Chapter 22
Within just a fewminutes of us striding onto the rooftop terrace, I’m sitting on a table with my legs spread. And Mark’s promise is kept—I am indeed panting for it, and it does make it better. A cluster of the rich and the powerful and the beautiful are standing around me, gazing down at my pussy as they sip muddled pear cocktails from long-stemmed coupes. A warm wind laden with the promise of autumn—changing leaves, the first sweet notes of plant decay—ruffles my hair and the sheer cape hanging from my shoulders. Music plays, something between instrumental and electronic, something between the opera and the vinyl and LED vibes of the hall. And I’m part of the show he’s giving them, as much of the night as the music or the autumnal cocktails. As the city slouches on the edge of the riverbank, lazily clutching power to itself.
I think I love it.
Yes, it feels right to have Mark use me, exploit me, feed the darkness that I think has always leached through my blood, but there’s another kind of darkness here, another kind of thrill.
After years of dancing around money and handshakes and all the unguent lobbyings and insinuations that come with my father’s world, it is almost intoxicating to see everything laid bare to its rawest form. We only shake hands because we can no longer draw knives; we only lobby because we can’t snatch away what we want and take it back to our walled city.
But here, every desire and ambition and coveted thing is made explicit. Here all the dressings and decorations of power are ripped down, leaving everything in its most primal, biological form.
Sex.
Violence.
Greed.
A glimpse into the darkest, truest tabernacle.
I’m fucked right there in front of everyone, Mark working me with his fingers until I come with a long cry, and then I’m dragged to my knees and made to open my mouth with cruel fingers still wet from my own body. Mark pushes past my lips and doesn’t stop until he’s in my throat, his fingers staying curled around my jaw. He tastes like clean skin and smells like thunderstorm, and when he comes, his eyes are as dark as the sky behind him.
And then they slide from my face to the corner of the terrace, where I know Tristan is posted.
“Show me,” Mark says, returning his gaze to my face.
I stick out my tongue.
“Good girl. Swallow now.”
I do as I’m told, and I’m rewarded with a kiss, a deep one that he bends down to give me. His tongue slides against mine in a coarse chase of his own taste, and he must like what he finds because I feel the rumble of approval against my mouth.
“Will you ever share her, Mark?” someone asks.
“I haven’t decided yet,” Mark says, rubbing at my lower lip with his thumb. “I’m enjoying having her all to myself.”
I open my lips and suck at his thumb. Being shared is such an arousing idea, and yet when he says possessive things like that…
It’s easy to forget why I’m here.
The wind blows again, hard enough to toss hair and make waves in the pool. A lie comes to me then, and like all of my good lies, it’s half-rooted in the truth. I wait until I’m lifted from my knees, petted and praised and given a pear cocktail while the party resumes. Mark is twirling a loose curl of my hair between his fingers and watching an actress peg her husband by the edge of the pool when I ask, “Do you mind if I go to bed early tonight?”
His posture shifts ever so slightly, from relaxed to the appearance of relaxed. “Is everything okay? You’re not hurt?”
“I’m not hurt,” I say.
“You’re not…overwhelmed?”
“A little,” I say. That is the part of this that is true. “The car—that was different for me than the hall. I don’t know why.”
“Different in a way like you wished you’d used your safeword?”
“No,” I say quickly. “No, not that at all. Just different like…I feel messy right now. That’s all.”
Mark still has his fingers in my hair. His eyes search my face. “Do you need me to come with you? Or would you rather have space away from me?”
I can’t handle this mix of possession and concern from him. “I don’t need space from you,” I whisper. “But you should stay. Enjoy your guests.”
He pushes hair away from my face. I get the feeling that he doesn’t want to let me go, doesn’t want to stop touching me.
But he drops his hand and nods. “Of course, Isolde. Go get some rest.”
I finish the pear cocktail and set it on a table as I leave, not looking back at my husband even though I want to. Even though part of me does want to stay and have him twirl his fingers in my hair until dawn.
I also don’t look at the terrace corner.
My dress, silky and heavy with crystals, hisses on the steps down from the roof into the glass bower of Lyonesse. I pass the door to our apartment and keep going; I go to an elevator and slip inside. I’m not concerned with being seen on camera, not yet. I am going to the kitchens to have a late snack made; that’s what I’ll tell anyone who asks.
The kitchens are in the basement, one subfloor above the server room. I’m not concerned with interior access tonight, however, and I get off on the kitchen floor, walking under the crisp-white lights to the kitchen itself, which is a racket and bustle of pot lids and metal bowls. Right inside, I remember, is a delivery door leading to an underground tunnel to the parking garage, a tunnel that has an outdoor exit of its own.
Here I do move quickly, unhooking the neck of my dress and shimmying out of it. With a quick rip—I do regret this a little—I detach the lining from the glamorous shell and drop the sparkling outer layer and cape to the floor. I shuck my high heels too.
I’m only wearing the lining of the dress now—what amounts to a black slip. My bare feet.
Ideally, I would have changed before coming down, but this is a window of time I don’t want to miss—security occupied with the hall and the rooftop, Mark busy, Dinah and Andrea and Sedge nowhere to be seen. The darkness as a cover.
Soon I’m outside the building, on the small island it sits on. Lawn tickles my toes, and I give myself a brief second to admire the club from this angle—a tall glitter of reflected city. Orange and red lights glow from underneath and within the structure. Autumn colors. All it’s missing are some pumpkins and a harvest wreath.
Just beyond, the river laps at Lyonesse’s well-disguised retaining walls, and at the far end of the island, I see the black-stone partitions of my garden.
It is striking how peaceful it is out here, with only the faint party noises from the roof and the wind for company. My feet, silent everywhere else, make soft noises in the grass in between gusts of wind. The night air is turning cooler, pleasant, and for a stupid moment, I wish I were just taking a walk because I wanted to. That I had such a freedom.
I shake it off.
This is the whole reason I’ve been put here.
I find the fire door on the Virginia side of Lyonesse, set into an exceptionally narrow outdoor stairwell with two cameras trained on it. I notice a glassy door set into the wall here at ground level—I imagine so that security could come pouring out at the first hint of a breach. Motion sensors would be natural down there too, maybe infrared.
I think about this a minute.
I pad back to the garden, find a branch on the cherry tree that looks weaker than the others, and pull it free. After that, I go into my studio, where I grab a thick wool blanket from the corner that I use for my morning prayers and sling it around my shoulders.
Not a perfect tool kit by any means, but I’m not planning some kind of heist. This is fact-finding only, and I just need a second or two. Just long enough to look at the door without leaking heat all over the place.
First the leafy branch, wedged under the railing so it blocks the cameras, then the blanket tucked as carefully around me as possible to block my body heat. Then I stop and give myself a proper look.
The door is thick and metal, with a steel frame and no handle from the outside, but there is something unusual next to the frame. A small black pad, set into the concrete. I press on the door itself, to see if it moves in the jamb, but it holds fast. Whatever issue they’re having with the door isn’t resulting in it coming unlocked.
But a few seconds is as long as I want to risk. I shove the branch the rest of the way down to the stairwell so anyone who comes to check on the obstructed cameras will find it, and then I unwrap myself from the blanket, walking back toward the garden with ideas swelling and then popping like soap bubbles in my head.
I can’t access that door without a key—and even with a key, I’m still not sure I could get inside without a handle.
My uncle wants me to seduce my way into Lyonesse’s secrets instead, but Mark is something worse than a door without a handle, something more than an inaccessible room. I might as well try to strike water from rock as get Mark to tell me anything I wanted to know.
But maybe…
“Isolde?”
I freeze, spinning to see Tristan stepping out from the glass door near the stairwell. Under the blanket draped over my arm, my fist bunches in the wool, and my neurons fire, searching for a way to explain what I’m doing barefoot in a ripped-apart Jenny Packham dress…near the single weakness of Lyonesse’s server vaults.
Tristan steps onto the grass, the door closing behind him. In the faint orange and red light glowing from the club, I can see the furrow of his brow.
“What are you doing out here?” he asks. And then: “No wonder you have a blanket, you look like you’re freezing.” His hands reach out and chafe my bare upper arms, and they are so large and tender and warm. I hadn’t realized until he touched me how cold I was.
The door opens again, and before I can do anything about it, Goran steps out, immediately seeing us.
Seeing Tristan with his hands on me, the blanket, my skimpy slip and bare feet.
“Mark said he was going down to a playroom with some guests and I wouldn’t be needed, so I was just coming to check on Isolde,” Tristan says with that open honesty of his, so touching in its simplicity, in its certainty that it will be believed. He hasn’t had to spend years thinking of other people’s lies and how to evade them. He has never been in a situation where the truth wasn’t enough.
“And I was just taking a walk around my garden and decided to walk by the river too,” I say.
Goran nods, although it’s a slow nod. “There was a disturbance on some cameras out here, but—” He looks down into the stairwell and sighs. “Just a branch. That fucking wind. The news says a storm is blowing in.”
“We should get inside then,” Tristan says, tucking an arm around me and guiding me in. His fingers on my arm are spread, like he’s trying to touch as much of me as possible. It’s not the careful nudge of a bodyguard.
Goran’s eyes drop to Tristan’s hand, and I step quickly away.
“Thank you,” I say to both of them. “I should get in bed.”
“I’ll walk you there. I told Mr. Trevena I was going to check on you and make sure you were okay, since you left early.”
I can hardly refuse without drawing attention to the various oddities of tonight, although the way Goran is watching us right now isn’t ideal.
“Yes, of course,” I concede.
And so my night ends with nothing gained at all.