenly found themselves either above or adjacent to these self-important dipshits, and soon anyone who was in the florilegium was being fired, investigated, shunned, or all three.
It meant, among many other things, that Cara Sims was finally safe enough to leave the shelter I’d offered her. She went home to her mother, and after so many years apart, they finally made peace.
As for us, Tristan, Isolde, and I spent a single day at Blanche’s before I looked at the two of them and asked, “Have you ever seen Cornwall in March?”