Chapter 41
“…and that’s about it,”Tristan finishes. I can’t see his face because I’ve set my phone on the bathroom counter while I finish doing my makeup, but I don’t have to look at it to know that slashes of red have appeared on his cheeks. Describing how he ejaculated all over Mark’s shoe and then licked it up is hard to do with any shred of dignity.
But it’s not what Mark and Tristan did just a wall away from the apartment that sticks in my mind. No, it’s the casual detail Tristan mentioned in the middle of the story, about how Mark unlocked his safe with his watch.
His watch.
Why hadn’t it occurred to me that his watch could be a key? He always wears it, and when he doesn’t, he always keeps it secure and close. And if it’s a key for the safe, it could be a key for the server room as well…
“Ah, he’s texting, I need to get down there,” Tristan says. Mark is welcoming all the hedonists to Lyonesse tonight, giving them Samhain greetings and letting them know what wickedness is in store for them. Each room at Lyonesse has been claimed and then transformed into an otherworldly miniature playground, and while there will be dancing and partying in the hall, guests are also welcome to come do kinky trick-or-treating in the various rooms. They might get swats from a witch’s broom or get mock-kidnapped by a band of cheerleaders. There will be a little something for everyone tonight, if they want it.
I’m going straight to the room Mark and I have claimed, where Mark will meet me later, along with Tristan. It’ll be the first time I’ve seen Mark since last night, and I’m terrified. I’ve spent all day in the belly of a whale of my own making.
This was always the plan, Isolde.
Who are we to resist our own time to take up the knife?
I manage a weak smile for Tristan. He called to tell me what had happened last night—coming to visit me in the apartment alone seemed ill-advised—and I know he wishes he were here to hold me and tell me everything is going to be okay.
I wish that too.
“Isolde,” he says softly, seeing my thin attempt at happiness, and I just shake my head.
“I’m okay,” I tell him.
I’m not, but I can’t tell him the reason why. I can’t tell my husband’s bodyguard that I am supposed to kill him.
“He’ll forgive us,” Tristan reassures me, his expression earnest. “He might make us work for it, but he’ll forgive us, Isolde.”
His faith is sweet and touching. And ultimately pointless. Even if Mark forgives me, my uncle still wants him dead. God wants him dead.
And I’m supposed to be the one to do it.
Unless…
“I’ll see you tonight in our room,” Tristan says. “You look beautiful already.”
“Thank you,” I whisper, and watch as the call ends on the screen. I pick up a tube of lipstick, but I don’t do anything with it. Instead, I think.
If I could deliver anything my uncle wanted from Lyonesse’s vaults, would that buy me time? Time to wait and see what Mark is planning? Time, even, to dissuade Mark from doing whatever it is that he’s planning to do to the Church?
I know my uncle, and I know he’s a reasonable man, a man who prizes strategy above all. If I can prove that there’s more strategic value in keeping Mark alive…
Yes. Yes, this is it.
I feel like I can breathe for the first time since I stood next to the reflecting pool watching the elm leaves skate across the water.
This fixes everything.
I’ll get the watch, get something of value to show to my uncle, and then he’ll realize I’m right.
I won’t have to kill my husband after all.
* * *
The playrooms look incredible.I see a haunted house, Pygmalion petting his living statue, a fake doctor’s office complete with slutty nurses, a gender-bent Dracula with a bevy of brides, and what appears to be a cat café with naked human cats.
I think of how I’d stepped into this place three years ago, of how unnerved I’d felt seeing glimpses of sex and punishment through the windows of the playrooms. Of how staggering it was to see sex not as I’d always thought of it—either sinful or stoppered inside a bottle of Church-sanctioned marriage—but as chaotic and playful and often queer, and how it had sung out answers to questions I hadn’t known to ask myself.
Maybe it’s like that for other people too, that they sometimes find the answers before they ask the questions. Or maybe I wouldn’t have known to listen if I weren’t already asking myself these things, just deep, deep down where even my own thoughts couldn’t listen.
Our room is the largest and at the very end of the hall. Dinah told me this is the first year Mark’s ever had a room of his own, that usually he sits in the hall overlooking the mayhem like Hades in the underworld. But she convinced him to take a room because she thought his kinksters would enjoy a chance to get close to the two of us. Maybe even receive little punishments or rewards from us, along with a moment of Mark’s attention.
Mark had agreed but had left the planning of the costumes and the themes to Sedge, who then told me to do it because he had enough on his plate, firstly, and also because he didn’t feel comfortable selecting a costume for someone he barely knew.
I’d been completely lost—growing up, I’d been a part of fundraisers and galas and dinner parties so boring they made me want to pull out my own eyelashes, but I had no idea what to expect for something like this. And I understood Sedge’s reluctance to help because the idea of choosing a costume for Mark was incredibly stressful. What if he hated it? What if he found it embarrassing? I could no more imagine Mark donning a vampire’s cape or a fake doctor’s coat than I could imagine him willingly getting his face painted at a theme park.
Finally, the deadline to order the costumes had arrived, and I’d had no choice but to commit to a theme. I’d mentally flailed for a few hours and finally settled on a very literal interpretation of the Samhain party. Celtic clothes from the post-Roman era, a circlet of antlers for Mark’s golden head, and a matching circlet and veil for me. The room I had staged like an oak grove—or, at least, as much as any indoor sex room could look like an oak grove.
And when I step inside the room tonight, I’m not disappointed. Oak boughs hang from the ceiling, small torches burn in a circle, and shiny apples are heaped among piles of green and brown fabric made to look like mossy humps of earth. At one end of the room is an altar laden with bundles of rosemary and mugwort, bowls of fresh berries, and several burning candles. At the other are two wooden chairs, thronelike, the oak boughs coming to meet above them like a living canopy. Carmine strings of dried rowan berries are draped from the branches like a warning.
Behind the chairs, hanging below the oak leaves and berries, is a wide and gauzy veil. A small fan, out of sight, makes the veil flutter at eerie intervals, matched by the snap and flicker of the torches.
And for a moment, I’m forcefully reminded of my dream the night of the wedding. Walking with Tristan to a clearing in the woods, coming to Mark standing there in the dark like he was born to stand under the stars.
It had been so vivid, down to the smell of moss and the distant sea, to the way that Tristan had been the same but slightly different—half frantic and devoted and ready to run.
I could almost wish that I lived inside that dream instead of here and now. I think I was meant for a bloodier time. Maybe it would have been easier to be me then.
After a second’s hesitation, I pull the honeysuckle knife from the sheath at my waist and lay it on the altar next to the candle and berries. The rubies in the handle wink; the gold honeysuckle petals inlaid into the handle glint. It looks correct next to the other things on the altar, like it’s ready to work.
I take my throne and sit, arranging the dress—a thing made of embroidered gold cloth and filmy, translucent layers that exposes the outside curves of my breasts and the sides of my thighs from knee to naked hip. The nasty bruise I got running from Drobny’s men in Belgrade is more than visible, it’s framed by the fabric. Displayed.
My hair is in two thick braids hanging down my chest, I’m wearing sandals that tie up to my knees, and I have my gold collar around my neck. When I picked the outfit, I had sex in mind. It would be easy for Mark to slide his fingers into the bodice and touch my nipples, easy for him to pull the dress aside and have me mount him on his throne. Braids he could wrap around his palm, my backside and inner thighs easily available for his hand or riding crop or paddle.
But now, with everything that’s happened since Belgrade, I just feel cheap. A whore on a throne with a prop crown on her head.
How many of the guests who come in tonight will know that Mark had to pick my underwear off the ground in the garden last night? How quickly could the people who saw it have spread the tale?
Pretty quickly, I have to imagine. Lyonesse might as well be a church for how fast gossip spreads. And for its owner, the Dominant of Dominants, to have been humiliated in such a way… I close my eyes. Polyamory is nothing to be forgiven here; it’s as normal as monogamy at Lyonesse. Cuckolding, too, is a popular kink. But lying and cheating are different things from polyamory and kink, and no one who was there last night could have mistaken which they’d witnessed.
And I just want to scream at them all. At Tristan and Mark and the Scales and my uncle and God. Everyone expects so much of me, the impossible, and I’ve been so alone for so long, and how many more secrets must I be asked to carry, how many more sacrifices will I be asked to make?—
I hear a noise and open my eyes to see Mark coming in the room, followed by Tristan. Mark is arresting in his costume, a scarlet tunic layered over dark breeches, tall boots, a gold torc around his neck and a slender circlet of antler bone set into his hair. I didn’t order it for him, but somehow he’s also found a fur to wear over his shoulders. And I know it’s fake, I know the whole costume is fake, but God help me, he looks so real wearing it and walking toward me right now. Like my dream come to life.
I swallow as he approaches, and then I stand, uncomfortable sitting. I haven’t seen him since the garden last night, he never came back to the apartment, and today it had been Sedge who came to get his things so he could get ready. I assume because Mark didn’t want to see me.
And who can blame him?
My husband stops just in front of me and then casts his eyes around the room.
“This is nice,” he comments. “Very immersive.”
“Mark,” I start, not sure what I can possibly say right here, right now, to make things better. I love you, and I’m supposed to kill you, so I turned to your bodyguard for comfort?
I’m so lonely, and everything hurts, and I know you have every right to hate me, but will you just hold me for a minute?
But it doesn’t matter. Dinah comes in right after Tristan, already talking, her phone chiming in her hand.
“—they’ll start making their way down the halls in about five minutes, everyone’s been braceleted to make sure they are limited to two drinks while they’re going through the playrooms, digital waivers are required for trick-or-treating, and we’ve got the meeting rooms open and stocked with beds, blankets, lube, and water for fucking and aftercare. Andrea and I will be in the hall, and Goran and the security team are on alert. Is there anything else you need before you’re open for business?”
She’s dressed like an undead groom tonight, with a bow tie and a top hat and a trickle of painted blood coming from the corner of her mouth. She’s also wearing a latex corset and thigh-high boots, and the boutonniere fastened to her corset is made of condom packets instead of flowers.
Mark takes a seat on the throne like he does it every day. “You’re a credit, as always, Dinah. I’m not worried about anything.”
Dinah looks at me, Mark, and then Tristan, who has come to stand behind Mark’s throne. “I am,” she sighs, and then she leaves.
Tristan is also in a costume, one I’d had sent to him almost as a joke because I couldn’t imagine him bending the rules of bodyguard etiquette enough to actually wear it. But no, he’s matching Mark and me tonight in a tunic and breeches and a dark cloak. Unlike Mark and me, he has no torc or crown, but the fake sword belted to his narrow waist and the ring he wears on his first finger still give him a princely air.
And again, I have the strange feeling like my dream has become real, that Mark is going to turn to me and speak of pirates and Ireland, that Tristan is going to step away and I’ll see the notch missing out of the top part of his sword as he goes.
Maybe it’ll be easier to talk like this, if we are pretending to be something other than ourselves, but again, I’m stymied by someone coming through the door.
This time, it’s Lady Anguish and her husband, Merlin, dressed like?—
Well, like us, actually.
Anguish is wearing a white gown, sleeveless and fastened with brooches at her shoulders, her hair down and strung with delicate chains of silver and gold. She has a silver crescent moon—resting on its back like a bowl—painted onto her forehead, just above the place where her eyebrows meet. Merlin is in black—black robes, black cloak, all of it trimmed in silver—with a crown of oak leaves in his silvering hair.
Their clothes look so much better than a costume, like they too have stepped out of my dream, and I think about how Lady Anguish was in my dream, standing in the forest and waiting to marry Mark and me in the way Mark wanted. Under the stars, inside the stones.
“Oh, this looks amazing,” Lady Anguish says as she comes deeper into the room. Merlin is behind her, and his eyes stray to the fake veil behind our chairs. His mouth twitches.
“It was all my wife,” Mark says, and I’m relieved to hear him call me that, especially to Anguish, who was there in the garden last night. If he’s still willing to lay claim to me in front of her, maybe that’s a sign of something good. Something like forgiveness.
“It’s very inspired,” Merlin says, looking at me now. His eyes are dark, and they’re not cold, but they are perceptive in a way that reminds me of coldness. Like he knows how to lift up my skin and look at the blood-seeped tissue underneath.
“Thank you,” I say, and I’m grateful that I sound like my usual self. Well mannered. Graceful. “I thought it would fit the theme.”
“It does,” Lady Anguish says. “Doesn’t it, Merlin?”
“We celebrated Samhain where I grew up,” says Merlin with a smile. “I could almost be back home right now. Except for the central heating and the lube dispenser next to Mark’s throne.”
“My ideas for improving Wales are limitless,” my husband says.
“We just wanted to see the king and queen before we go up to the usual haunt in the balcony,” Lady Anguish tells us, tucking her hand into Merlin’s elbow.
“You didn’t claim a room?” asks Mark. He’s already relaxed into the throne, his knees wide and his shoulders back against the wood.
“We have another stop to make,” Merlin answers. “So we’ll need to leave while the night is still young. Ish.”
“I hope the three of you have a magical night. And remember that we don’t usually spill blood on Samhain these days.” Anguish says it like a joke to Mark, Dominant to Dominant, but her eyes move to mine, and there’s a moment when her gaze is just like Merlin’s. Seeing everything deep in my body and my heart, seeing past the blood and the fascia down to my chromatids and telomeres. Seeing my past and my future and what I’ve been asked to do, and that, like Abraham, I would make myself do it at the price of my own heart.
I’m frozen on the throne when she leaves.
“I like that Lady Anguish,” says Mark. “I’m glad I sold half the club to her.”
“You what?” I ask, looking at him, right as the door opens again and the first wave of trick-or-treaters come through.
He only shrugs but smiles to himself, and then our attention is stolen away by people looking for treats from their king.