Chapter 7
A week later,I’m standing on a pedestal looking into a mirror. Three identical Isoldes look back at me.
They have fair skin sun-kissed into a pale gold and turquoise eyes; they have thick blond hair hastily pinned up into three identical messy buns. Their dresses are long and full, classic ball gowns, with long sleeves and sweetheart necklines. The gowns are made of Chantilly lace—magnolia white—laid over silk that looks white at first glance but is actually a pale, pale pink. The lace is unlined over their arms and shoulders, and if the brides turned around, their gowns would have identical open backs.
On their left shoulder blades would be a smudge of mottled green, the fading mark of their groom’s teeth.
I blink and look down at the two tailors kneeling at the base of the pedestal, murmuring in worried tones over a portion of the hem. The director of sales stands behind them with a sharp line between his brows and his knuckle pressed to his mouth while my wedding planner is pacing behind me, her phone pressed to her ear, dealing with some sort of errant catering situation.
“It’s a beautiful dress,” offers my best friend, Bryn Flores-King, from behind me. I give her a small smile in the mirror. She’s taken a long lunch from the Wall Street firm she’s interning with, and so she’s in her office clothes: a crisp emerald pantsuit with black pointed Louboutins. Her dark hair is in a loose braid over her shoulder, and her camisole drapes just below her collarbone, exposing the bronze arch of her throat.
I kissed that throat once. On a dare at a party I’d attended in high school, one of the few times I’d paused studying and training long enough to do something for fun. We didn’t kiss on the lips or anywhere else, but she had given a surprised oh when I’d sucked on the skin just under her jaw.
I remembered pulling back with hot cheeks and a restless swirl in my hips.
It won’t matter when I’m a nun, I’d told myself about that swirl, about the way my mouth had watered for more.
But now I won’t be a nun, now everything about sex and sin has changed, and I have to wonder if I’d believed different things about sin, about whom my mouth was allowed to water for when I was younger, what could have happened? Not even necessarily between me and Bryn, but between me and anyone? Would I still be wearing a wedding dress now, readying myself to marry a former killer who got off on people crawling to him? Would I still be restless at night, knowing his tortured bodyguard was just on the other side of the wall, hard and aching for me?
Maybe not.
Or maybe it doesn’t matter. I’m here now, and I’ve come to see that my mouth waters for everyone—and just as well, if I’m called to be Esther and Ruth and Rahab all at once.
But it’s hard not to wonder about what could have been different. About what couldbe different.
“So sorry about this hem,” one of the tailors offers from below me. “It’s a bit too long, and the lace scallops might catch on the floor when you walk. Unfortunately, it’s hard to fix without taking the bottom half of the dress apart.”
“What if she wore taller shoes?” asks a voice from the doorway of the fitting area.
Shock fills the space—the director of sales steps forward—Bryn stands—but I stay still, not turning and instead meeting Mark’s dark-blue eyes in the mirror.
It’s unthinkably taboo for the groom to be here at a wedding dress fitting, but Mark himself is unthinkably taboo. He probably walks under every ladder he sees and breaks mirrors on purpose.
I hold up a hand when I see our wedding planner walking toward him. “It’s okay,” I say. Both she and Bryn still look ready to escort Mark right out the door, no matter that he has nearly a hundred pounds of muscle on them and an employment history involving duct tape and tarps.
Mark for his part seems indifferent to their reactions; his eyes are only on mine in the mirror’s reflection. He’s dressed as sharply as ever—immaculate suit, large wristwatch. His hair doesn’t have a single strand out of place, and it makes the once-broken nose and white scar along his hairline look even more dangerous.
He’s carrying a pair of shoes in his hand.
I’m not shallow. I’ve grown up in a bower of wealth, I spend every day handling antiquities with incalculable value now, and I’m jaded by it all. When I look at myself in my princess clothes, my tailored dresses and heels and understated jewelry, I see Isolde Laurence, not myself. Myself, I only see in oil-slicked puddles, in the reflection of my knife in the dark.
But I can’t look away from the shoes Mark’s brought me.
They’re a blue so delicate that they’re almost silver—the London sky on a cold winter’s day. Slender vines wrought in gold twist over the vamp and along the sides, and they crawl up the gold stiletto heel to open into leaves and blossoms. I recognize the furled petals and seeking stamens immediately.
“Honeysuckle,” I say. I find his gaze to see that he’s staring at my dress. At the custom Chantilly lace that I commissioned.
“Honeysuckle,” he says, looking at the pattern tatted into the lace. And then he meets my eyes.
“I heard it was good luck,” I say.
The corner of his mouth curls the smallest amount. “Now who would say a superstitious thing like that? May I?”
I nod, and the tailors move out of the way as he approaches the pedestal. Bryn stays standing and is giving me an apologetic look. I realize why when he says, “I hope you don’t mind the intrusion, but I asked your maid of honor if you had anything blue yet, and she said no. I commissioned these as a wedding gift, but then it occurred to me that you’d need to make sure the dress was tailored correctly for them.”
As he’s talking, he’s kneeling in front of me, as smoothly as anything, his suit trousers pulling tight across his thighs and the toe box of an expensive Italian shoe rubbing carelessly against the floor. I see that the sole is scuffed badly, with small rocks embedded in the leather, a small detail utterly at odds with the rest of his careful appearance.
I’m not studying the sole of his shoe very long because Mark is lifting the hem of my dress, and the sight of it—him on a knee, his eyes on where he’s pushing up my dress—I could be a Victorian for how abruptly erotic it feels. But I don’t feel powerful, oh no, even though I should as his long fingers find my ankle and draw my foot forward. He’s the one kneeling, the one flexing my heel just so to work the white-satin pump I’d planned on wearing off my foot.
But when he looks up at me, I somehow feel dizzyingly small, lost in the midnight abyss of his stare.
His hands are expert and unhesitating as he replaces my shoe with the honeysuckle heel, and I am nothing more than a blown petal in his palm when his eyes drop to my foot, now clad in this thing he had made expressly for me.
He runs his tongue across his top incisors. Like I’m a delicacy being prepared for a banquet where he’s the only guest.
He does the same with my other foot, replaces the shoe I’m wearing with the matching honeysuckle heel, and soon they are both clad in silk and gold, the honeysuckle vines looking like they’re twisting their way up from the ground to snare my feet. Under the hem of my wedding gown, under the layers of silk and lace pouring over his wrists, his thumbs trace matching paths up from the vamps of the shoes to my ankles, where his fingers make small circles. He squeezes, once, briefly, and then lets go.
He stands, and I’m vaguely aware that we are not alone, that there are boutique employees, our wedding planner, my best friend, watching us. I am aware that now is the time when he should step back and allow the tailors to check the hem with the new shoes.
He doesn’t step back. And I don’t scold him for seeing the dress before the ceremony like a real bride would do. Instead I lift my skirt and look down at the shoes.
They are fairy-tale shoes, but this is no fairy tale.
I look back to Mark, who’s watching me study his gift. His jaw works slightly to the side.
“Leave us,” he says to everyone else, and they do, even Bryn, who catches my eye in the mirror and gives a look that says she hasn’t missed the energy between Mark and me. She is one of the very few people who know that this marriage is arranged. She knows more than Mark even because she alone knows that I’m doing this for my uncle and not for my father.
She’ll have questions later, but I hope she’ll understand when I don’t have any answers. The line between business and pleasure blurred the first time I crawled to Mark and was erased the night he put his fingers inside me.
There’s no line anymore, only stain after stain.
“I have to go back to work,” Bryn says. And then adds with some meaning in her voice, “I’ll call later.”
“We’ll wait for you at the desk,” the boutique director adds smoothly as our planner makes a gesture echoing the sentiment, her phone still pressed to her ear.
Mark and I don’t respond, our eyes on each other while everyone else leaves.
“It was bold of you to come here,” I say after we’re alone and the door is shut between the fitting area and the rest of the boutique. “If we want to keep up appearances.”
It doesn’t matter that I’m a foot taller than him right now, that his face is tilted up to mine. The power between us feels the same. But I do appreciate this new vantage of him, seeing the magazine-ready perfection of his blond hair, the way the light filters through his eyelashes when his face is tilted up. His mouth dents in at both sides—nearly a real smile—and I’ve been caught admiring him.
Shit.
“I am keeping up appearances,” he says finally. “Do you trust me?”
No. I shouldn’t. I don’t. He essentially warned me not to, all those years ago in my penthouse.
I will win because I’ve won before. I will win because I’ll die before I lose.
But he doesn’t know how I’ve changed, what I’ve done. Things that I could never flagellate myself enough for, starve enough for, atone enough for. Now there is nothing left for me but to win.
My sins to save God’s kingdom.
“Yes,” I answer. “I trust you.”
The lie is sold perhaps by it being maybe less of a lie than I’d like, but it doesn’t matter. Mark moves fast—fast enough that even I struggle to process it—and his hands are like manacles around my wrists. A defensive instinct, natural as breathing, flashes through me like the first flip of a knife, and I only keep myself from fighting back by remembering that I’m in a dress that represents thousands of hours of work and even more thousands of dollars.
A sharp smile cuts across Mark’s face as he says, “Why I’ve bothered with cuffs and rope all these years when I could just put someone in pretty clothes is a mystery.” He’s dragging me off the pedestal now, and with the full skirt of the ball gown and the unfamiliar heels, I stumble.
He catches me easily around the waist, and then I’m forced to my knees in a pile of silk and Chantilly.
“Open your mouth,” he says, his hands already on his fly.
The shock of it has me frozen, struggling to grab hold of my thoughts. I’ve been in lethal, existential fights, in pursuits down rain-wet alleys, subway tunnels, through the woods. And yet this has me grasping, floundering. Being forced to my knees, the sight of Mark’s hands pulling apart the placket of his pants.
I’ve done this before, technically. On the yacht, there was almost nothing Tristan and I didn’t do. But this is different; this is not like when Tristan and I were lost little hedonists devouring each other. This is Mark pushing the same buttons I’d only discovered once I’d crawled to him or allowed him to batter my backside until I came from that alone.
Hyssop. My safeword. I could say it now.
But as I watch Mark pull out his rigid organ, already hard just from putting his shoes on my feet, I know I won’t. I have permission to enjoy my sins, after all.
I open my mouth, and he uses his thumb to press against my bottom lip and open it more. Then he slides his thumb onto my tongue. I taste a hint of salt and—juniper. Gin, probably.
“Stoic little thing,” my future husband says. “Quiet little queen. What thoughts are behind those eyes right now, I wonder?”
I can’t talk, not with his thumb there, but what could I tell him even if I could? Not the truth. Not the truth about anything. Tristan, the Church, what I’ve done the past three years—all of me is held on the edge of a knife, and secrets are the only things keeping the balance.
But, oh God, how he’s looking at me now, those blue eyes blazing over me. His thumb in my mouth, the jut of his desire between us, almost a hundred thousand dollars of dress crumpled around me.
I have the real, awful fear that I will never win against him, never get what I need for the Church, and I will fail everyone, including God. Because what is winning and what is losing when my fiancé is now using two fingers to hold my mouth open as he slides his dick inside? What could winning or losing possibly even be when I can feel myself respond, my nipples hardening, my cunt swelling and growing wet—just from being so crudely used?
Mark grunts at the first wet glide of his erection across my tongue. “This is the first time I’ve had your mouth,” he tells me. “And it does not disappoint.”
His fingers push down even more, and he reaches the back of my mouth, into my throat. I seize around him a little, but not as much as I did the first time Tristan did this, and Mark grunts again.
“That’s good, sweetheart.” He rocks back and then pushes even farther in this time, testing me. My hands fly up to his hips automatically, and he pulls his fingers free from my mouth and then grabs both wrists.
“Snap if you need me to stop.” He pulls back, his cock wet, my mouth wet. “Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” I say automatically. My voice is already hoarse.
He likes that, I think, because his eyes hood a little. “Good.”
And then he lets go of my wrists so that he can take my head in his hands.
“You’re leaving your lipstick on me,” he murmurs as he flexes his hips forward and back. “I like that. I like it a lot.”
I like it too, the smear of pink I’ve left around his root. I like the taste, clean skin and a hint of salt, and I even like the tears building against my eyelashes, each clear drop like a drop of penance itself, like here I can atone for the things I’ve done, in however fucked-up a way.
Penance. It feels good in the worst way because even as it cleanses, it sullies. I squirm on my knees, seeking any kind of friction against my clit, anything at all.
Mark seems to notice my restlessness. “Are you wet under that dress? Shall I check?”
Fire flares up my thighs at the thought, and I can feel the arousal against the gusset of my panties now. If he checked…God, what would he say to me? What would he do? I’m past remembering that it would be good for me, my mission, for him to know his real effect on me. I just want it. I want him to touch me again; I want his fingers inside me again.
I want?—
The door opens, and the noise punctures through the haze like a knife. I stiffen and try to pull back, the shame filling me up fast and hot, but Mark doesn’t let me retreat. His hands on my head keep me where he wants me, and he doesn’t pull out of my mouth or even stop fucking it. Instead he looks over his shoulder and gives a curt, “We’re busy.”
“Ah, I’m so, so sorry, Mr. Trevena. And Miss Laurence.” It’s the wedding planner. “I’d thought—I’m sorry. Excuse me.”
Mark comes just then, his eyes closing for a long moment as he pulses in my mouth. I barely taste it, he’s too far back, but the feeling of him swelling on my tongue is so viscerally, crudely erotic. He’s coming in my mouth in front of someone else, someone not of Lyonesse but of our shared world, someone who knows fully where I come from and who my family is.
Ten minutes ago, I was an heiress in a shockingly expensive dress…and now I’m just a slut on her knees, mouth open on demand.
My clit is so swollen I can feel it throbbing.
Mark gives a low, satisfied groan—coupled with a few more deep strokes past my lips—and pulls out. Before I can do anything, I catch movement out of the corner of my eye. It’s his thumb, rubbing the middle of his palm.
Our signal. Watch. In other words: Follow my lead.
“Show me,” he says then, and I hazard a guess. I open my mouth and show him the semen left on my tongue.
The look of dark satisfaction on his face can’t be pretend, can’t be anything other than real. “Good girl,” he says roughly. He presses a hand to my throat. “Let me feel you swallow it.”
I’m humiliated, but I’m so, so turned on too. The floor is hard on my knees, the angle of my feet in these shoes painful, and it’s the perfect bite of pain to season the degradation. If he told me to do anything now, I would do it for him. Finger myself, fuck myself with the gold-plated heel of his fairy-tale shoe. Ride his cock until he came again.
I swallow, and his thumb traces over my lower lip. It’s then I realize that I’m panting.
“Little whore,” he says fondly. “Little wife.”
And it’s only then that I hear the door close. The wedding planner stayed to watch Mark come.
I think I’m too aroused to be shocked.
After he puts himself back together, Mark studies me for what feels like an eternity, but rationally I know is only a second. His eyes rake over my heaving chest in the bridal gown, the piles of lace and silk, my smudged mouth.
“I hate leaving you like this,” he says, and there’s something in his words that I can’t recall hearing before. Maybe once, on the night he took my virginity.
I’d like to stay, he’d admitted in a voice that was quiet and raw, and arrogant still.
He’d held me in my bed after.
“Then don’t leave, sir,” I whisper.
Regret flashes through his expression—tight mouth, tight jaw, eyes reluctant to leave mine. And then he rubs a hand over his face before offering to help me up.
I get to my feet unsteadily, and he has to catch me around the waist once again as I abruptly realize how light-headed I am.
“I’ve never seen someone so naturally—” A sigh. “I really do need to leave. I have to make sure our little show for the wedding planner is landing the way we need it to.”
I’m struggling to find my balance, my breath. “Why did we need a show again?”
“She’s feeding information about us to the man who tried to kill me last month,” Mark says with the dispassion of someone talking about a relative’s vacation plans. I’m both impressed by his sangfroid and irritated by it—this is information that I would have liked to have about my own wedding planner. But maybe one doesn’t live with as many enemies as Mark Trevena and not develop some detachment when it comes to danger.
“It protects you if this man believes you’re fully mine and not to be fucked with,” he continues. “And playing the part of obsessed future spouses protects us both from speculation.”
“You’re good at playing it.”
Mark slowly reaches up to brush a stray lock of hair away from my damp face. He opens his mouth—and then presses his lips together, like he’s thought better of saying what he was going to say. “I’ve had practice,” he says instead.
And I don’t know if he means with me, three years ago, or with his first spouse.
Eliot, the dead husband.
It suddenly feels important to know, although I can hardly ask him without admitting to eavesdropping on him and Melody at the party.
Mark lets me go, making sure I’m fully on my feet before withdrawing his support.
“I’m leaving Tristan here with you while I deal with the planner and then go to my next meeting. He’s going to bring you water. Drink it all.”
“It wasn’t even a real scene, sir,” I say. I don’t need to say sir when we are demonstrably alone, but I can’t help it. It slips out around him, somehow.
“Wasn’t it?” he asks and then makes for the door. “All of the water, Isolde. I mean it.”