Chapter 13
I changeinto a white silk camisole and matching shorts and then pad back into the living area in my bare feet. When Bryn and I were shopping for lingerie, we’d been lost as to what kind of lingerie would appeal to a man like Mark Trevena. Something manifestly kinky, with straps and O-rings? Something finely worked and expensive, just like the bride he’d bought with privileged information about upcoming regulations and damning FDA reports?
But I’d ultimately decided that any attempts at seduction would only work if they appeared genuine, organically me. And if I know anything about Mark, it’s that he’s interested in things far more wicked than garter belts and mesh…the total surrender of my dignity, for example.
And they don’t sell that at La Perla.
I do leave the white ribbon around my neck, and I’m glad I did when I see the way Mark’s eyes gravitate toward it once again. I log this away for when we get to Lyonesse. A couple of years ago, we did a formal collaring scene at the club, a way to build verisimilitude around our engagement, but the ceremony had been short, strangely hollow. He’d barely looked at me, even as he’d clasped the slender collar around my neck, and then afterward, he’d disappeared, leaving Dinah to pack me into a car and send me home.
I’d thought at the time that perhaps he didn’t find collars interesting, but the way he can’t drag his eyes away from my throat tonight is making me reevaluate.
“You look lovely,” he says finally, and he manages to lift his stare to my face. “Quite virginal.”
“We know that hasn’t been true for a long time.” I sit across the board from him. He’s rolled up his sleeves, and I can see the tattoo of a bird on one forearm, rendered in strong, abstracted lines of black ink.
“The look suits you nonetheless. You are exquisite in everything, but in white, you are fatally so. I’m certain our Lyonesse guests are hoping you’ll wear that reception dress again at the club—and then hoping I’ll share.”
With his unknotted bow tie, rolled-up sleeves, and gold five-o’clock shadow, he is the fatal one, but I can’t tell him so. He’s arrogant enough as it is.
“Do you plan to?” I ask. “Share me?”
He gives me a lazy look, his hand going to a glass of something amber, poured neat into the glass. Not his usual gin on ice. He must have made it for himself while I was getting changed.
“I recall you marking it as a maybe on your list of limits, having sex with other people. Have you changed your answer?”
I’ve given some thought to this over the past few months, as the wedding and my time as the bride of Lyonesse drew closer. When I was eighteen, freshly ripped from my dream of taking the veil, the idea had been faintly horrifying, almost insane in its distance from what I believed sex should be. It was a parody of godly sex—it was what good Catholics imagined that those sinful others did. If they don’t abide by our rules, then they must be like the ancient Romans, consumed in orgiastic excesses and switching beds whenever they aren’t drowning in flesh and violets and whatever else. Et cetera.
How funny that only four years separate me from that newly engaged Isolde, and yet I barely know her anymore. It makes me wonder what I’ll think four years from now and then four years after that. How could I have been so certain that something was wrong, abhorrent, totally anathema to me and now be sitting here not only contemplating its usefulness but feeling my pulse quicken as well?
“I’ve changed my answer,” I tell Mark, meeting his waiting gaze. His eyes are like the city night outside, blue-dark and glittering. “I’d be happy to be shared if you think the moment calls for it.”
“Happy to be,” echoes Mark. “Truly? You are not just saying this because you think it’s what I want to hear?”
“Is it what you want to hear?” I counter, and his brows lift, as if to say, You caught me.
“I won’t lie, Isolde. As archaic as it might be, giving my wife as a gift to a guest would be an extremely powerful favor. The kind of favor that creates debts. But there’s a reason it’s powerful, and it’s because it’s deeply transgressive. I won’t ask it of you unless you want it for yourself.”
“Is wanting it for our partnership enough?” I ask. “If it strengthens us? Our ability to get what we want out of this marriage?”
“Ambition is a good enough reason for a lot of things. I only wonder if you’re actually ambitious or if what passes for ambition is instead a long-exploited abnegation. A willingness to deny yourself even your own consent in pursuit of some abstract goal.”
“The success of Laurence Bank—and the Laurences—is not abstract to me,” I reply. Which is a lie; the bank is abstract to me, and more than that, it’s deeply unimportant. But the bank’s success is the lie I’m cloaking myself in for the foreseeable future. “But there is another reason too,” I add, and I look down at the table. My palms and nose are tingling, and I’m fighting with my breathing. Because what I’m about to say is the truth, and it is terrifying to give Mark any part of myself that’s real. “I want to do it. It…is not unappealing to me.”
I can’t see Mark’s face, but I can see his fingers twitch along his glass. He covers the slip by taking a drink.
“Does it get you wet to think about fucking other people?” he asks. “Or is it specifically being shared? Or both?”
“I, ah—” I was raised not to fumble with my words, so I clear my throat and try again. “It’s being shared. By you. I would—if we did this, I mean—I would want you to be there. Always. If I was doing it for you, it would feel like I was doing it with you. And it would be like I’m nothing.” My voice drops. I can’t even explain to myself why that feels thrilling. “Your nothing,” I clarify as I look up at him. “To do with what you want.”
My husband leans forward. The window shows me his profile superimposed over the night. “And also my most treasured something,” he says. His voice is serious, no longer cool. “Remember, it’s only powerful if you’re the greatest gift I can give someone. If you represent all that is intimate and proximate and dear to me.”
We stare at each other a minute, his lips parted and my pulse a hot thrum, and the promise between us feels as visible as the polished chess pieces on the table. Not only about sharing, but about being nothings and being somethings.
God, I knew this was the danger of trying to seduce him, I always knew this was it.
My heart will be immolated along with everything else, the smoke not rising up to God but sinking low to the earth to coil around Mark’s feet.
“Should we play then?” he finally asks.
“Yes.”
“Should we have some stakes?” A kind of mischief is folding around his well-shaped lips. “A prize, maybe? For the winner?”
I have tried and tried to stamp out my competitive nature—it’s hardly a godly thing, vanagloria et superbia being some of the worst sins—but whether it’s grades or sparring or vying with my fellow saints to see who can work the quickest, the hardest, the most viciously, I cannot seem to stop it. Perhaps it’s why I’ve craved corporal penance my whole life—it’s both a battle with my own flesh and fully a surrender to God. The fight and the defeat all in the same moment.
I try not to think of my submission to Mark in the same way.
“Yes,” I say, trying not to sound too eager. I thought of proposing such a thing when I first arranged to have this board made as his wedding gift, thought even of what I’d ask for as my trophy. “Perhaps the winner gets to ask for anything they like.”
Mark thinks for a moment, a finger tapping on the rim of his glass. “Anything that can be given in this suite,” he negotiates, and I nod my agreement. Because, yes, that would fit my needs perfectly.
“Wonderful,” he says, taking a drink and then considering the board once again. “Would you like a drink yourself? There is chilled champagne along the bar.”
Deciding it can’t be a bad idea to take the edge off the restlessness in my belly, I get the champagne and one of the waiting flutes, and after opening the bottle with a fearless twist, I return with the bucket, setting it on the floor next to my feet.
“White goes first,” Mark says after I take a sip and set the flute next to the board. “Fitting, as you’re the bride.”
There is very little point in trying anything too elaborate at this stage in the game. I’m not trying to impress him, I’m trying to win. I opt for a simple opening with a pawn moving forward two spaces, and then after Mark responds with a pawn of his own, I move my king’s knight forward. He narrows his eyes, moving his queen’s knight forward, and when I move my king’s bishop, he sits back and gives a little pout.
“The Italian Game.” He sounds disappointed. “Fine.”
I just smile at him. It’s a beginner’s opening, but there’s a reason it’s been around for five hundred years, and there’s a reason I’m doing it now. I want to coax him into battle, into the center.
“Your move,” I remind him, and he takes a drink, his lips still curved into a lush moue. On his rugged face, it’s incredibly striking, a fusion of those brutal, classically masculine features and then a pout that Michelangelo himself could have painted.
Without leaning forward, he presses a piece to the next square with the backs of his fingers. He’s already written me off as a novice. Excellent.
I respond a little innocuously, but still directly, into the center.
“What do you want out of this marriage, Isolde?” he asks after he nudges another piece forward without really looking at what I’d done with my own.
“To help my family and the bank.” I move another piece, choosing to keep my bishop covered for now. I’m fond of bishops. Probably a Catholic thing.
Mark studies me over the rim of his glass. “That’s why you agreed to the marriage when it was first posed to you by your father, but it’s been four years since then. Why are you doing it now? What are you hoping for?”
I guessed that he would ask me something like this. And I can’t tell him the truth—that it wasn’t my father who’d convinced me to agree but, instead, my uncle. That I needed every atom of information that passed intentionally, casually, or illicitly inside Lyonesse’s glass walls.
I can’t tell him that I want to be good, devout, sanctified, that I want to carve out a bloody spot in heaven next to King David and Paul the apostle and every other holy person who knew the bitter taste of murder. That I want to feel like I’ve finally, finally earned the love of my god.
But lies are flimsy things. Just like the lingerie I chose for tonight, just like my answer about being shared, this has to be at least partly the truth, and it is very dangerous to give Mark the truth. I might as well hand him that honeysuckle knife and hope he doesn’t slice me to death with it.
“I don’t want to be lonely,” I say. “I don’t want to be alone anymore.”
I want to say it with steadiness, like my loneliness is a neutral thing, like I’m strong enough inside that it doesn’t matter that no one really knows me. Not my best friend, not my uncle, not even the earnest hero I spent three weeks at sea with. No one knows all the parts of me, all my sins, all my inchoate terrors and joys.
Sometimes I think even God himself doesn’t know me.
Mark is studying me, his unmoving hand on a knight, a very faint line between his brows. I think I’ve surprised him, although with Mark, it’s hard to be sure.
“I’m not asking for anything,” I promise when he doesn’t respond. “I don’t mean that I expect us to be close or intimate. I don’t know if you want that from me. But I hope to be less lonely, I guess. Or at the very least, less alone.”
He lifts his knight, and there’s movement around his mouth, at the corner of his jaw.
“Why,” he says after a minute, his voice layered with some kind of tightness, maybe irritation, “would you think I wouldn’t want that from you?”
I’m so astonished by the question that I can’t even think of any response other than raw, historical fact. “Mark, you broke my hymen on top of my father’s desk while spinning me the filthiest, most intoxicating lies I’ve ever heard. You broke me open, and I loved it, and I could have loved you for it, and I thought it was the beginning of something real between us, something true, because it was truer than anything I’d ever known aside from God. Except you left, you stopped talking to me—I only saw you once after that, on the night of my collaring ceremony, and even then you couldn’t even look at me. And when it was time for the wedding, you didn’t even come get me yourself, you had your employee do it, like I was a task, an errand, an errand that you deflowered and then dropped. When you promised—you promised—that you would hold nothing back until it was written on my skin and scratched onto my bones how much you wanted me.”
I’m not even trying to control my voice now, my face, the burning in my eyes. Let him see; it’ll sell the story even more.
It helps that the story is the complete and utter truth; he broke me into shards that day. I’m merely omitting the rest of the tale, where I reforged the pieces and hammered them into the Isolde I am today.
I take a drink to steady myself and realize he’s moved his knight and it’s my turn to play. I’m very close to puncturing his defenses now, close to the hinge where the game goes from a beginner’s exercise to an aggressive drive right to his king. But I’ll castle first.
Mark watches me, having already castled, and his long fingers pluck up his other knight, setting it down next to my bishop. For a moment, the only sound is of the moving piece against the quartz board and the steady fizzing of the champagne.
“You are dangerous,” he finally says. “After that night, I was ready to throw away years of plans, of meticulously building my little kingdom, just to have you underneath me. You say that you feel lonely; I had been alone for so long by then that I had forgotten what not lonely even felt like. I had forgotten that there was any other way to be. And then here is this girl in goddamn college, too young, too rich, so ready to hate me, and she was practically begging for the one thing I’ve always wanted and never had. A girl so willing to be everything for everyone else that she hadn’t even realized that she could take the entire world for herself if she wanted.”
Our eyes meet.
“I tasted that girl’s cunt,” he goes on, “and I made it come, and then I listened to her breathe in her sleep, and I thought, This could be it. I thought, You don’t have to use her. You don’t have to do anything other than keep this knife-loving princess for your own and spend the rest of your life doing every depraved thing you can think of to her until that sadness leaves her eyes for good.”
My breath has stalled somewhere in my throat, and my hand is frozen over the board. I can’t tear my eyes away from his face, from the emotion tightening his jaw and roiling in his stare.
And I have questions. So many questions. How could he have been lonely if there was a husband before me? How long ago had that marriage been?
Had he really held me that night and thought of spending the rest of his life making my sadness go away?
“And there are not many things I’m scared of, Isolde, but I was scared of you that night. I was scared of what you could make me into. A man who forgets his past and his future. A man willing to set aside an entire world just to play with you.”
His voice is so rich, so layered with appetite. I don’t doubt that he means every syllable. That he would have forsaken every obligation and goal and instead devoted his life to tearing me apart. I am dizzy listening to him now, and my skin is buzzing and my heart is skipping.
We could be sparring, that’s how alive my body feels.
I force myself to move my next piece as he continues.
“It frightened me. I somehow ripped myself away from you, got out of bed. I walked the length of your room for hours, watching you sleep, hoping for something to change inside myself. For you to diminish into something lesser, a normal little heiress with perfect grades and a shitty father. But you didn’t, you couldn’t, because even though they have meant for you to be made of gold, you are made of shadows and glass instead, and I am too. I hadn’t ever met someone else so much like me—and I still haven’t—and I knew if I didn’t find a way to sever my attachment to you then, I would lose…”
A ragged sigh, frustrated. “How can I describe what I’d lose, Isolde? My focus, my dedication to Lyonesse. My neutrality. My invulnerability—my God, my invulnerability. It terrifies me to this day, even now, to think that the price of having you might be baring my throat to a callous world.”
I duck my head. I almost can’t even listen to him, to this, to this litany that is so much more intimate and powerful than the vows he pronounced before God earlier today. To this revelation that feels like being blisteringly down-to-the-entrails seen.
“So, yes, I chose to leave you, to redraw the curtain between us. The alternative was annihilation. I know that sounds hyperbolic. Believe me when I say it wasn’t. I have been lonely but alive. Had I stayed past dawn, I eventually would have been destroyed.”
Silence reigns. There is almost a ringing in my ears.
All this time, I thought Mark could barely tolerate me, that his physical desire for me was the same desire he’d feel for any available body.
“Do you still feel that way?” I ask, not daring to look at him. It makes me a fool, and a weak one, but I can’t endure his face along with his voice, this confession. I don’t know what it will do to me.
“That you will destroy me? Yes.”
It’s like the world has pitched sideways; my heart is somewhere wrong in my chest, and my stomach is in my throat.
“Oh.”
“I hope it will take longer now,” he says. “I hope that Lyonesse’s work will outlive my destruction. We shall see.”
I look up just as his eyes drop to the board—and despite everything, a swift kick of triumph thumps between my stomach and my ribs as Mark’s eyebrows push together.
“Fuck,” he mutters, realizing that I’ve really been playing chess this entire time.
I take a drink as he considers the pieces, and for the next three moves, we don’t speak, him assessing the entire game anew and me watching strategies and possibilities play through his mind with each aborted lift of his fingers, every narrowing of his eyes.
It’s just as well because I don’t know what to say to his explanation. It isn’t anything like a declaration of love; there is nothing of goodness or joy in it. And yet I feel it humming through my bones like a church organ. Like a prayer that I could etch into stone.
It is somehow more honest for its darkness, more uncorruptible for its possession. The near-violence of it is as sweet as incense to me.
That you will destroy me? Yes.
But, of course, there is one very sadly handsome reason why things are different than they were three years ago.
“You said you’ve been lonely but alive,” I say, as Mark reluctantly pushes a knight into a useless spot. “What about Tristan? I know that he was…something to you. Were you lonely even with him?”
“Are you asking because you’re jealous, Isolde?”
“Of course I’m jealous. He’s beautiful.” I move my next piece, my queen properly in the mix now, going for the kill. I hope I sound objective about Tristan and not like I think about his beauty constantly.
“He is beautiful, isn’t he? A beautiful man.” Mark fends off my first attack, taking my first bishop. “You should see how he fucks, because it’s truly remarkable. He loses himself to his lust, and all of that obsession of his is bent on you, the one person he’s made an idol of.”
It’s shocking how bluntly he says it, how nakedly he admits to having had sex with his bodyguard. And I shouldn’t be shocked—I didn’t expect him to deny it or anything—but for him to be so explicit…and so accurate. Because, yes, Tristan is truly something when he fucks. I felt, for that brief handful of days, what it was to be his idol. I can never forget it.
I move again with my second bishop.
“Of course,” Mark adds, “all of that is over now. It’s just you and me.”
“Just you and me,” I repeat.
A man willing to set aside an entire world just to play with you.
I can barely concentrate. I’m not sure exactly what piece I move next.
“Faithful until the end, my wife. Isn’t that right?” he asks softly. And then: “Checkmate.”
I look down at the board and realize my king is completely fucked. While I was busy clawing my heart back into my chest, he was reclaiming the game.
I may be competitive, but I try to be a gracious loser too. I set my king down on its side.
“What reward would you like?” I ask. There is no hope for my voice right now. It is full of breath and trembling.
Mark leans back in his chair, takes a long drink, draining the last of his glass.
“A kiss.”
A kiss. Won fairly, but still privately. This has nothing to do with selling our marriage. Even though I haven’t won the match, I’m winning the larger game, and yet I can’t even feel relieved right now. I still feel flung out to sea by the force of his admission.
“Okay, then,” I say faintly. “You can have your kiss.”
He stands, unfolding into a narrow-waisted, leanly muscled stretch of rumpled tuxedo, and offers me his hand. I allow him to pull me to my feet.
“What were you going to ask for?” he murmurs, his fingers still wrapped around mine. “If you’d won?”
I could have asked for so many things. Answers, mainly. Like if he regrets giving Tristan up for me. Like why no one but his sister knows that he was married before.
But I’d settled on something else instead, something that I had hoped would eventually lead to answers anyway.
“A real wedding night,” I tell him. “The two of us, together.”
I don’t think he was expecting that. “And you really wanted this? Enough to consider it a prize?”
He’s trying to discern if this is ambition or abnegation again, and I don’t want him probing into my motives. And anyway, I do want it. Surely he must know the effect he has on me? That this shadows-and-glass girl wants all the depravity he has to offer?
“Yes, sir,” I say, and his pupils spread.
“Even after the things I’ve just told you? They do not paint me to be a good man or a good husband.”
“Even after those things. Especially after those things.”
“I’m a liar and a murderer, and I don’t play games I don’t plan on winning. But I have told you that I won’t have an unwilling bride. If you need fucked—if you need the pain and atonement you sometimes crave—then you should know that we’ll be doing those things enough publicly to scratch any and every itch you might have. I regret that you were a necessary sacrifice to build this bridge with Laurence Bank, and I want to preserve as much for you as can be preserved. And so if you want this marriage to be something more than transactional, to be my shadows-and-glass girl for real, then you need to mean it.” The corners of his mouth are white and bloodless. “I promised once that I would make you feel every hour that I’ve abstained from possessing someone—it is exponentially truer now. You will suffer for it.”
I open my mouth to speak, to answer—to beg—and he shakes his head.
“You need to think about this, Isolde. I am not being magnanimous or solicitous here. This is a waiver. Think before you sign your safety away because your safeword will be the only armor I leave you with.”
He doesn’t wait for me to reply. He yanks me into him and brings his lips down onto mine. And then he fucks my mouth with deep, demanding strokes of his tongue. I am bent back from the intensity of it, held up entirely by the arm around my back, and I can barely breathe, and he tastes like whiskey and mint, and he smells like torrential rain and jagged rock.
He kisses me with promise—with threat—and every rub of his lips and every slide of his tongue just convinces me that the threat is half of what I like about this, about him.
What is God without vengeance or heaven without hell?
What is Mark Trevena without this?
When he pulls away, he doesn’t pull me up, and I am suspended only by him, staring dazedly up into his face with swollen lips and a heaving chest. He could not look more like a fallen angel right now, with his bow tie dangling from his neck and his bright hair in a tousle. His eyes are as black as hell itself.
“At least stay with me tonight,” I whisper. “We don’t have to fuck or even undress. But stay with me. Let me sleep next to you.”
“As you wish, my bride,” he says. His voice is husky from kissing and from what kissing has done to his body. I feel his erection as he pulls me upright and takes his time letting me go.
But he doesn’t do anything about it. When we get to the bedroom, we brush our teeth, the first domestic ritual we’ve shared, and then he changes into pajama pants in the bathroom after I leave.
And when he gets into bed next to me, even though he allows me to press myself fully against his side, he doesn’t move to push his arousal against me, doesn’t do anything about it at all. I wonder if he’ll cave, if I could cajole him into relieving himself, but the minute I’m nestled into all that lovely-smelling strength, the exhaustion of the day catches up with me. I fall asleep thinking of Tristan alone in his room and of Mark’s scorching honesty, of the years-old hunger he admitted to.
I fall asleep as Mrs. Mark Trevena, and for the first time since I was nineteen, I don’t have a single bad dream.