Chapter 9
With Goranand Nat in watchful tow, Isolde decides to spend the night with Bryn, ostensibly for wedding planning reasons, but I think it’s to avoid Mark. And me.
And I can’t blame her. We fucked up today, and I’m wrestling with myself all evening, shy of Mark, shy of myself, wishing I were a worse man or a better liar. Sitting at the dinner table with him and knowing that Isolde’s scent is all over my face is agony.
I half wish he would find out, though. And not even to relieve me of my misery, but so that he would punish me. So that he’d lick Isolde off my face and then use me so brutally that I could forget about everything that wasn’t him.
“Warm, Tristan?” Mark inquires after we finish eating, his eyes on me. “Your cheeks are flushed.”
“Yes,” I reply. I duck my face a little, knowing that I’m terrible at lying. “Just hot is all.”
“You should take off your jacket then.”
“Right. Yes.” I’m at his penthouse at his dinner table, and there’s no one else here. It’s not unprofessional. And yet as I stand up and slip it off, I feel the furthest thing from professional. Maybe it’s the way he’s watching me, glittering eyes and a lazy hand around his gin, the same way he’d watch someone get fisted on stage at Lyonesse.
“I should hang this up,” I say pointlessly, even though what I’m really doing is trying to escape. Those eyes, that mouth. My own body, which has been aching since I went down on Isolde this afternoon.
“Of course. You wouldn’t want it to wrinkle.” Mark’s tone is grave, like he’s sincerely agreeing with me, but I still feel teased somehow. My cheeks are burning the entire time I go to my room to hang up my jacket.
When I emerge back into the main area of the penthouse, Mark is no longer at the table but in the kitchen. Water is running and dishes are clanking, and I pause at the vast kitchen island to watch him. His sleeves are rolled up, exposing the black lines of the tattoo on his forearm, and his hair has fallen free of whatever he uses to keep it styled away from his face. A few loose locks hang over his forehead now, gold and platinum, setting off the high forehead and once-broken nose. The muscles of his shoulders and arms strain the shirt as he works, and from this angle, I don’t deny myself the view of his body tapering into a trim waist and then into narrow hips. Into the hard curves of his ass, with its slight hollows at each side.
Even washing dishes, his body oozes power. Supple power that I’ve felt plowing itself inside me, sinking its teeth into me. Demanding capitulation and sacrifice.
“See something you like, Tristan?” Mark asks without turning around.
Shit. One of these days I’ll get used to these preternatural abilities of his, the way he always seems to know where I’m at and what I’m thinking.
Do those preternatural abilities extend to the yacht? Or this afternoon?I’m still certain Sedge hasn’t told Mark about what he saw, and I’m certain that Isolde and I were quick enough today that no one at the boutique thought twice about it. But what if I’m wrong? It would be like Mark to hold that kind of knowledge close, to carry it in his pocket the way a soldier might carry an extra magazine for emergencies.
“I see my boss,” I say to inject some distance between us. “I see Isolde’s groom.”
Something ripples through him then, briefly. He shuts off the water, turns to face me as he grabs a towel. He dries his hands as his eyes rake over my face, his expression inscrutable. Then he tosses the towel onto the counter and walks toward me.
Danger, breathes some animal part of my mind. Predator. Death.
But the rest of me, the parts that signed up for danger—the parts that even sometimes wished for death—feel nothing but thrill as he comes around the kitchen island to stand in front of me.
“Do you know what I see when I look at you?” he murmurs. Even in a murmur, his voice is cold. Like having ice sliding over the valves of my heart.
I lift my chin, scraping together something resembling defiance. He doesn’t get to be handsome and cold and murmur-y with me. Not anymore. He lied about being engaged, and he’s about to be married, and my heart is no longer his.
No longer only his, at least.
“I see someone suffering for no good reason,” Mark says. His voice is still low, and he’s close enough now that the toe of his shoe is between my own. “I see someone too stubborn to ask for what’s right in front of him.”
He wouldn’t say that if he knew that I could still taste Isolde on my lips. But at the same time…
“You did this,” I accuse, but my words turn breathless as I meet those midnight eyes. “You’re the one getting married.”
“For business, Tristan,” Mark says, stepping so close now that our chests touch. He slides a hand to the small of my back and presses us together. I shudder as our stomachs meet, our hips. He’s hard. So am I.
His mouth is by my ear now, and he trails a long kiss along my jaw, nuzzles into my hair, and inhales, like he’s scenting me. “It’s only for business,” he says again between nuzzles. “Can’t you forgive me?”
“You told Isolde the marriage needs to look real.” I can barely talk. The hand on my back is holding me still as he works his clothed erection over mine.
“It does. But I’m not married yet.”
Pleasure is a scissor in my groin, shearing its way into my thighs and up into my chest. It feels so good, and his hand on my back is commanding and firm, and it’s so easy to melt back into being his.
“I don’t want to hurt Isolde,” and it’s a slip for me to say it, a huge slip, because what I meant was that I didn’t want to hurt Isolde by doing this with Mark right now. That even though she and I are in this tangled knot together, even though she doesn’t know that I love her and probably wouldn’t care even if she did know, the idea of betraying my own feelings for her is miserable.
But Mark hears it in the way I should have said it: that I’m worried he will hurt Isolde with this. “We always said the wedding was the starting point,” he murmurs. His lips whisper along my ear. “Who does it hurt, Tristan? Really? The marriage isn’t real. Isolde doesn’t love me.”
I think of a girl in a green dress, sitting barefoot on the deck of a yacht, ocean spray caught in her hair and spattering her bare arms.
He infected me.
So Mark doesn’t know how Isolde really feels about him. I don’t know if that’s a blessing or a tragedy at this point, or if it makes a difference. They’ll marry anyway, stay faithful to each other anyway. Does it matter if Mark thinks Isolde’s part is purely utilitarian?
I’m rocking against him of my own accord now, my thoughts getting harder and harder to hold on to, my principles getting harder to hold on to, because he feels so fucking good. He’s so solid and warm and steady, and his open mouth is on my neck, just below my jaw, and his smell is all around me, the smell of stone and rain, a city street after a storm. Each stroke of his erection over my own is like the slide of a bow over violin strings, and the music is drowning out everything else.
“If you can come like this, you may,” Mark whispers, and I should step back, I should safe out, I should do anything but shudder and fuck myself against him harder.
Mark’s hold on me tightens, and then his free hand is in my hair, cupping the back of my head. His mouth slashes over my own in a hot, open kiss—invasive and demanding. I make a broken, helpless noise, shivering, fucking, so close to coming, and how did I deny myself this? This deep kiss? This powerful body?
Him, wickedness incarnate?
“You taste so good,” he breathes against my mouth, and I only have a second to remember that my lips might still taste like Isolde’s cunt before I’m coming. It’s so fucking twisted, but it makes me come harder, longer, my erection pulsing long and wet into my boxer briefs. I press my face into Mark’s neck, clinging to him, gasping, lost to my own depravity and the intoxicating scent of him, and I could do this forever, come against him, with him, no matter how messy or unconscionable.
The tremors have barely ended when Mark pushes me back against the kitchen island, spins me around with a roughness that sinks deep into the pit of my stomach, making me ready for more. He tears at my belt, my pants, everything until it’s down at my knees and my ass is bared.
I brace my hands on the counter, ready, and when I feel the covetous press of his fingers to my hole, my dick stirs back to life. But he doesn’t fuck me there. He just presses and touches with one hand while he unbuckles himself with the other. And then I hear the sound of skin on skin—his hand working his rigid flesh—and then before I can beg him to put himself inside me, let me suck him, anything—he’s giving a sharp noise and there’s the slippery warmth of his satisfaction spattering across my backside.
I know he used Isolde’s mouth earlier, but he still comes for ages, his breathing harsh as he gives himself over to his orgasm.
When it’s over, a light rain has started outside, and lightning is flashing in the distance. His semen is rolling down my skin, his shadow is like a blanket, and guilt is bubbling inside me. Isolde and Mark both today, and neither of them know about the other.
What has happened to me?
Mark’s forehead drops briefly to the place between my shoulder blades, and I close my eyes against the sudden tears. I still love him. I love Isolde. I’m obsessed with them both but have nowhere to put the obsessions, no way to vent them. I have no idea how I’m going to survive their marriage.
Mark lifts his head, and then I’m cleaned off with a kitchen towel. I turn.
“Sir, I?—”
Mark presses his fingertips to my mouth. There’s a lingering flush in his cheeks that reminds me of a vampire that’s just fed.
“Shh,” he soothes. “We both needed that, I think.”
Yes, but will I ever stop needing it?
Mark seems to have the same realization because he presses his eyes closed. “I knew you were going to make things more complicated.”
“Should we—” I have no idea what to say, what to do. What to want to do. “Should we tell Isolde that we…?”
He opens his eyes. “I’ll leave that up to your conscience.”
I hate that because my conscience feels absolutely broken right now. What is right and what is wrong, what will hurt the people I love the least—answers that should be simple and distinct are instead jagged and sharp and jumbled together like broken glass.
If I tell Mark about Isolde and me on the yacht, I’ll be betraying Isolde’s trust. If I tell Isolde about what Mark and I did tonight, I could be hurting her. They keep telling me that it doesn’t matter since they’re not married yet, but then why does it feel like it matters so much?
Mark’s fingers find the collar of my shirt, slip around to stroke the nape of my neck.
“I miss having you in my bed,” he says after a minute.
I can’t speak. His touch on my neck is a curse.
“Are you still having nightmares?”
“Yes,” I admit.
“About the man you killed? Your friend?”
“About everyone I killed and everyone I couldn’t save, like my friend McKenzie, but yes. It’s mostly Sims.”
He’s still touching my neck, and my cheek is against his jaw now, my head on his shoulder. He makes it so easy to be weak, and it should be a red flag, but it feels so wonderful. Like I could rest my head on his shoulder for the rest of time, my pants sticky and my heart pounding, and he would hold my weight and stroke my nape for eternity.
“The woman who came in while you were on the yacht. His sister.”
“Cara,” I say. My voice is muffled against his suit jacket. “Cara Sims. She wants to meet.”
“Do you want to meet with her?”
“I killed her brother.” My voice is tired, thin. “Do I have a choice?”
Mark’s lips find my hair. “There’s always a choice, Tristan. There’s no such thing as fate. You know that, right?”
“That makes it worse,” I mumble. “If choice is all there is, then I chose to kill her brother that day. And I’ll have to explain as much when I see her.”
He kisses my hair again. “I could come with you.”
I lift my head and look at him. He’s entirely serious. “I wouldn’t make you do that.”
“Why not? You sit through meetings of mine all the time.”
“You pay me to do that. And this is different anyway because I don’t want you to see—to think about?—”
I can’t finish, but he seems to know what I mean. He pulls me close again.
“Tristan, are you still so ashamed of what you’ve done? Even when you could have done nothing else? Can you not at least be comforted by knowing that I’ve killed far more people for far shallower reasons?”
I give a weak laugh. “Should that be comforting, sir?”
There’s a smile in his voice when he answers. “Probably not.”
“I miss—I do miss sleeping with you,” I confess. “At least then I didn’t have the bad dreams.”
“The door is open,” he murmurs, and then his lips find mine, warm and drugging, softer than I can ever remember feeling them. He licks into my mouth like he wants to memorize the taste and then pulls back to look at me.
“God, you’re pretty,” he rasps, and then he pulls himself away.
I watch him walk up the stairs to the loft, where his room is, my heart pounding as the rain drips onto the windows outside.
* * *
Three hours later,and I still can’t sleep. I toss and I turn and I pace and I try all the fancy breathing techniques the combat stress counselor taught me, and still nothing. My body is alert and my ears are attuned to every gust of wind, every single raindrop.
I am so, so aware of the steel and wood and air that separate Mark and me right now.
One thing I never realized during my career as a good boy, as a hero, is that guilt can feel good too. Like a thrill, a secret dose of darkness, and it filters into my blood as I slide off my bed and leave my bedroom, as I climb the stairs to Mark’s loft and knock on his bedroom door.
There’s no answer, only the faint drumming of the rain echoing throughout the penthouse, and with some hesitation, I knock again. The guilt is fading into embarrassment now, into that upward rush of shame. Maybe he doesn’t want me to come up here, or maybe he’s changed his mind?—
No. I’m not going to leave it at that. Yes, I might be a submissive, his plaything, I might love wrapping myself in his red flags like I’m using them to fight off the cold, but if he’s going to corner me in the kitchen for some light frottage, then the least I deserve is the chance to knock on his door.
With a burst of bravery, I open the door and let myself in the room, preparing myself for anything. Rejection or sleepy annoyance or?—
He’s not here.
With a frown, I step all the way in, looking from the neatly made bed into the open bathroom with its glass shower and freestanding tub. I check the walk-in closet, and then because I’m doubting myself, I go back downstairs and check the common areas as well.
Mark isn’t there either.
He couldn’t have left…he would have had to walk by my door to use the only exits—the elevator and emergency stairwell next to it—and I would have heard him. Even over the rain and the wind, I would have heard him. And when I check the alarm log next to the elevator, it shows what I know to be true: no one has come or gone since before dinner.
Back up in his room, phone in hand, I stand in the empty space for a long time, forcing myself to accept what I can see: no extra door, no balcony, no rooftop access. His room is a box with no escape, and he didn’t leave the penthouse through the main exit. Which means he has another way out of the penthouse, or he’s found a way to doctor his own security system to hide his comings and goings.
But I still would have heard him.
With the wedding planner and the chance that his and Isolde’s movements are being surveilled…I don’t like this. Not at all.
I call him—and, to my surprise, I hear his phone ring, and ring from his closet of all places. Following the sound, I walk back into the space, scanning the wooden shelves and rows of tuxedos and suits for the phone. I don’t see it, and the ringing is muffled, like it’s behind something, and?—
There’s a seam along the edge of the full-length mirror.
It’s a hidden door, and when I swing it open, I find a nook large enough for a built-in desk and a stool. A monitor is on and glowing, several camera feeds visible, and at a glance, I can see the front of Mark’s building, the interior of the elevator that serves Mark’s floor, the lobby with its security and concierge desk.
I can access the video history, and so I click back several hours on the elevator feed, the lobby, the front. I don’t see the man with the neck tattoo anywhere, and the only people I see in the elevator footage all have key cards for their own floors and get off at their first stops.
No one has come up…and Mark hasn’t come down.
He wouldn’t leave his phone here if he were stepping out—but I remember Singapore. I remember his phone and passport on the bedside table. The makeup covering his tattoo and the uneaten room service.
I don’t have any evidence that he’s been hurt or kidnapped, but I also don’t have any evidence that he’s fine either, aside from that one time in Singapore. And at least then he’d left me a note.
After a brief, if heated, internal debate, I text Goran and explain the situation. While I wait for a response, I go back to the security feeds in front of me.
There’s more here than in my security portal. When I scroll through the camera index on the side, I see feeds for the club, for a house in Maine, for some kind of pied-à-terre in a European city I don’t recognize when I click it open. There’s an unlabeled feed that shows nothing but a bare concrete floor and tattered plastic drapes, a setting that would be ominous if it weren’t for a pile of fruit snacks and a handful of sports drink bottles off to the side. A construction site, probably.
And then my stomach wrenches to the side. Becomes a dry, hot knot.
The feeds for the yacht are here.
I see the pool, the library, the dining room. Not Isolde’s dojo or chapel, thank goodness, but all the main living areas of the vessel are covered, and I know Isolde and I definitely defiled some of them. With near-numb fingers, I click back to when Isolde and I were on board.
God, what has Mark seen? I thought only Sedge would have known, but this is worse, this is so much worse?—
But there’s nothing here.
I blink a few times, click around, confusion and fear making thought impossible.
But no, there’s no record of anything for the three weeks we were at sea. I see recordings from before we embarked, as the craft made its way to Ireland, and I can see it now, in its marina full of fellow superyachts, but there’s nothing between Ireland and then docking in Manhattan. Like the trip across the Atlantic never happened at all.
I let out a shaky breath, unsure of what to make of this. Maybe Sedge deleted everything? Maybe Mark had seen it all and then deleted it because he was hurt or angry?
He hasn’t acted like a hurt or angry man since we came to New York, though, and he certainly wasn’t angry in the kitchen tonight when he let me grind myself to a shameful orgasm in his arms. And he’d made the point—clearly, emphatically—that his marriage is arranged, that nothing matters until the vows are spoken.
I return the feeds to the way they were when I found them and decide to leave well enough alone. If Mark still hasn’t said anything about it and the proof is gone…maybe it’s okay?
Maybe Mark knows and is fine with what happened and deleted the videos purely to protect the narrative that this marriage is a genuine one?
My phone buzzes. It’s Goran.
Sometimes the boss disappears
sometimes it’s better if we don’t know why
but if he’s not back in the morning, sound the alarm
Sometimes it’s better if we don’t know why. Yeah, that tracks.
I step away from the screen, checking it one last time before I leave. It’s interesting—all these properties, all this surveillance, and yet Morois House is nowhere on here.
But he keeps it private, he told me, so that only Melody, Sedge, and his bodyguards know where it is. I guess it makes sense that it wouldn’t be looped in with the other feeds accessible to all of the Lyonesse staff. The security system I found there must be a closed one.
I shut the mirror-door and then leave Mark’s room. Rain streaks the windows of the penthouse as I go downstairs and wander back to bed.
It’s a long time before I fall asleep, but I do eventually slip under, and when I wake, the sun is struggling valiantly against the skyline and Mark is in the kitchen, whisking eggs.
I blink as I stand at the edge of the hallway. My eyes are gritty, and I’m still clouded with sleep, but he’s undeniably there. Undeniably whisking eggs in nothing but pajama pants like some god of domestic porn.
“Good morning, Tristan. Would you like an omelet?”
“Yes, sir,” I say. I’m almost fully awake now. “Can I help?”
“You cannot,” Mark says. “This is a French omelet. I am required to be contemptuous of everyone else in the kitchen while I make it.”
I sit down at the kitchen island and watch him. The light of early morning catches along the muscles and lines of his back, along the small scars that dot and score his skin. The stab wound in his shoulder is red and gnarled—his doctor had been right. Any chance of it healing nicely had ended when Mark accidentally ripped the stitches.
“By the way,” Mark says as he’s dropping butter into his pan, “the person you and Goran were looking into—the one you thought might be following Isolde—will no longer be an issue.”
His voice is casual, the words nonchalant.
“How do you know?” I ask slowly. The butter hisses and spits as Mark gives the pan an easy swirl. “Did Goran learn anything else about him?”
“I actually caught up to him yesterday before I joined Isolde at her gown fitting. We had a conversation, and while it was a long one, it turns out that this is all a misunderstanding.” Mark pours in the eggs, stirring and shaking, his hands constantly in motion. “And he’s sincerely sorry for any worry he might have caused.”
“Oh,” I say.
Mark looks over his shoulder at me. “Don’t give me that Geneva Convention look. He is perfectly fine, limbs intact, all his teeth still in his head, and I didn’t even resort to financially destroying him either. He knows a few things he didn’t before, that’s all.”
More swirling of the pan, and then with a few deft movements, the omelet is turned out onto a plate, perfectly folded. Mark dusts it with sea salt and fresh tarragon and then slides it in front of me.
“Eat up, Tristan,” he says. “I need you strong.”