Chapter 35
I hate sleeping alone.
I can survive it, and have for years since the nightmares started, but sleeping with Tristan on the yacht and then Mark at Lyonesse has ruined me.
You should never get a taste of comfort. It makes it so much harder to go back.
Mark chose his own room for the night, and when I came downstairs, the door was firmly shut and the light off. There was no sign of Andrea or the staff, although I was certain that she’d stayed to listen, just as certain as I was that the rooftop would be cleaned by morning, all the food and broken glass and semen cleared away like it had never been.
And there was no chance of sleeping in Tristan’s room, of course. So I slept alone, and I tossed, and I turned, and I killed people over and over again in my dreams, except this time I was killing Tristan over and over, his sweet green eyes going wide as I speared my honeysuckle knife into his belly.
I wake up bleary and bone-tired, on the edge of tears.
I miss my husband. I miss my lover.
And the loneliness is all the more crushing for those brief moments of having not been alone.
When I sit at the edge of my bed and test the tear-swollen skin around my eyes, I see that a newspaper, folded and crisp, has been slid under the crack of my bedroom door.
I stare at it a moment, imagining a life where there isn’t a newspaper under my door. A life where I could go find my husband and apologize and explain. Where I could keep Tristan safe from everything, from everyone. Even from me, because he doesn’t know me, does he? The real me who has possibly killed as many people as him, maybe more? The me who has lied to him about my past and my job and my future and the reason I’m at Lyonesse at all?
I look down at my hands, the misery of everything filling me like a well. I was supposed to marry Mark, seduce him, feed information back to my uncle. I was always supposed to live a lie. Only another saint would know the truth of who I was and what I’d done, along with my uncle and my confessor.
Why is it so jarring to realize that I’ve done it so successfully? Why does it make me so unhappy to think that Tristan is in love only with who he thinks I am, a fragile princess forced into a marriage with a former killer? Why does it terrify me to imagine what he’ll think of me after he learns the truth?
It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if he stops loving me. We can’t be together, and…and he never loved the real me anyway.
The most honest thing on the rooftop last night was Mark’s anger. How fucking dark is that? That vengeance and lust are the only things any of us can trust from each other?
I get the paper, not sure where to look. The Scales mostly manages these communications, and subtlety is key. But this is less subtle than usual—the crossword is already filled in with blocky penciled letters.
ItMustBeTonight
The words are all crushed together in the puzzle squares.
SafeHouseOrClub.
So even the Scales doesn’t know where Drobny will be. I fold the paper, thinking for a moment. I haven’t spent all my time in Belgrade unsnarling export laws and valuing Bronze Age bowls—most of my time in the museum’s basement has been sorting through all the information the Church has on Drobny, Kulov, and their business contacts. A safe house is suspected on the other side of the river, in the concrete communist-era high-rises known as the blokovi.
We’d even narrowed it down to a block, but which building and which unit was another question.
I decide the club is the best place to start. If he’s there, he’ll be there all night. Saves me a trip across the river.
I get dressed quickly—I’ll need to figure out how to manage Mark tonight. Tristan I’d planned for, had secured the appropriate things for, not that I feel good about it. But Mark…especially with how things are between us…
I tear out the crossword puzzle and flush the small square of paper down the toilet, make peace with skipping my prayers this morning, since I’ll definitely be praying before I leave for the club anyway, and step out into the main living area.
To my irritation, Andrea is there at the table with Mark, reading the same paper that was slid under my door. Minus the cryptic assassination instructions, presumably.
“It says the pope is experiencing some bad health,” remarks Andrea, not looking at me as I go to the buffet and make myself a plate of fruit. I’m never hungry the day of a kill—or after—but it’s dangerous not to eat. I can’t risk my body betraying me at a crucial moment.
“This is the third event he’s missed in a month,” Andrea adds.
Mark makes a noise, like Andrea’s said something ridiculous on purpose just to goad him. And then he looks up from his own paper to see me staring at him.
“I’ll say a prayer for his health,” says Mark.
“Does your uncle have any insight into the pope’s condition?” Andrea asks me, and I sit down, trying to hide my incredulity. Are we really doing this? Are we pretending last night didn’t happen, that Andrea wasn’t sent away so that Mark could screw Tristan against a table and finger me while I sobbed?
My cunt is still sore from his hand. My eyes are still red.
But my Laurence breeding is too strong, I guess—I can’t resist the pull of politeness, of pretense. As much as I crave the real, the fake is so much easier.
“I think the hope is that this is only temporary as the Holy Father recovers from his gallbladder surgery,” I say.
I can’t stop looking at Mark. At the morning-lit features and perfect gold hair and the silver watch on his wrist. He looks like he’s just stepped off a helicopter, and it’s impossible to reconcile with the nightmare from last night, with the utter pollution he murmured to me and Tristan.
What, still crying, my bride?
I can still feel his thick erection in my hand, the way it shifted in my grip as he breached Tristan’s body and impaled him. I can feel the slippery lube, the heat of the thin skin of Tristan’s entrance, the tautness of it as Mark stretched him open.
Mark meets my gaze and takes a sip of his cappuccino. His face gives away nothing, and his blue eyes might as well be lakes in the dark for how much I can see inside them. He was right to warn me about playing the game with him all those years ago. It’s like playing with a ghost. I don’t know what he thinks about most things, or how he feels, or even what he wants, other than my submission and loyalty. I don’t know anything about his first marriage.
Sometimes I don’t even know that he feels anything at all.
“I know your uncle would be upset if something happened to the Holy Father,” Mark says blandly. “For everyone’s sake, I hope his health improves.”
I break the stare and look at my plate with a nod of polite agreement. My uncle has always been rather neutral about the papacy—as a spymaster, his loyalty is to the Vatican as a whole, not to any one leader, and he was dismissive when he mentioned the pope’s health last time we talked. But it wouldn’t be seemly to admit that.
We eat as Mark and Andrea finish reading their papers, and then after Mark sets down his empty cappuccino cup, I learn why she’s here.
“We’ll need to leave now if we want to make it to the boat in time,” Andrea says, standing up. “Are you ready?”
I stand as Mark does, meeting him as he steps around the table. I need to set up my alibi for tonight, yes, but also…
Also I don’t want him to leave just yet. I want a moment alone with him. I want to kneel for him. I want to see his forgiveness made explicit. I want him to beat me at chess and then fuck my throat and then pull me against his chest where even his cold heart feels warm.
He looks down at me, lifting his hand to take my jaw in his hand. It’s not bruising, not like it would be in a scene, but I feel the trembling restraint in his touch. I think if Andrea weren’t here, if he didn’t have some place to be, I’d be bent over that table with my dress hiked up, and all that suppressed fury would be vented on my body.
I want that more than I can say. Honesty. Atonement.
Him.
“Andrea and I are visiting the club member on their riverboat,” he says. “We’ll be traveling some ways down the Danube, so we’ll be gone all day.”
“We’ll be sailing almost to Romania and back, so the member’s PA told us to expect to be back after midnight,” Andrea clarifies. She presses the elevator button, and it opens immediately, and she steps inside with a don’t take long kind of look at Mark.
“I have to work,” I say, pointlessly, after the elevator doors close again. It’s hard to talk with his hand on my jaw, but I don’t mind.
Mark nods. “Your bowl. I remember.” He leans in and carefully kisses my forehead and then my mouth, angling my face so he can more easily press his lips to mine. This kiss is closed-off and cold, but it is hard, and my eyelids hood as my body recognizes it. Like the apostle Paul in the book of Romans, it is the sin that dwells within me that craves this evil; there is no goodness in me left to crave what’s right.
“Mark,” I say. I hear the hesitation in my voice. Mark pulls back but leaves his hand on my jaw. “Before you go off alone with Andrea, you should know that I think she might be connected to Drobny…somehow. A colleague of mine told me that the club Jadranka took her to is a favorite haunt of Drobny’s.”
I keep the necessary lie about the colleague simple—I can’t tell Mark how I know about Drobny’s connections, and I also don’t want to diminish the very real warning I’m trying to give him with too much falsehood.
Mark’s expression is impossible to parse. “This club you speak of,” he says. “I believe you’ve been there also, have you not?”
I can’t deny it. Not when he has video evidence that I have.
I nod, his fingers still on my face.
“Then I might have the grounds to make the same claim about you. Are you connected to my would-be murderer, Isolde? Is Tristan?”
“Mark, please,” I entreat. “I don’t think you can trust her!”
Mark studies me and then says, quietly, “I would be careful about how you speak of trust to me.”
The elevator doors open to reveal a sweaty Tristan in athletic shorts and a long-sleeved shirt, pulling the earbuds from his ears.
Something shifts in my husband’s gaze. After a minute, he says, “I trust you won’t fuck the bodyguard while I’m away,” and drops his hand from my jaw.
“Sir,” I whisper, stung, a painful knot cinching abruptly in my throat, but he’s already turning away to go to the elevator, and within a few seconds, he’s gone.
* * *
After workingat the table for an hour or so, listening to the sound of Tristan shower and move around his room, I go to my room and get the small packet I’d collected from the museum basement after it was left for me there.
I debate whether to do this now or later in the day, but I settle on now because I don’t want him to sleep too late. Ideally he’d be able to vouch for my being at the penthouse tonight, although I doubt it will come to that. My involvement in a death has never been suspected, much less investigated, and I do my best to keep it that way.
Except when I knock on Tristan’s door and then open it, a cup of hot coffee in my hand, I find him stretched out on his bed, fast asleep already. No drugs, no Trojan horse coffee. Just on his back, completely naked with his arm flung over his face, black-and-silver ring glinting from the first finger of his left hand. His bath towel is on the bed next to him along with an empty water bottle, like he got out of the shower and told himself he was going to take a drink and then lie down for just a minute.
“Tristan,” I say, going over and nudging his foot. He doesn’t stir, his ribs and stomach moving in slow, steady breaths, his beautiful mouth slack and open.
He’s out.
I spend too long looking at him like this. The sheer length of him, the heavy muscles at rest. The sleepy cock, which lolls to the side, lovely and with thick, dark curls around it. Even his pose is unconsciously graceful, and I think of Renaissance paintings, of frescoes, of statues. The beautiful, unclothed hero at rest. I can’t trust that he won’t wake up while I’m gone, but feeding the spare tablet to him in his sleep is ill-advised. If he wakes up while I’m doing it, if he’s taken something else that I don’t know about that’s making him this tired…
I’ll just need to make sure I’m gone before he wakes up. I’ll leave a note so he won’t worry and alert Mark. And maybe he’ll sleep as long as I need him to anyway. We did have a hell of a night.
I cover him with a blanket, dump the coffee, and get ready to end a man’s life.