Chapter 31
Mark landsin Belgrade in the late afternoon, and I meet him at the airport to pick him up. When he sees me standing by the door of the car, waiting to open it for him, he doesn’t react at all. His face doesn’t change, his jaw doesn’t flex or relax, his eyes don’t narrow or flare with emotion. “Tristan,” he says, and then he gets into the car. I could be Goran or Jago or Sedge for all the reaction I just got from him. I fucked his wife, and I’m certain he knows, and all he’s done is nod at me like I’m a bellhop.
But when I get in the car with him, I feel it. I can’t see it, not in his expression or in his posture, which is relaxed, and I don’t hear it in his voice when he asks the driver to take him straight to the penthouse. And I don’t even know what it is—if it’s anger or hurt or jealousy or fear—although it’s impossible to imagine Mark feeling afraid of anything ever.
But nevertheless, I feel it. Like unheard thunder, like my body registering the electricity in the air before I can consciously perceive it.
I’ve felt this from him before, I realize. At Morois House, in his library. He could have torn me limb from limb that day, and I would have thanked him for it because even his anger is beautiful, elemental. The sea in a frenzy…and who doesn’t want to see that at least once in their life?
I wish I didn’t deserve the frenzy. I wish his anger or jealousy or hurt weren’t absolutely warranted. I wish that I didn’t have to be ashamed, that I hadn’t betrayed his trust, that I hadn’t betrayed the second, unspoken, trust of what he and I had shared before Isolde came.
I wish that I could protect Isolde from it.
This isn’t Mark’s usual Mercedes-Maybach, the Pullman limo with the divider between the back and the driver. We sit side by side, undivided from the front, and the driver’s sighs and scoffs at the city traffic come back to us among the engine noise and honking.
Mark and I don’t speak.
My skin itches. My blood hums. I am sitting with every muscle poised and alert, every hair lifted on my arms under my suit. I’ve felt like this on a patrol, right before stepping into mist-swathed trees or a remote village where suddenly the children are gone and everything is quiet.
And it’s ridiculous to feel this way in an expensive goddamn suit, in an expensive car, sitting next to a man who looks like he walked right out of a magazine ad for giant watches. From the outside, it seems like I should be safer than I’ve ever been before.
From the outside. If you don’t know Mark Trevena.
But I’m good at fighting. I’m good at scenting danger, at covering the person next to me, at taking the right risks. I was the sharpest marksman in my platoon, the best at defensive tactics, I had the fastest mile.
I can hold my own against him. I can cover Isolde from his anger.
Besides, I’m angry at him too. I’m angry that he made me fall in love with him and then got married. I’m angry that he put me on a boat alone with a beautiful woman broken in exactly the same way I am. I’m angry that I had to spend hours and days and weeks watching her delicate shoulders curl when she thinks no one is watching, that I’ve had to listen to her rich-girl voice, and I just have to hold all of the feelings I feel deep, deep inside myself. Even though it’s a cup full to brimming and everything is still sloshing everywhere, spilling and staining.
I’m angry that Isolde doesn’t belong to me. I’m angry that I don’t belong to him.
I’m angry that she is sick like me and we can’t even share the sickness together.
Mark and I still haven’t spoken by the time we get to the penthouse, and I’m braced for any possibility once we get inside. He might yell; he might speak in a low, cold voice; he might tell me I’m fired; he might tell Isolde the marriage is over.
It will hurt. Whatever happens. He won’t have to lay a finger on us and we’ll be blown open.
But when we step inside from the elevator, we’re not alone. Andrea is sitting on a low sofa, a laptop balanced on her trousered knees. She barely looks up at me. I don’t see Isolde yet.
This is more dangerous, then. Andrea is the one who saw us, recorded us, and if she’s here, there’s no refuting anything. Not that there would be anyway. Maybe this is in the sense of judicial fairness, then. The right to face our accuser.
Except her demeanor is as impassive as ever, and when she flicks her eyes to me, I see the usual suspicion and dislike but nothing else. No triumph, no smugness, no determination.
And when Isolde steps out from her room, Mark drops his bag on the floor and says mildly, “Andrea’s in town to help me collect a membership fee from someone here. I thought she could join us for dinner.”
Which is when it hits me: he doesn’t know that we know he knows.
Andrea couldn’t know that Isolde had overheard her at the club, after all, and so for the moment, Isolde and I are supposed to be ignorant of the video.
God, I don’t know if that’s better or worse. It’s like being spared the firing squad only to be led into a dark room underground. I’d almost rather get this over with.
I don’t know what I expect Isolde to do when she greets her husband—she could play sweet, she could play submissive, she could play the icy heiress she was bred to be—but I don’t expect how honest she looks when she approaches him. Even with the subtle makeup, the sleek waves hanging to her slim shoulders, her short dress with an open back secured at the base of her spine with a thick bow, there’s something slightly undone about her. I realize that it’s her face. It’s not tearful or defiant or fawning, but it’s not placid either. I see her eyes move, her mouth tense and relax, her throat swallow. All the parts of her that she normally holds in such careful stillness, the parts that only a lover gets to see after she’s been punished or pleasured, they are available now.
I don’t know how it can be so erotic just to see her like this, but it is. Despite everything and because my body is such a fool when it comes to her, my penis gives a lazy kick and starts thickening slowly against my zipper.
Mark must feel the same way because he bridges the final gap between them, slides his hand under her hair, and lifts it from her neck. And then he leaves a lingering, possessive kiss there. He can’t see it, but I can: as his lips part and he gives her skin a sharp, sudden suck, her eyelids flutter closed. She looks more helpless from that suck on her neck than she has ever looked trussed up, bound to a bench, with a mouth full of Mark’s cock.
When he pulls back, Isolde says, “I’m glad you’re here. I missed you.”
“Did you, wife?” The words are nothing he wouldn’t say normally; the tone is level, if a little cool. But that invisible feeling returns, the sense of thunder on the horizon.
She looks up at him. “Yes,” she says simply. “Sir.”
They stare at each other a moment, and surely, he can taste the honesty in her words? Surely, he has to know that the whole reason we fell into each other’s arms was because we missed him, because we were ruined by him?
“I’m starving,” Andrea announces from behind us, breaking the moment. “They must be finished setting things up for dinner, right?”