Chapter 3
I wakeup struggling for air.
It’s the two priests in Seville, their eyes staring up at the moon as the Guadalquivir washed them away from the shore. It’s the surprised gasp of the billionaire in Gdańsk as I slipped my honeysuckle knife between his ribs. It’s the archbishop in Rome, coffee splattered on his cassock, his last words heavy in the Italian sunlight. You can’t.
But I could. I did.
And now I can’t breathe.
A shadow moves in my room, and a hand presses to my naked belly, warm and strong and big enough to splay across my entire stomach between my rucked-up tank top and my underwear.
“Breathe,” comes Tristan’s voice. “Honey, you need to breathe.”
Honey. The word is like honey itself—clear and golden and sweeter than anything. No one’s ever called me anything like that and meant it. Not since my mother died.
“Lift my hand,” Tristan urges quietly. “You can do it.”
I fight to inhale, my throat working, my chest like something hollowed out and filled with concrete. But there’s Tristan’s hand, the ring that Mark gave him cool against my stomach, the pressure of it so solid and sure, and suddenly I can do it, I can breathe. Air fills my lungs, and I choke a little around it, but Tristan just murmurs in approval, his eyes shining in the dark.
I inhale again, almost normally, and the nightmare is receding like a tide. Stealing away to hide until the inevitable gravity of night brings it back.
“Good,” Tristan says, and his voice is so lovely, a melody. A singer’s voice and not a soldier’s. “Good.”
“Thank you,” I whisper. He came into my cabin on the yacht last night too, even though we’d already ended things, and helped me just like he’s doing now. “You don’t have to do this. I managed to live with the nightmares for three years. I’ll have to do it for the rest of my life. I’ll be okay on my own.”
“I don’t want you to be on your own, though,” Tristan says, and there’s a world of pain in his voice. In the dark, I can’t read his face or follow his eyes, and so I don’t know if he’s looking at me or looking up at the ceiling, where just above us, my future husband sleeps.
Tristan still hasn’t lifted his hand from my stomach, even though I’m breathing just fine now, and I think I can feel every crease of his palm, every whorl of his fingertips on my skin. His hand is warm and a little rough. Lingering calluses from war, maybe.
And my body is singing, nerve endings flashing, as it recalls every single place that hand has been. Hard on my breast, spread over my backside. Inside me, inside me.
Clouds shift enough outside that I can see he’s looking down at where he’s touching me. His fingers twitch, and my belly quivers. A dark cloud blooms below my navel, lust and shame mixed, the kind of guilt that only feeds desire.
My own guilt is strange to me. I’ve accepted that with Mark, I must be Esther, Ruth, Tamar. That sex is the weapon I’m meant to use, a weapon for God’s will and therefore sanctified.
But sex with Tristan was never part of the plan—is dangerous to the plan—and is wrong on every single level.
“We’re not real in the dark,” I say in a whisper. Permission.
Tristan doesn’t say anything back, but I feel a shudder run through him.
How long has it been? A day? Two days? And already I’m starved to death, emaciated with greed. Craving Tristan like he’s what sustains my flesh and blood.
It can’t be that he’s the first person to learn my body inside and out—it can’t be that he’s gorgeous, that he’s strong, that he’s the kind of person anyone would want in their bed. And it can’t be love, it would be absurd for it to be love. I’ve only known him for three weeks.
But it is something. Familiarity, maybe, once I saw the torment he carried, the guilt and brokenness over the lives he’s taken. Or longing, possibly, for the goodness inside his heart, that bright, sweet, incorruptible core of him. Goodness he just seems to have, that he doesn’t have to reach for, atone to get, refine in a fire.
Or maybe it was that, from the very beginning, I knew he was Mark’s. Mark’s step-nephew, Mark’s bodyguard. When I’d learned he’d been Mark’s lover as well, it was a confirmation of a suspicion only barely felt in the hollow of my chest before then: Tristan was like me.
And if falling in love with Mark could happen to someone as good as Tristan Thomas, then maybe I’m not so broken after all.
Just as I take Tristan’s hand to push it farther down, we hear water running through the walls. Mark is awake.
Mark is upstairs, awake, doing things, and his bodyguard is here on my bed.
I hear Tristan’s ragged exhale. In the dark, I sense more than see him hang his head.
My skin is on fire with misery, but what can I say? What can I do? Beg him to keep touching me when Mark is up and moving around?
“I’m sorry,” Tristan mumbles, and there’s enough misery in his voice that I know that I’m not alone. That the minute he leaves, he’s going to touch himself like I’m going to touch myself, and we’ll both be hoping that will somehow make this lust of ours better, safer. Only half a sin instead of a whole one.
“Don’t be sorry,” I finally say. “We shouldn’t.”
“We have to be careful,” he says, and he looks at me. I can tell from the shine of his eyes in the dark.
“I know we have to be careful. I have more to lose than you.” I don’t speak the words with any bitterness—I gave all my bitterness to God years ago—but they come out so unvarnished, so starkly true, that I can tell it pains him to hear.
“I know you do,” he says quietly. “I stayed for you, remember? You’re why I’m here, and I’ll help in any way I can.”
The ache between my legs could collapse stars, but the rest of me is cooling and darkening. Turning to glass. I sit up.
“Thank you for staying,” I say, also quietly. When he’d told me on the yacht that he wanted to quit, that he didn’t feel like he could work for Mark after betraying his trust, I’d nearly shattered.
When I thought I’d have to do this all by myself, I’d been able to bear the idea of my future with all the stoicism of a martyr. But having had Tristan for just those few days at sea—it ate away at my strength and took it away with the tide. After the glow of his company, after being with someone who had also killed, who had also lost their mother, who had also lost themselves to Mark, it felt abruptly staggering to live without it. Without him.
How would I survive Mark without Tristan?
Tristan’s hand comes to rest over mine. “Anything for you,” he says, and he means it. I can hear that he means it. And I don’t deserve it.
I want to cry.
“I need to tell you, though, that I think Sedge knows,” he says. His voice is still soft enough to be a whisper. “Knows about what we did on the yacht, I mean.”
I process his words immediately, my mind whirring.
Sedge the assistant. Sedge who undoubtedly has Mark’s ear.
Sedge who looked at me with pale, suspicious eyes when he first met me on the dock this morning, his thin but pretty mouth set in a slight frown.
“Oh,” is all I say.
“There were cameras in the interior rooms of the yacht.” A long breath. “I’m so sorry, Isolde. I didn’t think to check for them. The security system the captain showed me was purely external.”
“Don’t be sorry. I didn’t check either.”
Stupidly. Foolishly. Why didn’t I check? Why didn’t I think of it? My uncle had drilled every care into me when it came to doing my job, and that included being caught on camera. But the rooms of a private yacht—I hadn’t even considered it. Because originally it was supposed to be Mark and me, and why would he need to have eyes on himself?
But it was an obvious oversight, one I shouldn’t have made. Mark had told me once that he’d played this game longer than me, with more dangerous people than me, and here is the perfect example of my inexperience knocking my own pieces off the board.
“Do you think Sedge has told Mark?” I ask.
“Mark is hard to read, so it’s impossible to say for certain—but I don’t think so.” Tristan squeezed my hand. “If I had to guess, I think Sedge suspects there’s something unusual about your marriage and is reluctant to embarrass himself by coming to Mark with something Mark won’t actually care about. But we should still be careful. Check our own rooms here for cameras. Assume Sedge is watching.”
I squeeze his hand back. I don’t want to let go. The simple touch is so reassuring, so anchoring, and it makes something protective flare in my chest. I want to keep him safe from Mark’s games. From my own. I want that goodness inside him to stay good, no matter how much I also want to eat it from its source.
I’ll have to be strong for the both of us.
“You’re right,” I say. “You should go. Tomorrow, we’ll search our rooms and we’ll be…better.”
He bends over, presses his forehead to the back of my hand. I allow myself one caress of his thick, silky hair and then lift my fingers away.
He exits with the heavy tread of a soldier, and I’m left with a loneliness so heavy and familiar that it feels like I’ve never known anything else in my life.