Chapter 15
“Tristan?”Goran calls, and my head snaps up. I was checking my phone for any texts or calls from Cara.
There’s nothing, just like there’s been nothing since our brief call in Central Park. Pushing the worry and guilt down into my stomach, I give Goran my full attention. We’re all in the security office, planning for tonight. Though it’s members only, a mind-boggling number of them have RSVP’d, many of them with intense security needs, and so we have the full security protocol in place for the event.
Event. What a word for what’s planned.
“Yes, sorry,” I say. “You want me where?”
“I think you should be on the stage,” Goran says. “In the wings. That way you’ll be closest to Mark if anything happens.”
Security here used to be a mundane thing, a comfortable thing. We all felt assured that Lyonesse itself, a fortress of secrecy, was enough to deter danger. But since Mark’s stabbing three months ago, we are a little more on edge.
“Good idea,” I say, although as we take a last-minute tour of the hall before we open it to members, I almost regret agreeing.
There is a bed on the stage, made up with silk sheets, leather cuffs dangling from its posters. Behind the headboard, out of view from the hall itself, is a basket with condoms, lube, and a wand vibrator.
I realize that I will only be feet away from Mark fucking Isolde. I will be close enough to see if she flushes on her stomach and chest, close enough to see if his eyes hood at the first tight squeeze inside.
I should have left Lyonesse before all this.
What am I doing here? What could I possibly be hoping for?
Guests have been filtering in all day, to the bar, to the rooftop, to the lobby, where drinks and canapés have been circulating, and now that we’re ready, we finally open the hall to them too.
Murmurs and gasps fill the space as the guests file in and see the hall transformed. The dance floor has been set with row after row of wooden chairs, gleaming and dark, with a wide central aisle down the middle. Along it, all the way to the stage, candelabras march with long white tapers, and then on the stage itself, set against curtains of crimson velvet so dark that they’re almost black, there are more candles.
Hanging from the sides of the hall, swathed from balconies, and gathered at the front of the stage is a lavish amount of flowers and greenery, but it’s not the elegant, well-ordered displays of yesterday’s society wedding, not the tasteful arrangements that looked of a piece with the airy vaults of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Ivy chokes its way over chairs and up the stems of the candelabra; clusters of ferns waft softly in corners. Branches of trees I can’t name are suspended throughout the hall, some still clustered with bright red berries, some of them with wide leaves and clutches of acorns in different stages of brown and green.
And the flowers—they are no wedding flowers. Maybe the peonies, dark as wine, and maybe the honeysuckle too, since that was at the wedding yesterday. But the other flowers are the kind you’d find looking for mushrooms in the woods—slender bells of nightshade, weeping bluebells, spires of verbena, wild orchids in eccentric little blooms of white and pink. Foxgloves peek above the deeper arrangements, their blooms in every color, white spots just visible inside their bell-shaped petals.
Darkness shivers from an unseen cello, its melody like an invitation and a warning all at once.
It’s as if Mark’s brought the forest around Morois House here to Lyonesse, and it’s striking to see the hall, all concrete and glass, a place of vinyl and leather and synth, somehow made organic and alive. Poisonously alive, maybe, but I can’t deny the effect it has on the guests, and on me. It’s like being in the underworld…under the fairy hill. Here, work is play; here, the most beautiful things are the deadliest to touch.
Backstage, Sedge is bent over his eternal iPad, and Dinah is examining the arriving guests with an assessing eye. Sedge looks up at me as I come to stand next to them, and when his nearly colorless eyes meet mine, I have to blink. Despite the differences between us, I could be looking in a mirror.
He looks absolutely devastated.
But he must realize his expression is revealing too much because his face shutters and he looks back down at his tablet, tapping quickly on the screen.
Dinah, for her part, is glowing. She’s in a dress of pale-pink latex and tall boots, her lipstick a lush, matte black against her ruby-toned brown skin and her short undercut curls dyed the same vivid purple as the foxgloves sprouting on the stage in front of us. Satisfaction drips from the curve of her mouth. As the club manager, she loves seeing Lyonesse at its fullest and strangest. As a Domme, I think she likes the power swirling through the room like fog, the energy pushing through the deadly flowers along with the insistent pull of the cello.
“Was this always the plan?” I ask as I watch the room fill. It looks more and more like a wedding as people sit, as the sky darkens above the glass ceiling. A midnight version of a wedding.
“Ever since he decided to marry her,” Dinah says. She looks at me. “This is his world, the one he built. And those people out there need to see that she’s just as much a part of it as he is.”
Jealousy rips through my guts.
I want it to be me on that bed, me with roses and bluebells under my feet as I walk toward Mark on a road made of candlelight and cello music.
But I was never the plan. He told me so, didn’t he, in Singapore and again at Morois House. By then, he’d already been engaged to Isolde for four years.
It was never going to be me.
It’s a bitter blow anyway, when Mark himself appears in the wings on the other side of the stage, looking like a dashing Lucifer in his black tuxedo. In one hand, he’s carrying a slender golden collar with an etched pattern and set with small rubies. Honeysuckle again, that tendril of promise between them.
The jealousy is eviscerating me now.
The music slows but doesn’t stop, a thrum on the edges of silence, and Dinah steps out onto the stage, where the candles have been lit too. The lighting is moody and intimate for so large a space, and it feels holier than the cathedral when she speaks.
“Dearly beloved,” she starts, and there is a swirl of wicked laughter through the room. The microphones hanging above the stage mean she doesn’t have to lift her voice beyond her usual throaty contralto. “We are gathered here today to see something wonderful. Not just Mark’s new wife, but our new wife. Not just Mark’s new pleasure, but our new pleasure. We are here to witness, just like medieval courtiers of old, the sealing of vows. After tonight, there will be no mistake whom our new queen belongs to.”
The guests are primed, shifting, eager. This is not the usual boredom of wedding guests, the resignation of sitting through a ceremony largely irrelevant to them. They want to see Isolde on that bed as much as Mark does.
Mark comes onto the stage as Dinah steps back, and the guests erupt into wild applause and feral cheers, a desperate edge to their welcome.
“They don’t get to see him play very often,” Sedge says quietly from next to me. “They are panting for it.”
I look over at him, but he keeps his eyes straight ahead on Mark, his slender jaw tight.
“I know the feeling,” I can’t help but say, and Sedge huffs an exhale through his nose, a small laugh.
“Don’t we all?”
The music swells as Mark finds the center of the stage and Dinah melts into the shadows. Violins join the cello, and then another cello joins too, and it’s like music from a dream, a dream of shadowed forests and pitiless kings. For a minute, the candles around Mark look like torches, and I blink.
The guests stand, and the doors at the end of the hall open, revealing Lyonesse’s new queen. She is alone, clad in a white long-sleeved gown. It plunges to her navel, and exposes her collarbone, sternum, and her taut belly. But it reveals nothing else. The hem reaches to the floor, and the fabric is luxurious but opaque.
Small flowers are woven into the loose braid that falls over one shoulder, her feet are bare, and she wears no jewelry save for her wedding ring. She carries a small bouquet of purple and green, more herb than flower.
Hyssop.
Isolde follows the music down the aisle, and she walks alone. A submissive is the only one who can give themselves away, Dinah had explained to me earlier. There would be no handing off, no facsimile of separation from a family to join a spouse. You give yourself freely.
This might be worse than the actual wedding yesterday, even though I have no idea how that’s possible. Watching a veiled Isolde approach the altar had been agony, like bleeding into my own chest, knowing that she would never be walking to me and that I’d never be walking to him and that from now until forever, I was shut out of their joining.
But here, tonight, it is excruciating. Dinah was right. Yesterday was a show for the world, a rendition of a wedding, but somehow, this is the actual thing. This is Mark as he is, and I think maybe even Isolde as she is. In the white gown that is somehow both erotic and demure, with her feet bare like they are in the dojo, her hands clutched around a plant that features in King David’s most desperate prayer.
This is really them, joining together without me.
It was always going to be this way, I remind myself. Mark hadn’t even known I’d existed until after he was engaged to Isolde. I wouldn’t have met Isolde at all if it hadn’t been for Mark.
There was never any other outcome than them together and me alone.
Isolde mounts the steps to the stage, her dress sweeping against the flowers and ivy edging the treads, and as the candles flicker behind them, she kneels gracefully at Mark’s feet.
“We have done this once before,” says Mark, and the entire hall is in the palm of his hand as he speaks. His voice is his devil’s voice tonight, seductive and cruel.
Oh, how he makes us fall in love with him. We should hate him for it.
“But you are my wife now, my chosen one, and so in honor of the collar you now wear on your finger, I want to make new vows to you.”
He holds the collar in front of him, and the gleaming gold between her kneeling figure and his tall frame is striking. Art, almost.
“I swear to you, Isolde, my attention, my care, my affection, and my control. I swear to honor your agency and your consent. You will be mine until you no longer wish to be so; I will be yours forever.”
Isolde looks up at him. When she speaks, her voice is polished and elegant, a voice of boarding schools and ski chalets. “And I swear to you, Mark, my body, my surrender, and my trust. I swear to speak my needs and honor myself. I will be yours until we no longer wish to be together; I accept your collar as gratefully as you’re accepting my heart.”
Something flickers in his face—maybe he hadn’t expected her to say the last part. But I can’t see his expression anymore because he’s kneeling in front of her now, clasping the collar around her neck. This moment of humility, both of them on their knees, is more romantic than any part of their wedding ceremony, and the final click of the collar’s clasp is more honest than the vows they said in front of the cathedral’s altar.
Mark presses his palm to Isolde’s throat, the collar between his hand and her neck, and he’s looking into her eyes. Whatever he says next, he says too quietly for the microphones to catch, but Isolde’s head moves the smallest amount.
A nod.
His other hand weaves into her hair, fisting through the flowers and white-blond silk, and cinches. She draws in a sharp breath.
He lowers his mouth and kisses her. It’s a strangely sweet kiss for all the nightshade and foxglove around them, for the collar around her neck. He kisses her like she is something cherished, something meant to be cupped carefully in his hands.
I can see his wedding ring glinting from the back of her head.
He breaks the kiss slowly, lingeringly, and the crowd is hushed, awed maybe, by this intimacy. He has shown them violence and vice and gleeful degeneracy, but perhaps never this. Never genuine affection or care.
Never love.
Oh God, is this love? Could he love her like she loves him?
Could I survive that wound too?
He gets to his feet, his eyes staying on Isolde as he looms above her, and the crowd seems to take in a collective breath.
“Here we go,” murmurs Sedge next to me, his iPad forgotten by his side. He can’t seem to look away from Mark.
“Now,” says Mark from the stage. “Let’s see what’s under that pretty dress of yours.”