Chapter 32
Dinner ison the rooftop terrace, overlooking the twilight city. Heat lamps surround the table, keeping a warm blanket of air around us, and the table itself is laid with the kind of food Mark loves—bloodred cuts of seared tuna and meat; roasted mushrooms and fresh but fragile greens; edible flower petals and flecks of gold.
We are drinking wine, and Mark and Andrea are talking about this Lyonesse member, and Isolde is gracefully answering and interjecting and doing all the normal things one does in a conversation. I am silent, unable to shake my vigilance or douse the adrenaline and cortisol occasionally spiking my blood. I cannot feel safe—we cannot be getting off this easy, with dinner and business as usual.
But I watch Mark give a low chuckle at a pointed remark of Andrea’s, and I wonder… I wonder if maybe she never did send the video. Maybe she decided the better of it, that it wasn’t her business or that she’d rather confront Isolde and me directly.
Jesus, I can only hope. How was I so reckless last night? Fucking Isolde in public? Even if I’d thought we were completely anonymous, just bodies in a crush of bodies in a crush of a city so very far away from Mark and Lyonesse, it was still a stupid risk. After Sedge and the yacht cameras, I told myself I was done with stupid risks.
I mean, I told myself I was done with Isolde too, and that hardly came to pass, but still.
The heat lamps have actual flames burning in them, and the light around us is gold and red, making Mark’s already wicked face look downright infernal tonight. I just want to know if he knows and what’s going to happen to Isolde and me. That’s all. I can take it, I can take anything, but I can’t take the uncertainty. It makes every word from Mark’s mouth feel like bullet casings clinking on the ground.
“It was a good reminder of the clubs she’s used to,” Andrea is saying, and I try to refocus on the conversation.
“The one you went to last night?” Mark asks. I can practically see the casings, spent and smoking, rolling around our feet.
Across from me, Isolde doesn’t react. She merely continues pushing her fork through the layers of her chocolate framboisier and then taking a delicate bite. She eats like she had lessons in eating.
“Yes, Jadranka”—this is the name of the member Andrea and Mark are visiting—“invited me out. Even the VIP level at this club was something of a joke. No respect for good taste.”
Isolde is carving off a slice of her cake with the precision of a surgeon. I’m trying to keep my face somewhere just on the friendly side of the blank expression I learned at West Point.
Thankfully, the conversation moves back to Jadranka, to her contacts in the European automotive world.
We finish eating, and the discreet staff tidies away the supper, leaving plenty of wine and fruit, cheese and bread. And a glass of gin on ice for Mark.
“Dinah says that she saw Lady Anguish in your office again,” Andrea says. Her glass of wine is full, her cheeks are a little flushed, but her gaze at Mark is as sharp as ever. “She’s worried you’re actually going through with this absurd scheme of splitting ownership.”
Mark lifts a shoulder and then takes a drink. “It won’t affect Lyonesse.”
“You’re out of your mind if you think that,” Andrea says flatly. “You are Lyonesse.”
“Then Anguish will become Lyonesse too.” Mark sounds completely unconcerned, almost dismissive.
“Bullshit,” Andrea snaps. “I don’t care that her husband is Merlin Rhys. I don’t care that her nephew is the goddamn president. This club is yours, you built it, you’ve shaped it, you’ve bled for it. It is synonymous with you.”
For once, I find myself in complete agreement with Andrea. Mark clearly is not, however, and there’s a warning in his voice when he says, “Nevertheless, my mind is made up.”
“They will never accept Anguish, at least not this suddenly,” Andrea points out.
“She’s right,” Isolde says, looking at Mark. Her dress, which I know to be a pale pink, is nearly white where the moonlight hits it. “Everyone at Lyonesse is loyal to you.”
“Are they?” Mark asks.
The hairs on my arms lift. I can’t say why. He hasn’t shifted, his expression hasn’t changed. But that new note in his voice…
Isolde hasn’t missed it, the adumbration, the shadow. She can school her body and her face better than anyone I know other than Mark, but I still see the pulse pounding in her neck. She meets Mark’s eyes with an even look and lifts her chin. “Yes, my husband,” she says, and there’s no sarcasm in the word husband, no unctuousness. Neither is there apology nor pleading. “Everyone. To a person.”
There is the sound of crashing glass—bright and tinkling, a beautiful sound for such a permanent thing—and then my mind catches up with my senses.
Mark has flung his glass against the terrace, hard enough to make it shatter into pieces the size of raindrops. His eyes at night always look black, but tonight, with the red and yellow light from the lamps reflected in them, they look hellish.
“To a person? Truly? Be careful how you answer because I measure loyalty in very specific terms.”
Isolde for her part hasn’t jumped or startled, isn’t terrified. The pulse still pounds in her neck, and a flush is rising on her chest, but she keeps his gaze, and her voice doesn’t waver. “Maybe it’s not the loyalty that’s at fault but the terms.”
For a moment, Mark loses control of his face. And it is fucking terrifying.
His jaw clenches, his nostrils flare. His mouth, the softest part of him, becomes a harsh and ruthless line, and his eyes glitter from underneath those straight brows. It is the expression not of a man, not even of an animal, but of a vicious and sadistic god.
I only realize that I’ve stood to put myself between him and Isolde when Isolde reaches up to touch my arm.
“Tristan,” she whispers. “It’s okay.”
Mark’s eyes have moved to the place where her hand still presses against my shoulder. His mask returns, but it’s almost more unsettling than his anger, because now I know what it hides so well.
“Andrea,” Mark says. His voice is sharper than the glass shards glinting wetly from the terrace. “Leave us.”
Andrea, who has been watching this whole time with undisguised interest, stands up. “Of course. You already know what I think.”
“I remember.”
She slides a look at Isolde and me, and pure disgust flits through her expression. It infuriates me that she looks at Isolde like that—Isolde who didn’t even want to marry Mark, who was made by her father to be here, Isolde who prays alone in her garden every day like the trees and stones can store up her pleas.
But I’m not infuriated on my own behalf. I deserve that look.
Mark is completely still as Andrea leaves, and surely, he can guess what I can, which is that she’s only walked inside and just down the stairs enough so that we can’t see her. That this still isn’t private.
Maybe Mark doesn’t care. The set of his jaw and the slashes of color on his cheeks make me think he doesn’t. I turn to face him, blocking his view of Isolde.
“Sir—” I start, and he stands up.
I know—objectively from the attack at the club, from the gin I’ve seen him drink tonight—that he cannot be half the fighter I am. But my brain and my body refuse to register that knowledge as relevant.
Predator, that ancient part of my mind whispers, as it has before. Flesh eater.
He is a leopard or a lion or a bear. He is taller, larger, faster, stronger. He is made for violence.
He does not lunge or grab or even step toward Isolde and me. Instead he puts his fingers to a cuff link and starts unfastening it.
“You both have safewords, do you not?”
It is not what I’m expecting, not an accusation or a demand. But it does not portend safe things.
“Yes,” Isolde says from behind me. Her voice isn’t entirely steady.
Mark is on the other cuff link now, and when it’s finished, he tosses them both carelessly on the table. They sound like thrown coins when they land on a silver platter laden with fruit. He takes off his jacket now, his muscles so horribly, wonderfully evident under his white shirt. “Tell me your safewords. Both of you.”
“Why, sir?” I ask. My heart is beating with the hard rhythm of battle, and I’m poised to defend Isolde against anything he wants to do. She doesn’t deserve this.
I also can’t drag my eyes from where his hands make efficient work of his shirtsleeves, from his newly exposed forearms. I can see the tendons and muscles moving under the ink of his tattoo. A bird of prey midflight, which feels very apt right now.
“So I know you know how to stop me,” Mark says. And then his hand drops to his belt. At the sound of it leaving its loops with a leather hiss, my body responds. A clench deep in my guts, the thick pulse of my stiffening cock. Even my nipples feel tight.
But I won’t let him beat Isolde for this, even if she gets off on being beaten. He needs to understand how this happened; he needs to know that this isn’t about loyalty. He needs to know about the yacht.
He needs to know that we love him.
Next to me, in her chair, I hear a shuddering exhale. When I look down to Isolde, her cheeks are scarlet and her nipples are pushing against her dress.
“I want to know what this is about,” she says.
He drops the belt on the ground. “Safewords first.”
She and I look at each other, and I see my own helplessness mirrored there. Nothing good will come of him dragging the truth out of the light while he’s unbelted and furious…and also we are helpless thralls when it comes to Mark and nothing good. We pine for his nothing good. We jerk off to it, pant for it. Maybe even fuck other people just to feel close to it.
“Hazel,” I say, staring at her.
“Hyssop,” Isolde says, without her eyes leaving mine. “My safeword is hyssop.”
“Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean,” Mark says, and I vaguely recognize the words. A psalm, I think. One of the angsty King David ones. “Do you need to be cleansed, Isolde?”
A pause. Whatever moves through her eyes then, I don’t entirely understand, but it breaks my heart.
“Yes,” she says, closing her eyes. “Yes, I do.”