Chapter 2
I stareat my unzipped suitcase, my entire body itching to leave this room and find the two people outside it.
I took the job as Mark’s bodyguard this spring hoping for a distraction—or whatever existed between distraction and pinning all of my time, movements, and decisions onto someone else’s—because it turned out that leaving the army had not fixed the ache that came with having killed my best friend.
I had not expected to fall in love with my employer. I had not expected to fall in love with his future wife.
And now I’m in love with two people—two people who are about to marry each other.
We’d arrived at Mark’s Central Park–facing penthouse a few minutes ago in a cloud of silence. Easy silence, on Mark’s part. He seemed pleased to have Isolde with him, and whenever his eyes met mine, I saw the banked heat there that never failed to steal my breath…a legacy of those heady weeks when I’d been his, fully and completely, until I’d learned that he’d never been mine in return.
But the silence hadn’t been easy between Isolde and me. It had been sticky, hot as fresh tar. We made sure that our eyes didn’t meet; I made sure that my gaze stayed on the world outside Mark’s Mercedes-Maybach. But God, how I wanted to look at her. At her delicate nose and her stubborn chin and her eyes the color of dark turquoise. At those adorable freckles and at that mouth, lush and curved with an unusually shallow notch on her upper lip.
At sea, I had kissed that mouth so much that I had the feel of it memorized, the taste. And yet I couldn’t look… If I looked, Mark would see everything in my face.
And the fourth occupant in the car would also see everything in my face. The fourth occupant who knew about Isolde and me.
Maybe. Maybe he knew.
Probably.
Sedge, the quiet assistant who kept Mark’s days productive and ordered, had told me that the yacht—the same yacht where Isolde and I had lost all self-control with each other—had cameras.
Cameras.
Fuck. Why hadn’t I thought of that? Lyonesse, Mark’s kink club, had cameras inside for the safety of its guests and employees. But I’d assumed his yacht would be like his apartment or Morois House in Cornwall. A residence, a private space, away from every concern…
My assumption had been a na?ve one, and now someone knew about Isolde and me. And if Sedge knew, then surely Mark knew. Right? Surely loyal Sedge wouldn’t have kept a secret like that, especially when I suspected that Sedge was also in love with Mark in his own wary way.
Except Mark hadn’t acted like someone who knew that his bodyguard had spent eleven days railing his fiancée. After we dropped Sedge at the hotel where the rest of the Lyonesse staff would be staying while here in Manhattan, we’d arrived at the penthouse, and Mark put Isolde and me on one floor together, next to each other. While he would keep his usual bedroom upstairs.
Whether this was some nod to bridal propriety or an acknowledgment of the transactional, public-only nature of their relationship, I didn’t know. It had disconcerted Isolde, though, and her lip had stayed trapped between her teeth while she’d watched me carry her suitcase into her new room. It had been the single time our eyes had met since before we’d left the yacht.
Mark couldn’t possibly know. Despite Sedge knowing, despite the way he’d said much to discuss, on the dock.
But then what else had he meant?
I’m still trying to squeeze a feeling of certainty out of this latest turn of affairs when I hear a knock on the frame of my door.
I turn to see Mark, his blue suit still smooth and crisp, even though it’s now the afternoon and he’s been in the summer wind and Manhattan traffic.
“Tristan,” he says, and my name in his voice lifts goose bumps along my arms. I’m grateful he can’t see them underneath my own suit. “Come here for a minute. I want to make sure we’re all on the same page.”
The certainty vanishes, and panic rushes in, cold and tingling. My lips are buzzing as I nod and follow him out to the main living area of the penthouse, feeling like I’m on a patrol run in Carpathia and not in a crisply minimalist space overlooking Central Park.
Isolde is standing by the window, her hair the color of gleaming bone and soft as silk around her face as she stares down at the park. She’s wearing all white today, a bodysuit and trousers, already looking like a bride. The white makes her glow.
Mark takes a seat on a low leather sofa, stretching his arm along the back. There’s a glass of gin on the rocks on the table in front of him.
I heroically ignore the pert curves of Isolde’s breasts in her bodysuit and the way Mark’s suit trousers pull over the hard muscles of his thighs. I keep my face on his as I stand next to the sofa, my hands tucked neatly behind my back.
Does Mark look like he knows? Is that anger simmering in his eyes as he looks between Isolde and me?
I’ll take the blame. It was my fault anyway, what happened on the yacht. If I’d only stayed away from her, had more control. Found a way not to kiss her tear-salted lips, not to taste the wet place between her thighs.
If only I’d been stronger—but God, how could I have been? Isolde Laurence under a dark sky, spattered with sea spray, splintered and humiliated by the same man who’d splintered and humiliated me.
Isolde Laurence, who knew how wonderful it felt when the splintering came from a man like Mark Trevena.
If Isolde is worried that Mark knows, that this is the beginning of everything unraveling, she doesn’t show it. Her back is straight, her arms crossed, and her hands cupped elegantly over each elbow. In profile, she is graceful and aloof. It’s easy to forget that she wields a knife like it’s as natural as breathing. That she wakes up in the middle of the night with choked screams in her throat.
“So,” Mark says, his gaze moving to me and then Isolde again. I wish I could read his face, his eyes. I wish I knew what to brace for. “The engagement party is this weekend, and it must be a success.”
It is so far from what I expected him to say that I nearly buckle to the floor. There’s no way, no way at all that I could be this lucky.
“Of course,” continues Mark, “the party is to celebrate our coming union, and as long as you’re happy with it, Isolde, then I’ll consider it a success. So everything else is of little?—”
“Tristan knows,” Isolde interrupts, finally turning toward us. The ruby engagement ring winks on her hand, sending red beams dancing across the room. “I told him the truth.”
Mark’s fingers lift once from the back of the sofa and then settle. His head turns, but not all the way, before he says, “Is that so?”
Isolde’s gaze is steady. “I was surprised you hadn’t told him yourself, actually. He’ll be with us constantly. Did you think he wouldn’t see that we weren’t a love match? That this whole charade is engineered to benefit you and my family?”
“We must be careful, my bride,” Mark says. “The more people who know, the more danger the charade is in.”
Isolde doesn’t move, doesn’t blink. Doesn’t react at all.
Finally, Mark relaxes. “I agree with you that eventually Tristan would have figured it out. And you are good at keeping secrets, aren’t you, Tristan?”
He doesn’t look over at me as he speaks, which is a very good thing because I’m keeping more secrets than I’d like to right now and I’m worried every single one of them is visible in my face.
“Yes, sir,” I manage.
“Well, then. We’re settled.” He leans forward to get his glass and then sets it to his lips, his eyes on Isolde as he drinks, like he’s not finished studying her.
For her part, she doesn’t look away.
I glance to the hot city outside the glass. It hurts to look at the two of them right now. I miss them both. I want them both.
“So Tristan,” Mark says, now looking down at the drink cradled in his hand, “you should know that this party is the beginning of Isolde and me as a public couple. We’ve had something of a debut at Lyonesse, years ago, but this is our inauguration into certain circles of society. I’m sure you’re aware, via Goran, about how tight I’ll need security to be—we have several high-profile guests coming. And undoubtedly, Isolde and I will need to circulate separately, and I want your eyes on Isolde when mine can’t be.”
My eyes are on Isolde far too much as it is, but I manage to sound professional when I say, “Of course, sir.”
“Wonderful,” says Mark, and then he smiles at his gin. “It is lovely to have you together. My bodyguard and my bride. My two pretty things.”
He doesn’t touch us, doesn’t lift a finger, and yet I think I might bruise anyway. Broken blood vessels across my chest, hairline fractures along my ribs. He doesn’t know how together Isolde and I have been, and the shame of it is going to kill me.
But he might know how she and I still ache to be his pretty things, no matter how he’s hurt us, lied to us, used us.
And the shame of that will definitely kill me.
For her part, Isolde steps away from the window. “I’ll be in my room,” she says. “Just so you’re aware, I go back to work tomorrow.”
Mark takes a drink, still smiling. “Me too,” he says.
* * *
That evening,after I leave the penthouse to meet with Goran in his hotel room about the engagement party and security, I detour into Central Park to make a private phone call.
My fingers shake as I dial the unfamiliar number. It had been emailed to me by Ms. Lim, Lyonesse’s concierge, while I was on the yacht with Isolde. Someone had come to Lyonesse looking for me. Someone who had every right to hunt me down and demand my time.
I took a breath and pressed send. Anything for the sister of the man I killed.
The phone rings and rings and rings, and I’m a fucking coward because the longer it takes for her to pick up the phone, the more relief swells in my stomach. I owe the family of Aaron Sims a debt I can’t repay, and the debt feels tenfold because I know them, because I’m known to them, because Aaron loved me and I loved him and I still killed him. That it was necessary and inevitable does nothing to requite what I owe.
A call is the least of what I can do, but I’m practically panting in relief as I drop the phone and prepare to end the call. My excoriation is delayed for now?—
“Hello?” comes a woman’s voice. “Hello?”
Shit. I lift the phone, mouth dry. “Hello,” I say. “It’s—this is Tristan. Tristan Thomas.”
There’s a silence on the other end, and I think she must be readying everything she wants to tell me. She’s unfolding handwritten notes detailing all the ways she hates me, she’s gathering her breath for a litany of curses.
And then she says, “Oh, Tristan, thank God.”
I’m standing still in the middle of a path, staring at nothing, her words not making any sense. “Chloe, I?—”
“It’s Cara,” she says quickly. “And we need to meet.”
Cara? Even before he’d died, Cara wasn’t much a part of Sims’s life. There’d been a bad boyfriend—and then a string of bad boyfriends—and then she’d skipped from town to town, running just ahead of a job gone wrong or a shitty ex. That Cara has emerged from the vortex of her life to find me is as odd as it is worrying.
“Of course,” I say. I’m walking again now, close to the edge of the park and looking at Mark’s high-rise across the street, at the people milling along the sidewalk in front of it—people texting or arguing or stopping to tie their shoelaces. Funny how the world keeps moving even when you find yourself stuck in place. “Where are you? If you need a place, you can stay with me?—”
“I’m okay for now,” she says, “but I have to go. I’ll call you at the number you called me from when I can again. Okay?”
“Okay, but?—”
There’s silence, followed by a beep in my ear. Cara’s gone.
I look down at the screen and then across the street at the high-rise again, my mind a mess of memories and everything I should have said to the sister of Aaron Sims. But my vision clears, and I see someone kneeling to tie their shoe in front of the building.
The same person I saw just a moment ago doing the same thing.
He looks away from his shoe and at the front door, just for a beat. Glass glints in the evening light—a phone—and then he’s standing up and sliding the phone into his pocket. I think he just took a picture of the entrance.
By the time I get across the street, he’s too far away to pursue.
I call Goran on my way up to the penthouse.
“I’ve never been with Mark here in Manhattan. Does he have external security feeds on the penthouse?” I ask by way of greeting. I’m a little ashamed because this is something I should know, something I would normally have committed to memory if I hadn’t spent the last three weeks daydreaming about my boss’s fiancée.
“Sure, kid,” Goran says easily. “Not that we’ve ever needed them. I’ll make sure you have access through the security portal on your laptop. Anything I should be worried about?”
I tell him about what I saw as I step into the penthouse and go straight to my room to find my work laptop. And yes—there they are, a handful of feeds nestled under the building’s address on our security portal. All of them are watermarked with the name of the building’s private security firm, so God only knows what kind of bribery—or worse—Mark employed to get access to them.
I click back on the recording until I find what I’m looking for: a glimpse of the picture taker’s face. Short hair the color of used dishwater, a tattoo on one side of his neck. Flat features like partially rolled-out dough. The screen grab is not as high-quality as I’d like, but it’s enough. I send it to Goran.
“There are roughly a hundred and twenty condominiums inside Mark’s building,” Goran points out as I’m doing this. “It’s very possible that he’s creeping on a different resident.”
“Still. Do you mind passing it around to the team?”
“Not in the least. And we’ll run it too, see if we can find any matches in law enforcement databases, although it usually takes us a bit to get the international hits. Might have to have Mark’s pet hacker Lox on that one. Either way, you can rest easy as long as you’re up in Mark’s little nest. He owns the unit beneath his floor and keeps it empty, and the floor above him is one of those mechanical fake floors. No one’s coming from above or below—or through the front door, for that matter.”
I believe Goran, but I still don’t like it. Ever since the attack on Lyonesse, I’ve been acutely aware of how quickly everything can unravel, and there’s more than just Mark to protect now. There’s Isolde too.
I hang up and shower, and then I do my best to set it aside. Years of combat have taught me not to ignore my instincts; years of sleepless nights between skirmishes and engagements have also taught me not to hyperfixate until I know something to be a threat.
But I still don’t like it, and between that and my abbreviated phone call with Cara, it’s a very long time before I fall asleep.