Chapter 19
Dawn is breakingas Mark and I walk back to his apartment. No, our apartment now. Home.
It doesn’t feel like home yet.
I yawn as we step inside and he closes the door quietly behind us, watching me. There’s no one else here, no one to perform for, but Mark reaches out and tucks some hair behind my ear. There’s an almost troubled look on his face when he does so, and he steps back and away before I can react.
“How are you doing?” he asks. “Any soreness? Do you want anything on your thighs?”
“I’m fine,” I say, which is the truth. The crop marks on my legs only sting in a good way, and my pussy is sore, obviously, but I wouldn’t trade that feeling for the world. If I’d ever feared I would have made a terrible nun, the proof is tingling between my legs. “But we need to talk. I want us to be?—”
I pause because Mark’s jaw has flexed. His hair is completely loose now, hanging over his forehead in a magazine-worthy mess, and his bow tie is undone. In the orange and pink light of sunrise, he looks not just handsome but infernally so. The colors of hellfire love him, gilding every slope and curve of his face.
“Isolde, I cannot let you ask for this right now.”
“Why not?” I ask, grateful that I sound normal and not angry or hurt. “You’ve warned me. I’ve thought about it and still want it. Want us. Like you promised me the night you took my virginity.”
He passes a hand over his face, his eyes still closed. It is a rare moment of visible self-control from him. “The scene we shared was not a mild one. And then I spent another two hours fingering you, and then I fucked you again after that. It is not possible to overstate how much your brain chemistry has been manipulated tonight.”
“I wanted this before tonight,” I point out.
“And this—being a full wife to me—you understand what that means? That I am not vanilla in private? You would be my possession and pet and”—here his voice changes a little and he opens his eyes—“the fixation of my heart.”
My pulse skips at that last part. “You are already the fixation of mine,” I whisper. He stares at me.
“You didn’t want this four years ago,” he says quietly. “We agreed that it would be pretend. I want to believe that you’ve changed your mind, but I have to be sure.”
“What will convince you?” I ask. I feel strangely close to crying now. “How can I say it any plainer than I want to be your wife and submissive, your shadows-and-glass girl, for real? When will you believe that it’s not dopamine or oxytocin talking?”
He rolls his firm lips together. “A month. Ask me again in a month. When the charms of Lyonesse have become common and you realize how much sex and pain you can still get from me even while we’re pretending. I know you need the pain, Isolde, and you won’t go without, no matter what boundaries we’ve drawn between us.”
“But I’ll go without you,” I say.
The sun has risen even more, its reflection in his eyes. “Yes,” he says.
“A month.”
He nods and looks down at his hands. “You won’t suffer,” he says. “Even when our agreement was entirely formal, I never planned for you to suffer.”
God, he doesn’t know the half of it. Between him and Tristan and my vocation as a saint, suffering is all I am.
“Give me one thing during this month,” I say, and my imperial tone seems to amuse him because his lips quirk.
“And what is that?”
“I want—I don’t want to sleep alone.”
He looks at me, his perceptive gaze made even sharper by the sunrise mirrored there. And then he holds out his hand. “Then you won’t sleep alone.”
And with the morning light filling the apartment, we get ready for bed.
* * *
My wedding presentturns out to be my very own martial arts studio, right there in Lyonesse. Mark shows it to me the next day after giving me a more comprehensive tour of Lyonesse than I’ve had before, and I’ve been silently cataloging the spots I’ll need to revisit—the security office first and foremost and then possibly Sedge or Andrea’s office to see if there’s any mention of Ys in Lyonesse’s more accessible records. And so it takes me a minute to recognize this space as something different.
Mark steps forward onto the pale wood floor, all the way to the glass wall, which can be rolled open like a door. The river licks just beyond the room, and a patio leads to a garden, walled and small. The garden itself has stairs leading down into a grotto, where Mark shows me a full spa—steam rooms, soaking pools, lap pools.
“There are showers down here too, if you feel like using the spa after you train,” he says as we walk back up to the garden and then around to the studio again. Racks of gleaming wooden weapons are mounted on the walls; mirrors reflect the light and glass and river. It smells like water and wood oil and a hint of the garden just outside.
“It’s perfect,” I say to Mark, and I mean it.
The look he gives me is arrogant, confident. “I know,” he replies, and it’s unfair that he wears every single victory so well. But he’s earned this one. I was already privately delighted by my new office next to his, with the river and city view and long glass desk perfect for laying out high-res images or archival boxes, but that is a room for work, for the job that is really only a cover for my real vocation.
This…this is for me. Tailored for me.
I blink fast, trying to stop the burning against my eyelids. Mark has ridiculous amounts of money and access to resources most people can only dream of. It was probably nothing to him to make sure I had a quiet place to train.
But it’s not nothing to me. I walk over to him and kiss him on the cheek.
His chest lifts and then falls. Slowly.
“Thank you,” I say.
His reply is matter-of-fact. “The chessboard is better.”
* * *
A week passes.
In the mornings I wake in Mark’s bed, his arms around me, the scent of rain and stone and man hanging in the air. I watch the water of the rooftop pool wave and refract until I can convince myself to leave the heavy warmth of his embrace.
That first morning I reached for the tempting bar of his erection, thinking him asleep, half asleep myself, and had my wrist snatched quickly enough to make me gasp. I’d looked up into his face to see a narrow sliver of blue under thick lashes.
“We said a month, Isolde,” he’d said, still holding on to my wrist.
“A month.”
“And even then, it would be a very daring submissive who fondled their owner in their sleep.”
“What would happen to them?” I whispered. The pressure on my wrist was hypnotizing, as was the water-strained light coming in from the room’s ceiling.
His eyes hooded even more, blue slits, dangerous, dangerous. “Anything the owner wanted to happen.”
He let go of my wrist and then rolled away. When he got up to walk to the shower, his dick was a thick, angry jut in front of him, casting a shadow along with the rest of him. He didn’t look back at me.
And that was how we woke up together for the first time.
In the mornings after I wake, I go down to the garden. There is a fountain under a long-limbed cherry tree, the kind of place that feels wonderfully private. The leafy branches stretch and droop nearly to the stone flags and lush lawn; just beyond the tree is one of the garden walls, black stone cloaked with ivy and other greenery. The garden is made up of pockets of green and stone, each one like a cloister, like a child’s fort, and by the time you get back to the fountain and the little stream leading to it, it’s like you’ve disappeared from Lyonesse. From DC altogether.
I pray there. I kneel on the grass, even as I look longingly at the stone flags that would bruise my knees. I keep my shirt on and my hands in my lap, even though there is an entire building full of floggers just a short walk away and I could whip my own back until I bled if I wanted. I wrap myself in a thick blanket when the mornings are cool, even though I could shiver and ache in the morning chill.
But my body is needed for my marriage now, for the performance that Mark and I sell night after night out in the hall, and showing up with bruises and marks he didn’t give me would hardly help.
And—I can admit this to myself only halfway, only when I think God can’t see—the urge to hurt myself when I pray, to atone, is fading.
Someone else is punishing me now, and it feels just as good as when I did it to myself. Maybe better.
I pretend that it’s because this marriage is ultimately in service to the Church, to my work. That’s why the pain feels so good, because it’s still for God. It’s just Mark’s hands delivering God’s will now rather than my own, that’s all.
I train in my new studio until it’s time to shower and get to my office, where I write up assessments of artifacts and artworks and wait for the Scales to assign another job to me.
In the evening, I eat dinner with Mark on the rooftop or in the leather and wood restaurant at Lyonesse. Twice we go into the city for dinner, eating with people of business or diplomacy, and it’s more effortless than I would have thought, being on Mark’s arm for such things. But I speak the language of influence and money, and I know the choreography by heart.
Afterward, there is the hall or a playroom or, once, a party on the roof, where guests swam and drank and Mark had me wear nipple clamps under my swimsuit. That same diabolical white suit from the yacht that shows everything when wet—my navel, my cunt. And especially my clamped nipples.
I’m not fucked every night, but even if I’m not fucked, I’m played with, I’m edged, I’m manhandled like a pet until lust is an anchor in my stomach, chained to my clitoris. By the end of some nights, I’m so wound up that I’m begging Mark to let me come, to touch me, to let me touch myself.
It’s always a mistake. It’s like a gazelle asking a lion not to eat her. It only sweetens the hunt.
During the day, Tristan is with Mark, shadowing him at lunches and meetings, keeping an extra-vigilant eye on his every move. Dinah tells me that the security team as a whole has been jumpier since the stabbing—Mark had to tell Goran to stop following him to the bathroom while Tristan was away—but the paranoia seems justified to my admittedly violent mind. Drobny is still in the wind, after all, and there’s no reason to think he won’t try to kill Mark again.
In the evenings, we are all together in the club, and Tristan is no less vigilant but perhaps more confident in the place where he knows every sight line and every secure stairwell. He stands behind Mark’s chair or on the rooftop in a discreet corner, watching the revelry unfold. Sometimes outside a playroom, where I know he can hear my whimpers and cries.
He tries his best to hide his feelings; I honestly think he succeeds with almost everyone who happens to look at him. He hasn’t been in the military his entire adult life for nothing.
But I see the bloodless skin around the corners of his full mouth, the quick blink of those bright eyes. The long lift and descent of his throat.
And if I can see it, Mark can see it.
Hopefully, Mark thinks it’s all for him, the envy and the yearning. And who am I to suppose that it’s not, anyway? To wish that Tristan’s suffering is for me?
To wish that I’m not the only one who can’t forget salt-soaked kisses?
God help me, I can’t forget it. The touch of the only good person in this den of serpents. The touch of someone earnest and honest and pure.
And I’m just as bad as Mark because I’m a lion too, thinking lion thoughts, and I’m terrified that one of these days I’m going to pounce.