Chapter 29
For a minute,there is just the river—a dog barking—the honk of a truck on the road up ahead. I clear my throat.
“Cara,” I say gently. Regretfully. “I am the reason. I would do anything to make things different, but I can’t. I pulled the trigger. I shot him. And I couldn’t stop the bleeding after I did.”
“You’re not listening.” She sounds tired, so tired, and I realize that it’s got to be very, very late where she is. “How he died and why he died are two different things. And I know why he died. Why he was going to hurt that Carpathian politician.”
I’m off the river walk now, back on the streets, but I feel like I’m seeing nothing, perceiving nothing. Just Cara’s voice thousands of miles away. “They said he was taking money from Carpathian rebels. They’d wired money into his account the day before he died.”
“I think it did have something to do with the rebels, in the end,” she says. “But not—not like how the military made it seem. Because we talked the day before he died, and he told me…” She trails off.
I don’t say anything. I sense that the conversation is in a fragile place, and I don’t want her to hang up on me again. If there’s any way I can help…I owe her that much, at least.
“Sorry, it still sounds fucknuts to me.” She gives a shaky laugh. “Sometimes I wonder if I’ve imagined it all.”
“You can tell me,” I say, trying to sound reassuring and not like I’m worried about her. “I promise I won’t judge anything you say.”
She blows out a breath, a long one—the exhale of cigarette smoke. “He kept calling me and calling me the week he died. He’s always been persistent, you know that, and he usually hated whatever boyfriend I had or whatever situation I was in…rightfully so, probably. I’ve dated some real winners.” Another pause, and I hear the puff of her dragging on her cigarette. “So I ignored his calls at first. But he wouldn’t stop. All hours of the day—he was on Carpathian time—and finally I caved and answered, ready for a fight.”
“Did you fight?” I ask. I know there’s a particular pain to having the last words between you and a loved one be vicious ones. It’s nearly as bad as knowing you put a bullet in their neck.
“No,” Cara replies. “That’s the thing. He wasn’t calling me to fight at all. He was begging with me, pleading for me to make sure Mom and Chloe were okay. And then he said he wanted us to hide. That he’d been taking money from someone to do…just small things at first. Things he didn’t see the harm in. Information about the villages you were patrolling, any rebel activity. Not stuff that would actually compromise the unit’s safety.”
A slow tide of disbelief is rising in me. Sims wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t.
All this time I’d been so certain that the official narrative had to be a lie because Sims was the last person on earth to ever take a bribe.
“It was for Mom,” Cara says on another exhale of smoke. “And Chloe. And me, even though I was never in one spot long enough for him to send money. But Mom was struggling to pay on the house, and Chloe was expecting her first baby and could barely afford car seats and all that stuff on her teacher’s salary. He had a savior complex about us—when Dad left, Aaron decided that he was the man of the house, even though he was only a kid when it happened. It changed something in him, I think. It became the only reason for anything he did.”
“But he was so proud of being a soldier.” I shouldn’t be pushing back, I should only be listening, but I can’t make sense of this. “It was his entire identity.”
“I think he tried to justify it at first. It wasn’t really disloyalty. It wasn’t really treason. Just information that anyone could go find out for themselves if they really wanted to. But then…it got dicier. They wanted to know information about the unit. They wanted him to make sure certain buildings were left alone during patrols or raids. He tried to back out then, and they threatened to expose him. You know what would have happened if they had—a court martial, Leavenworth. That scared him.”
Sims hadn’t been a coward. Not in combat, at least. But I can easily see a threat like that having a lot of power over him. No one wants their name to be synonymous with treason, no one wants to end up in prison for decades upon decades. No one wants for that to be the reason they have their own Wikipedia page.
But especially Sims. He would rather have died.
“So he did things he wasn’t proud of,” says Cara. “He made sure certain things weren’t found on patrols. He made sure he was working checkpoints at certain times so he could wave through the trucks he was told to wave through. If any of the rebels he was shielding asked if they could trust him, he was supposed to tell him that he was with Ys.”
“Ys,” I repeat. That name again. It had come up during a security meeting at Lyonesse, connected with Drobny.
“Y-S,” Cara spells for me. “It’s French, I guess. The name, I mean, not…well, not whatever Ys is.”
“So Ys was the group bribing him?” Arms deals. That was what they’d said at the security meeting. Weapons shipments to rebels.
Oh God. Aaron, what did you get yourself into?
“Yes. And he tells me all this, and then he tells me that they want him to do something bad. Something awful. And he can’t make himself do it, except they told him that if he didn’t, they’d…find…us.” Cara’s voice is a little shaky again. “They’d kill us. Me and Chloe and Mom.”
It’s my turn for a long exhale. I can see our borrowed penthouse now, tall and stately and everything that’s the opposite of muddy forests and desperate soldiers.
“He was stuck,” Cara says finally. “He didn’t think there was anything he could do. If he turned himself in, confessed everything, Ys would have us killed. If he didn’t turn himself in but still didn’t do what they wanted, Ys would have us killed. But if he did what they wanted, he might be arrested, he might go to prison forever, but there was a chance we’d be safe. And that was all he could see. That chance.”
I stop in front of the penthouse, my mind firing with memories. Memories that had turned into official statements and therapy sessions and mandated journaling exercise entries and nightmares.
When Sims had died, when I’d dropped down next to him and tried to stop the hot, arterial gush of blood with my bare hands, he’d spoken to me. Two words.
Family.
Ease.
Ease. All this time, I thought he’d been asking me to make sure his family was comfortable, taken care of, but what if that hadn’t been it at all? What if he’d been trying to tell me something completely different?
“I think he tried to tell me,” I say numbly. “I thought he was saying something else, but he was saying Ys. He wanted me to know.”
Family. Ys.
And then it comes together—the timeline, Cara’s sporadic calls, her exhaustion. “Cara, are you in any danger now? From Ys?”
I hear the click of a lighter and the burn of paper. A long exhale. “Yeah,” she says finally. “Not Chloe or Mom because they didn’t know. They still don’t. But somehow they found out that Aaron told me. At first, I just got a few threatening phone calls, smashed windshields, that kind of thing. I’m used to that shit, so it didn’t scare me. Much. That’s when I decided to come see you, to see if you knew anything about Ys too. Some place you work at, by the way.”
“Yeah.” I laugh, a little uncomfortably. “It is.”
“But after that, shit got worse. My apartment caught on fire. I was getting followed home from the place I was bartending at. I worried that if I told Mom or Chloe, they’d be attacked too, so I just…ran.” A dry chuckle. “I’m good at running.”
“Cara, let me help. Come to Lyonesse—even if I’m not there, you can stay in my apartment. You’ll be safe there, I swear.”
“And then what? I hide there forever?”
“You can’t run forever either,” I coax, as gently as I can. “Aaron would want you to be as safe as possible. Please. I owe you this.”
A pause. And then, “I’ll think about it.”
“Please do. And call anytime.”
“Okay.”
“I wish I knew more about Ys,” I say. “They came up in a meeting a few weeks back, but all anyone knew was that they move weapons around.”
“I think there’s got to be something else to it,” Cara says. “Arms smuggling isn’t that special.”
“But it’s lucrative.”
“I guess.” She takes a breath. “Thank you. For listening. And not thinking I’m crazy.”
“I would never think that.”
“Thank you anyway. I’ll call again if I can…and I’ll think about your offer.”
We hang up, and I wander into the building, pressing the button for the elevator with my brain whirring. I’d been wrong about Sims, although not as wrong as I could have been. He’d been bribed to a point, led into venal, petty misdeeds, and then the rest had been a combination of shame and threats. Of the very real fear that something might happen to his family.
Fuck. I hope Cara takes me up on my offer. And Mark might be able to help too. Surely, he knows people who could help her get set up with a new identity…or something. However that kind of thing works.
The balcony door is open inside the penthouse, and I hear the low, sweet murmur of Isolde’s voice on the wind. She’s on the roof, I think, talking on the phone. There’s a scatter of folders and documents on the dining room table where she’s been working, all stuff about export laws and this goddamn bowl, and I’m about to look away when a name pops out at me.
Jakub Kulov.
I recognize it immediately. It’s the name of Drobny’s security lead. We had a meeting with him right before the attack on the club.
Peering closer, I see Kulov’s on a short list of names—potential buyers, the list is labeled.
I shake my head and step back. Cara’s call has me suspicious of mundane things now. We’re in Europe. Slovakia is just a short train ride or flight away. There are probably Kulovs all over the place.
“Oh hey,” Isolde says, coming down the stairs. She’s changed into a soft, slouchy sweater and linen pants, but her cheeks are still pink from the run. There’s something else too, something tense about the way she holds herself, but it could also be that she’s spent or sore from this morning. “Everything okay?”
Kulov forgotten, I turn fully toward her. “Can I tell you something?” I ask.
* * *
Isolde doesn’t thinkthe story is ridiculous or unbelievable—she was at the same security meeting as I was, of course. Plus, she tells me that she overheard Mark talking to Melody about Ys at the engagement party.
“‘Ys started the game. I’m only finishing it,’” she finishes.
“At the security meeting, he seemed like he barely knew anything about it,” I say. “But why pretend? Why keep the Lyonesse team in the dark? Didn’t you think that was strange at the time?”
“I did,” she admits, “but also Mark is rarely forthcoming about anything. If he really did have something to do with John Lackland’s death and that death is somehow connected to Ys… Well, I could see why he wouldn’t want anyone able to draw lines from one thing to the next.”
And I have to concede that she’s right. Mark’s done more than collect secrets at Lyonesse—he’s buried his own.
For the rest of the day, I think about what Cara said. I think about whether this makes me more or less guilty when it comes to killing Sims. Because, sure, now I know Aaron was committing treason for far longer than just that one morning, but also…shouldn’t I have noticed? I was his best friend—how had I failed to see that he’d been trapped in a nightmare of his own making?
Mark doesn’t call Isolde again that night, although he does check in briefly with me over text to make sure we’re both home safely, and we go to sleep early, her still tense about something—work, she says—and me scouring my memories for anything else I could have missed about Sims before he died.
I don’t have nightmares that night, but I do dream. Sims is stealing my Pop Tarts, and the Pop Tarts keep turning into Bronze Stars, which he chews on obnoxiously. They turn into knurled discs in his mouth, the shavings falling out like crumbs.
But it’s not horrifying; there’s no blood, nothing pulpy and dying. Just metal crumbs and the bad jokes he used to make in the DFAC.
I wake up somewhere between sad and guilty, and it mingles with the tender, heady sensation of having Isolde limp and warm in my arms, wearing a silk nightie and a flush on her cheeks.
Maybe it’s the past making me melancholy.
Maybe it’s the months of deprivation. Of her. Of him.
Maybe it’s that the October sunlight is falling just so over the slope of her nose and her full upper lip.
When my dick fills all the way, burrowing into her belly, I don’t peel away from her. And when she stirs and slings her thigh over my hip, I don’t move it back. And when she starts grinding against me, her cunt hot and swollen through her underwear, I don’t stop her.
Her eyes flutter open, still sleep-glazed but also hungry. I see the moment she becomes aware of how we’re pressed together, of how she’s moving against me.
I see the moment she decides not to stop.
And then her panties grow wet with her and start catching on her skin, pulling aside, so that I’m rubbing against the bare lushness of her outer labia.
I shudder.
“Honey,” I say hoarsely. “Please.”
She reaches down, a wiggle and an arch, and then the panties are gone, and it’s just bare skin to bare skin. The head of me is almost as wet as she is, and my balls are pulled tight to my body. When my tip catches on the slippery entrance to her body, we both freeze. Staring at each other.
“Tell me to stop,” I mumble. My whole body is trembling. “Tell me that you’re married and that you can’t. Tell me you only want your husband.”
She keeps her eyes on mine. Her voice is hushed, miserable. “It wouldn’t be true if I said it.”
“Isolde…”
We can’t. We shouldn’t. We agreed we wouldn’t.
Nothing’s changed. Nothing’s different this morning versus any other morning. I’m not a new person, and neither is she, and neither of us have let go of what we feel for the wicked man in the suit who rules our lives.
But maybe that’s the thing about bad decisions.
Sometimes there’s no good reason for them.
No good reason at all.
I push at the same time she moves her hips, and I’m squeezed inside, just the end of my erection. She’s so soft and so tight and so, so hot. I’m close to losing it. I’m going to come with nothing more than my tip inside.
It’s not enough for her though, and she’s wrapping her arms around me, canting her hips, impaling herself, slowly, so slowly. The angle is wrong, and this is wrong, and every muscle in my body is trembling, straining with the effort to stop myself, stop her.
We’re not real in the dark, she told me once.
What does that make us in the morning light? Under the soft gilding of the sun? Realer than ever before?
It doesn’t matter, and maybe it never mattered because somehow this is the only thing that makes sense right now. I can’t change killing Sims, and I can’t fall out of love with Mark, but this?—
This I can have. This I can take.
She seems to feel the same way, her eyes troubled, her mouth open, and when I break and shove her on her back, thrusting in with one thick stroke, there’s as much unhappiness on her face as there is lust.
We don’t tell ourselves it’s just this one time. We don’t tell ourselves that it’s just in Belgrade, that we’ll stop when we get to Lyonesse again.
We don’t tell ourselves anything.
We fuck.
And when I come so hard my back nearly breaks with it, when she contracts around me with a cry and everything between us is wet and filthy, we don’t bother speaking at all. I gather her into my arms and pretend I don’t feel her tears dripping down my chest.