Chapter 33
Mark doesn’t speak,but he doesn’t have to. The air is seething around him.
Isolde opens her eyes and stands and then gently presses on my chest with a slender hand. It takes almost no force at all for her to move me, and it never will.
“Scourge me if you want,” she says. Her voice is throaty but unwavering. “You know I want it, and you know I deserve it. But leave Tristan alone. He’s blameless here.”
I’m unprepared for her to try to defend me, protect me, with her pink dress and neatly tied bow and five feet two inches of boarding school manners and memorized psalms. I open my mouth to—well, to what, I’m not sure, but it’s ridiculous for her to shield me when it’s my fault and she has more to lose. And when there’s video evidence displaying that I’m very much not blameless.
Mark seems unprepared for this too because a harsh, ragged laugh is torn from his throat. “Blameless, wife? So you blackmailed him into pushing his tongue into your mouth? You extorted him into putting his hands up your dress and enjoying what’s mine? He hated every second of eating your cunt or sticking his dick inside it?”
Isolde’s chin is set in a stubborn, little point. “I won’t let you make up your own story about this. If you want to know something, ask.”
“Am I to be both the victim and lawyer of my own cuckolding?” Mark demands coldly.
“Why not? You’ve already made yourself the judge and jury.”
“Clever wife. And I suppose that you’d rather I presume you innocent instead of guilty?”
“Ask, Mark, if you really want to know. Ask what you really mean.”
He does. “Did you fuck my bodyguard last night?”
Isolde doesn’t hesitate, but I see the courage it takes for her to answer. “Yes.”
“Was it the first time?”
“No.”
I look back at him just in time to see him flinch. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him flinch—not when stabbed, not when sewn up on his kitchen table. And that flinch cuts me deeper than any invective or imprecation ever could.
He’s hurt. We hurt him.
I wish I could tear out my own ribs in offering.
“Has this—” He stops, and I realize he’s trying to wrest himself back under control. “Has this been going on since our wedding?”
“No,” Isolde and I say at the same time.
Mark looks at both of us. “Am I to believe that Belgrade is the beginning?”
“No, sir,” I say before she can. Not because I think she’ll lie, but because I don’t want her to try to shift any more blame onto her shoulders. “On the yacht. For about a week and a half. I started it.”
“He also ended it,” Isolde cuts in. “Right before we reached Manhattan. Nothing happened between then and two nights ago.”
“Nothing.” Mark laughs humorlessly. “Nothing but what? Glances? Goose bumps? A skipped heartbeat or an orgasm with the wrong name on your lips? My God, that I am jealous of this—” He shakes his head, as if he can’t believe himself. As if he’s surprised himself.
“I’m not any less yours,” says Isolde quickly, urgently. “And Tristan has never stopped being yours, whatever he’s told you. It wasn’t right of us to do it, of course we know that, but it wasn’t because we don’t need you or want to belong to you. Sir, I’m so?—”
His eyes flash at the sir, like she’s drawn a sword, and she stops.
His hands twitch at his sides, and abruptly I remember this conversation started with safewords. “I had one thing I asked of you, one rule that we were both to follow. Do you remember?”
“Of course,” she whispers.
“As faithful to you as you are to me,” he says. “The punishment should fit the crime, shouldn’t it?”
He moves too fast for me to stop him. It must be that I’m stunned, dizzied from this entire horrible encounter, too miserable to focus. Because he’s on me in a second, his hands fisting in my suit jacket and feet crowding mine until I’m off-balance. Protect Isolde is all that comes to mind, even though the logical part of me is sure that Mark won’t hurt her. Not nonconsensually, at least.
But the rest of me only sees a carnivore, an existential threat, and I have to keep her safe, except?—
Except he’s not trying to get to Isolde at all. He has me, he’s dragging me back to the head of the table, easily resisting my every attempt to get away. This can’t be the same man whose reflexes seemed so sluggish during the attack on the club, the same man who puts away gin like water, and yet he is too adroit, too quick, too strong to fight off. I’m bent over the table like a paid whore, and his hand finds my belt buckle and yanks.
Isolde’s stepped forward, horror on her face, and Mark tosses my belt away as he repeats, “As faithful as you are to me, little wife. So isn’t this fitting? Isn’t this just? A wergild for the death of our marriage bed?”
He has his hand on my head now, keeping one side of my face pressed to the table. But I can still see when she looks at me, hurt and anger and shameful desire mixing in her face. My cock is so hard that I think it might rip itself open. It’s wet at the tip already and soaking through my boxer briefs.
“Well?” he prompts. “Does it not solve our little betrayal? If I have the bodyguard for every time you’ve had him yourself since we took sacred vows? But I’m not without mercy, Isolde, I’ll let you watch.”
A whimper comes from her throat, and I don’t know if it’s agony or arousal.
“What about you, my knight?” he croons. He presses his hips against me, his obscene erection huge and hard and seeking. “Do you think that’s fair?”
I have a safeword. So does Isolde.
I can stop this. I should stop this. She should stop this too.
This will break all our hearts and make no one feel better and just give us more ammunition for resentment and betrayal later on.
I can stop this. One word and it’s done.
He kicks my feet apart, spreading me, and when he shoves against me now, I feel the drag of him through our clothes. The inflexible bar moving against the place where I split open. His hand on my head is large and implacable.
It feels like everything I never knew to want until I met Mark.
I meet Isolde’s eyes again, and they are a shade of desperate turquoise that I’ve only seen in a bare handful of circumstances. When she was cuffed to a bed on Lyonesse’s stage, when she sat on the deck of Mark’s yacht in a green dress and cried salt down her face.
She’s caught in the same storm I am, a storm of no no no, where the eye of the hurricane is God, yes, do it.
How can I ever explain that to anyone else other than her? Anyone who hasn’t been caught and conquered by Mark Trevena? That sometimes my noes and my yeses mix together, that I want to be made to do something I know is vile and hurtful and immoral on top of it all? That I will let him do whatever he wants to me even when I don’t know what I actually want myself?
Is it love? Obsession? Something indelible to me that makes me crave being told what to do, how to do it, whether it’s how to make a bed or how to offer my open throat?
Isolde closes her eyes for a minute, a tear tracking down her cheek to run along her jaw and drop off her chin. It falls to the bodice of her dress, where her nipples are still crudely pushing against the soft fabric.
I understand. I’m close to crying myself when I finally answer, “Yes, sir. I think it’s fair.”
She and I deserve to be punished. Worse, we want to be punished. Worse still, we want anything from him, of him, punishment or forgiveness or love or respect or anger or pleasure—there is no difference. It all comes from the same center; it’s all the same in the end.
It’s all him.
I see his free hand in the corner of my vision. He’s beckoning to Isolde.
“Come here, little wife,” he says. “You’re going to help.”
“Help,” she echoes. She’s opened her eyes again, and her lashes are wet. “You want me to help with this.”
“You know how to stop me. You know how to bring everything to a pause with only one word, so if you want to push me to test my will or if you want to push me to stall, that’s fine. If you want to make it clear that I am the monster here, then by all means. But do not pretend that you can’t stand up and leave the game any moment you choose.”
Her chin lifts a little—that flare of competition. She hates to lose, and more than that, she hates having her warped and murky consent dragged into the light, just as I do.
Isn’t it enough that we were built to want this?
Do we have to own up to it as well?
But she can no more leave the game than she could walk away from an unfinished chessboard. She steps forward, and then I can’t see her anymore. Only the heat lamps and the stars and Mark’s fingers at the edge of my vision.
“Unfasten his pants,” Mark tells her. “I need access.”
With a shaky breath, she complies, and I feel her hands on my waist and then on the hook and bar of my pants. Then on the zipper. There is pressure and grazing and the ghost of her fingertips over my throbbing erection, over the hair-dusted skin below my navel. My stomach clenches.
“Pull them down,” says Mark. “Then everything else.”
Her fingers curl around the waist of my pants and underwear, and then it’s all tugged to my ankles.
“Shoes,” Mark tells her, and there’s a dark satisfaction in his voice that sends fear and lust zipping down my spine. He’s getting off on this, on humiliating us. Her hands shake as she unties my shoes and then pulls them off my feet, a little awkwardly. My pants and underwear are pulled all the way off, and I feel so embarrassed and exposed right now, still in a suit jacket and tie, and then wearing nothing but socks and a bobbing erection below the waist.
Mark ameliorates this a little when he tells her to take off my jacket too, which happens just as awkwardly as the shoes, given my position on the table and Mark’s refusal to step away or stop pressing my head down against its surface. But the embarrassment is still there when he runs his hand up my naked flank and under my shirt. I shiver as his fingers tickle over my ribs. One of his feet plants beside my own and traps it. His dress shoe against the socked edge of my foot.
“In my suit pocket, on the inside, there’s a condom and a packet. Will you get them for me?”
How like Mark, to have a condom and lube inside his bespoke suit jacket just in case he needs to fuck. Of course, he probably had all of this planned for tonight. From the moment Andrea sent him the video, he must have been burning with the need to hurt us both in return.
Isolde must have gotten what he asked for because he says, “Take it out and put the condom on me.”
I hear fabric—Mark’s pants being parted and pushed down—and then the slide of skin on skin, like she can’t resist giving it a stroke. The tear of a packet and the slick sounds of wet latex.
I wonder if she’s looking at his sex or if she’s looking up into his face or if they’re both looking at me. I feel abruptly both extraneous to them and also the fulcrum on which their wedding vows tilt. It makes me miserable, and it makes me glow, and I don’t know what I feel.
“Now the lube,” Mark says in a low voice.
Another tearing noise and then a pause.
Mark seems to be answering an unspoken question. “On him, Isolde. Inside him. Work him open and get his hole ready for me to take.”
I nearly groan. My whole body feels as tight as a piano wire, ready to snap at any moment. This is sick. This is sick.
She should hesitate now. This is when she should hesitate, think about her safeword, question herself. Lubing up an asshole for her angry husband to fuck in front of her. Instead, her fingers are on me immediately, slippery and cool and slender, painting the pleated skin with lubricant and sending sharp thrills lancing through my belly.
“Inside too,” Mark reminds her. “As deep as you can get.”
And then I feel the press and test of her fingers against the ring of muscle. The fingers that had just been carefully slivering apart patisserie and holding unnecessarily expensive stemware, the fingers that can flip a knife faster than the eye can track, that work over her mother’s rosary every morning—they are now sliding inside my entrance, first one and then a second.
I grunt a little, moving instinctively away from the intrusion, but, of course, there’s nowhere to go. I’m bent over the table with Mark’s hand on my head, and the edge of the table is already biting into my hips. My poor cock is trapped below the edge, a turgid and pitiful thing leaking at the slit.
Mark kicks my foot back a little from where it tried to move, trapping it once again.
We’ve barely done this, Isolde and I, just once on the yacht, and then we didn’t have any lube at all, just her own slick that she used to feel the inside of me. It made me so hot that I flipped her over and started fucking her before she could do more than a cursory exploration.
But now I’m trapped, and now Mark is here, saying cold, tremble-inducing things like deeper, turn your wrist, fingers down, feel that? See him jump? Rub it there, yes, like that.
My head can’t roll with his hand where it is, but I’m still trying, the pleasure and pressure as he supervises Isolde working my prostate like something unsurvivable. I can barely breathe, and I’m so past being embarrassed now, trying to move away, trying to fuck against her hand, just trying to move at all, because the sensation is inside me, in my bones, thrumming up to my scalp and buzzing at the soles of my feet.
“Enough,” says Mark finally, when I’m to the point where I’m moaning like someone dying.
Isolde withdraws her fingers—I give a disconsolate groan—and then Mark says, “Put me in,” and I don’t think I can do it. I don’t think I can live through Isolde guiding Mark’s flesh inside me.
I can’t see her face, can’t see her wrap her fingers around him, but I feel the huge press of him against my rim and the familiar terror of that first few seconds when it feels impossible, like being wedged right in half.
He is too big, too big for anything, and my toes are curling and pain is pricking goose bumps all over my skin. But my cock is leaking and leaking now, and I know if I could see it, I’d see long strings of pearly fluid. I’m shuddering and it’s like I’m already climaxing, but it keeps rolling on and on as he gives me several rough shoves until he’s fully seated, with only Isolde’s fingers between the base of his cock and my stretched opening. She strokes the skin there before removing her hand, a light, almost licking touch, and I shudder some more.
“You never answered me,” Mark says. The words come out over gravel, asperous and shredded. “Is this a fair requital for what you’ve done, little wife? Will this balance the scales between us?”
Her hand has moved to the small of my back now, still damp from the lube, her fingertips pressing in possessively. “I suppose that’s up to you,” she says in a low voice.
“That’s a good point,” he says, and he is still stroking himself with me all this time, still pressing in and circling his hips to get even deeper. “How many times have you fucked each other since our wedding?”
Shame burns in Isolde’s voice as she lifts her hand from me. “Three.”
“Three times.” Mark’s voice is cold enough to freeze the moisture in the air. “Yes, perhaps this isn’t enough.”