Chapter 4
“I thinkwe met at a place much like this.”
I don’t turn as Mark joins me at the glass railing of the rooftop terrace. It’s the night of the engagement party, and Mark and I are waiting for the first of our guests. Behind us, servers are loading trays with flutes of champagne and canapés, and a quartet in the corner is warming up. Mark is wearing a tuxedo—Zegna, I think—the double-breasted jacket fitted tightly to his waist, the creases of the trousers razor-sharp. His shoes shine like an oil spill.
“You know we did,” I murmur.
“You look stunning, by the way.”
He had a late meeting today, and so we arrived here separately, not seeing each other until now. In fact, I’ve barely seen him since the day I came home to Manhattan. I wake early, in the dark, and pray until it’s time to go to the dojo, where I train until it’s time to go to the antiquities firm I use as a cover for my real job for the Church. Mark’s had his own work, his own meetings, and Tristan’s split his time between us, escorting me to the dojo and to the office and then home again.
At night, Tristan and I stay in our own beds, although when I finally shake off the nightmares and make myself breathe again, I can hear the brush of Tristan’s hand flat against my door, like it’s taking everything he’s got not to come in and help me.
At no point has Mark indicated that he knows about what Tristan and I did on the yacht. Even Sedge ignores me when he sees me.
But no matter how I rationalize it to myself, no matter how much I remind myself that I didn’t do anything wrong, Sedge knowing about Tristan and me feels dangerous. Omen-like, even.
And all I can do is wait and hope Sedge chooses silence.
“Thank you,” I say now. I’m in a periwinkle chiffon dress with a high slit and a bodice that drops in a daring, if narrow, plunge to my sternum. The collar of the dress comes high around my neck and then billows behind me like a scarf or a cape down to the floor. The whole effect is fluttering, traditionally feminine, perfect for a Laurence bride.
But the glimpses of skin, the collar, all speak to being Mark’s bride.
I glance over at him and wish I hadn’t. His dark-gold hair is styled back from his face, making him look more debonair than usual, and he’s freshly shaven, meaning there’s nothing hiding the carved jaw and cheekbones. If Tristan looks like a Victorian painting, then Mark looks like a statue of a god, the kind that stares vengefully up at whatever unlucky archaeologist happens to uncover it.
I look away before he can catch my gaze. The last thing I need are those blue eyes while I’m trying to stay steady. While I’m steeling myself for the job to come.
“Tonight will be threading a needle,” I say. The guest list for the party is a mix of society types, politicians, and businesspeople—and several of those guests are also members of Lyonesse. We’ll need to show a traditional power couple to one group of guests and a kinky one to the other.
Not to mention that my fiancé is someone who got stabbed in his own club less than two months ago. I can’t forget that Mark’s world is a perilous one…and that he is the one who makes it perilous.
He turns so that his back is to the wall and he’s facing the terrace. His hand is in his pocket now, and he’s leaning back with his elbow propped on the railing. “Yes. But you’re good at that, are you not? Pretending different things to different people?”
My pulse gives a heavy, cortisol-laced rush, but I betray nothing, breathing the same, blinking the same. He means our marriage. He doesn’t mean that I’ve been pretending not to be an assassin for the Catholic Church for the past three years. He doesn’t mean that I’ve been pretending to accept this marriage for my father’s sake rather than for God’s.
He doesn’t mean that I’ve been pretending I don’t know what his bodyguard’s mouth feels like.
“I’m out of practice with the Lyonesse version of myself,” I say instead of answering him directly.
“I’ll guide you if you need it,” he says. “You remember our signals?”
I nod. A thumb running over his fingertips for good. A thumb in the middle of his palm for watch me. A thumb and forefinger pressed together for stop.
“There is one more thing,” he says, straightening off the railing and coming to stand behind me. I look back at him as he brushes a length of chiffon from my shoulder. His hand leaves warmth behind it, electricity, even in the heat of this summer evening.
I hear everything in acute detail just then, like the world has become sharper. The honk and roar of traffic below, the clatter of the servers behind us. The breeze, ever present up here, ever split and sundered by glass and steel.
My pulse is surging again, lashing at the inside of my veins, and then Mark drops his mouth to my skin. To my shoulder, to be precise. And I only have a moment to marvel at the first touch of his lips since that day on my father’s desk before pain blares through me, my nerves sparking, my breath catching.
He bit me.
I feel the swipe of his tongue at the precise moment the pain decants itself into something else, something that makes me feel clean and dirty all at once. I want more of it. I want to be plunged into the place where pain turns into freedom, where pain becomes a refining fire and a cleansing water, a baptism unlike any other.
“For my Lyonesse guests. If they know what to look for,” he says. He runs a thumb over the bite, and I shiver. “You’re so lovely when bitten.”
He smooths the chiffon back over my shoulder. Just like my leg through the slit, the bite will only be visible when I move or when the breeze is just right.
I have so much practice finding my center. When I’m tired, when I’m hurting. When God feels so far away that it’s like losing my mother all over again. But right now, with the impression of Mark’s teeth stamped onto my skin, I’m struggling.
It isn’t until I turn to see Tristan at the far edge of the terrace, his stricken gaze on Mark and me, that I remember the Isolde I was just a few seconds ago.
“Ah,” says Mark, looking at the elevator. “There’s the first of our guests now.”
* * *
A few hours later,the sun is gone, the stars are out, and I’ve found my footing once again as Isolde Laurence. Despite the devil occasionally at my side—and his wicked bite on my shoulder—this is a familiar dance. The rich, the powerful, partaking in the fruits of capital while music plays and champagne circulates.
I was born to be the perfect daughter in this world; my uncle, the cardinal, trained me to be the perfect spy. His little church mouse, gathering crumbs of gossip and scandal, of details both banal and salacious, to carry back to him. It wasn’t until I was in college that I fully appreciated what he did with this information, how he pieced it into a mosaic of the world. I’d known that he’d collected intelligence for the Church…but what use was intelligence if it wasn’t acted on?
And so it was—and is—my uncle’s job to act.
Or to have people like me, his saints, act for him.
I talk and smile and listen and automatically file away the kinds of details Uncle Mortimer is always interested in hearing. Who has new contracts in Colombia, who is hosting which congressperson for Labor Day weekend. Which divorcée has someone new on their arm.
After I excuse myself from a group of bankers—including my grimly satisfied father—to find a fresh glass of champagne, I hear Mark’s voice chased by a woman’s. Just around the corner of the covered elevator bank and barely audible over the din of the party.
I look around the corner and see that they’re alone, Mark with his customary glass of gin, his watch glinting in the dark, and the woman with her back to me. She’s tall and blond, wearing the kind of pantsuit that looks like it was worn to work earlier, although it’s still crisp and perfectly unwrinkled.
Melody, Mark’s twin sister.
I duck back behind the corner, but I can still hear when Melody says, “A mere missing person might not make the news, dear brother, but a body will.”
“I’m surprised a mere missing person didn’t make the news, given that it’s the director of the NSA.”
“President Moore wanted it kept quiet until we knew more, but now that a body’s been found, I don’t think it matters. By tomorrow everyone will know John Lackland is dead and that he died in Thailand months ago.”
“A shame.” Mark doesn’t sound sad about it.
A pause. “You were over there around that time.”
“Now, dear sister, I think you’ll find that I wasn’t in Thailand at all.”
Melody says something that makes Mark laugh, a dark, low laugh that sounds the furthest thing from innocent.
I look to make sure that no one is watching me eavesdrop and see that I’m well shrouded by potted plants and that the guests are preoccupied with themselves anyway. I creep a tiny bit closer.
“—a commercial flight,” she’s saying. “To Singapore and back.”
“I had business in Singapore. And I wasn’t alone. Tristan was with me.”
Tristan was there? I glance back at what I can see of the party, but I don’t see him. Last I saw, he was trapped in a corner with his father, and it looked more like a formal reprimanding than a casual father-and-son conversation.
I shouldn’t be surprised that Tristan was in Singapore with Mark. He’s Mark’s bodyguard—of course he was there too. The real question is if Mark had anything to do with the NSA director’s death.
I don’t catch what Melody says next, but Mark laughs again. “But when would I have made my way over to Thailand? I was at a very long dinner my first night and a well-known club on my second. I’d imagine there is plenty of security footage showing my comings and goings. Showing, for example, that I didn’t leave the hotel after I got back on either of those nights.”
“We both know there are ways to get around footage like that, Mark. Just like there are ways to charter unlogged flights to Thailand. And the third night of your stay?—”
“Has a rather memorable alibi,” Mark cuts in.
“Oh yes. All of Langley knows. Some poor hotel staff member walked in on a tryst with you and your bodyguard.”
“So there you have it. Even if there are ways to sneak out of a hotel unseen or to get to Thailand without anyone noticing, I wouldn’t have had the time to go there, come back, fuck my bodyguard, and then make my early flight. Or fuck my bodyguard, go to Thailand, murder a man, and then come back to Singapore in time for my flight. And how would I even know where Lackland was staying? He was notoriously paranoid about sharing that kind of thing, you know.”
“I do know. Just like I know that hotel employee only recalls that you were in the shower. Not that he saw you in the room.”
“You’d need more.” Mark’s voice is calm, teasing even. Like this is a game to him. “You’d need more than just opportunity, which is still looking pretty shaky to me, Melody. Where are my means? Where’s my motive?”
“Means are looking difficult to establish,” Melody admits. “Extended downtime in a subtropical climate will do that to a corpse.”
“How terrible. I hope it doesn’t slow the investigation down.”
“But motive,” Melody says softly, and I have to strain to hear her now, “you and I both know you have that in spades.”
“Very hard to prove. After all, Eliot’s death was a clear case of friendly fire. Tragic but understandable under the circumstances. No reason for someone to kill Eliot’s boss several years later.”
Eliot. I’ve never heard that name before. I log it away, along with his death as a potential motive for killing John Lackland.
“Mark.” It’s the first time I’ve heard Melody sound like a sister. Like she cares. “He was your husband. Don’t pretend like it doesn’t matter how he died.”
Husband.
But—but Mark has never been married. I’m sure of it. It was part of planning our wedding, and my uncle and his informants have given me everything they know about him. Which admittedly is little—Mark spent several years of his life as barely more than a ghost in a suit.
But still.
A husband we would have known about.
There’s a strange prick in my chest as I focus again on Mark and his twin, and I pretend I don’t feel it. It’s an anomaly. I’m not invested in whether Mark has been in love before or if he’s still grieving someone he lost.
If he doesn’t mind having a sham marriage with me because he’s already had a real one with someone else.
“I’ve never pretended that it doesn’t matter,” Mark says, and his voice is sharp enough to score glass.
“Then what is your game here?”
“Ys started the game. I’m only finishing it.”
Ys.My breath stills in my chest.
“And how will you know you’ve won? How many corpses will there be by the end?”
There’s a long silence and then the rattle of ice in Mark’s glass. “As many as it takes.”