Chapter 42
Two hours later,and I can’t say how many people Mark has spanked or that I have kissed. The first time Mark told me to kiss a guest, I’d felt my cheeks burn and wondered if it was a test, but he’d only watched me deliver the kiss with the satisfaction of a proud host and not with any jealousy or cruel vindication, so I’d let myself relax.
But it is clear the whole night that the three of us are being watched, reported on. Guests come in, their eyes flicking to Tristan and then back to Mark and me, and more than once to my left hand, as if they expect my wedding ring to be gone. And then to my neck, like they’re surprised to see my collar still in place.
It comes to a head when a daring man dressed like a mobster from the 1920s says, after Mark waves him and the crowd of people around him forward, “I hear your wife gives out more than just kisses. I’d like a taste if it’s on offer.”
He’s smirking, and I recognize the gibe in his words, I see the way he hopes to needle Mark. To impress the people around him, maybe, or as some kind of Dominant dick-measuring gambit.
Whatever his plan, it doesn’t work.
“It’s not on offer, as it happens,” Mark says.
“You might want to ask your bodyguard about that,” the mobster says, still rippling with bravado.
“Or I could ask Dinah if your membership fee is coming due,” replies my husband. He leans an elbow on his throne and braces his head on his hand, and with his sprawled legs, he is the picture of a man completely bored. “I believe last year you gave me some information about your brother? I think this year I might want some information about you instead.”
The mobster tries to laugh, but it comes out strained. “My fee isn’t due for a while yet.”
“Hmm,” Mark says. “Are you sure about that?”
The people behind the mobster now are slowly creeping backward, like they don’t want to get accidentally snared in whatever this is and end up forking over blackmail material about themselves. The guest in question seems to realize that he’s fucked up. “Sir, I, um?—”
“You are not sure,” Mark clarifies for him. “In fact, you’re so not sure about when it’s due that you’re going to leave now and you’re going to find Dinah and tell her that there’s been accounting error and that your next membership fee is due tomorrow, and if you can’t pay it, your membership is forfeit. That is what’s on offer tonight. Tristan?”
Tristan steps forward and herds the guest back toward the door. All of his companions have already made quick, furtive exits, and he’s left alone to protest.
“I’m sorry, sir,” he says. “I didn’t?—”
“Don’t apologize to me,” says Mark. “It’s my wife you insulted.”
The mobster turns wide eyes to me. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Trevena. Really. I didn’t mean anything by it! It was just a joke!”
Mark keeps his head braced on his hand but turns a little to look in my direction. “He says it was a joke, my little queen. Did you think it was funny?”
I suppose the kind thing to do would be to relent and not to condemn someone to the threat of blackmail, but I’m all out of kindness. If he doesn’t want to give up information about himself, he doesn’t have to. He’ll just be kicked out of a club where he gets his rocks off.
Some of us have real fucking problems right now.
“No,” I reply to my husband. “I didn’t think it was funny.”
Mark turns back to the mobster and shrugs, like, Queens. What can you do?
And then with visible pleasure, Tristan shoves him out of the room.
“God,” Mark says, turning his head so that his fingers can press in at his temples. “Enough.”
“Sir?” Tristan asks from the door.
“That’s enough,” Mark says, scrubbing his hands down his face. There are shadows under his eyes, and the torches show off the gold stubble on his jaw and the white scar in his hair. He looks more tired than I’ve ever seen him. “Shut the door, Tristan. No more people just now. I can’t.”
Tristan shuts the door, and then it’s only the three of us and the snapping of the torches as the veil behind us flutters.
“Isolde,” Mark says into his hand. “Come here.”
Dread is heavier than gold, heavier than the darkness crowding where the torchlight can’t reach. But I am all out of choices, all out of plans. There is only one plan, and that is to get Mark’s watch and then hope…and pray…
I stand and take the two steps to Mark’s throne, coming to a stop between his booted feet. He doesn’t look up at me. Behind me, I hear Tristan come closer and then stop.
“I am tired,” murmurs Mark, “of denying myself what I want.”
“And what is that?” I ask in a whisper, afraid to know.
He lifts his head to look at me, and then his stare moves behind my shoulder to Tristan.
“You,” he says to his bodyguard, and then he looks back to me. “And you.”
I’m not sure I understand what he’s saying.
“I want you both, and I’m sick of it,” he goes on. “I feel like all I do is want, and all I am is jealousy, and sometimes I think I could tear out my own veins, I’m so fucking afflicted with this…this needing. This wasn’t supposed to happen. You were a plan, Isolde, and Tristan, you were a mistake, and both had very specific limits on them. And now I find that I can’t stop craving my mistake and that my plan—my business arrangement—has somehow become the reason I get out of bed in the morning.”
I swallow as he drops his hand away from his face. Even though I’m standing in front of him, even though I’m looking down into his face and he’s looking up into mine, I feel like I did the day I was fitted for my wedding gown. A blown petal in his palm. A single drop of blood shivering on the edge of a knife.
“I hate that you two have fallen in love with each other, which is the most ridiculous fucking thing I can think of, given the circumstances,” he says, his head falling back against the throne. It knocks the circlet askew the tiniest bit, mussing his perfect hair. It makes him look youthful somehow. Careless. “I covet every look you’ve cast each other’s way. Every instant you’ve linked hands. Every glimpse you’ve given each other into your secret hearts. I want them all and I want to lock them up in a glass cabinet and lock the two of you in a glass cabinet and keep you both trapped forever, mine, mine, and yet when I think of you two together, the jealousy is like—” He waves a hand, his jaw tense. Then he presses the heel of his palm to the place over his heart. “It hurts like praying hurts, like a good scene hurts. Like a hurt that hurts so good, I never want it to stop. A hurt that could keep me alive, if I let it.”
“What are you saying, sir?” Tristan asks. He’s right behind me now, and he touches the small of my back, a firm, warm touch. Like he wants to reassure me.
Mark laughs, and it’s caustic and tired and also soft and sad. Above all, it’s self-deprecating. As if he can’t believe himself, but he’s given up trying. “I’m saying I want you both. In my bed. All the time. I want you both to be mine, and I also want you to be each other’s. Not only because I don’t think I can stop whatever has grown between you, but because I don’t want to. I could have told anyone months ago that the two of you would wind up needing each other, but I couldn’t have known what the two of you needing each other would make me feel like.”
“What does it make you feel like? Not only jealous, I hope,” I whisper, and I dare to touch him, to ghost my fingers over his face.
His eyes flutter closed, long lashes against his proud cheeks.
“No,” he murmurs. “Not only that.”
“I love you,” I tell him for the first time. For the first time since we got married, since I consented to the engagement, since he walked into my dojo and taught me how to hold a knife like I meant it. “I love you, and it hurts. It hurts like how you’re hurting right now.”
He opens his eyes a little, slices of dark blue under gold.
“Nothing hurts like how I’m hurting right now,” he says quietly.
I think of what Tristan told me of last night, of the husband he lost and wasn’t able to openly mourn. I think of how he murdered John Lackland in cold blood years after the fact, revenge not just served cold but frozen into a jagged spear of ice. The kind of grief and pain it would take to fuel such an act.
I press my whole hand to the side of his face. Warm and stubble-rough. And then Tristan is kneeling, pressing his face to Mark’s thigh.
“Keep us in your glass cabinet, sir,” I say, and he stares up at me. “We like it there.”
“I am afraid of myself,” he says, but he threads a hand through Tristan’s hair. He twists his other hand in the fabric of my dress, just above my hip. “I am afraid of what I will do to all of us if I try to keep you both after all of this is over.”
After all of what is over?I nearly ask, but he’s hauling me into his lap with a roughness that steals the words from my lips and the breath from my lungs.
“But that is what safewords are for,” he growls and then bites my collarbone.
“Yes, sir,” Tristan says, nuzzling Mark’s thigh.
Mark lifts his mouth from my clavicle and finds my collar with his fingers. His other hand finds Tristan’s throat. We are both collared by him, both snared in place, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.
“No matter how this started,” Mark says in the low, fervent tone of a vow, “this is how it will end.”