Chapter 44
We creepup to the apartment, giggling like teenagers trying not to get caught, half naked and sticky with fluid and lube. The Samhain party is still ramping up, with the hallways crowded and music thumping from the hall, and I can’t deny the excitement in the air, the feeling like mischief and potential and something primal and necessary is shimmering just within reach.
When we get to the apartment, Mark closes the door behind us, and then we all just grin at each other like fools. Fools who think they’ve found the escape hatch to every problem and the escape hatch is just giving in, is just taking what you want anyway.
We shower together, washing, and then Tristan and I washing Mark together, smiling at his renewed arousal, the insatiability of him. Erect, he drags us out of the shower, gives us the most cursory of pats with big fluffy towels, and then pulls us to the bed. A few minutes later, he’s on all fours above my face as he fucks my mouth, one hand reaching back to hold Tristan’s face between his cheeks as Tristan kneels behind him and eats ass like he’s never cared much for oxygen and will happily go without.
It doesn’t take long with Tristan tonguing his entrance and my mouth around him and he spurts down my throat with a whispered Jesus, you two.
Tristan and I can’t possibly come any more, we can’t, but Mark forces one more orgasm each from us, using a powerful vibrator and his filthy, wonderful voice. He can’t wait to wake up and do this all over again, he can’t wait to fuck me in the ass while Tristan fucks my cunt, he wants to see if he and Tristan can fit in my cunt at the same time. He wants to watch Tristan and me fuck, and then he wants to punish us; he has more turns left with Tristan, he reminds me, and he wants to make me observe his sordid retribution while tied to a chair with a vibrating egg nestled inside me. He wants Tristan and me kneeling in front of him so he can fuck our mouths at the same time, and he wants us both under his desk when he’s bored, our lips parted and waiting. He wants to make out with Tristan while I suck on them both. He wants to eat my pussy while I’m still asleep and then let Tristan fuck it; he wants to tie me up and make Tristan edge me until I scream.
A wicked, perfect future he paints for us, and we grab at it with both hands.
And by the time everything is finished—the bed a rumpled mess and the vibrator tossed who knows where—we are mussed and spent and limp as rag dolls. Mark turns on the light and checks over our bodies, our happily abused flesh, to make sure nothing needs attention. Then he kisses both of us, warm and brief. Good-night kisses.
We fall asleep in a warm tangle, moonlight dancing in through the water above us.
* * *
I wake an hour later,abruptly alert and clearheaded, as if God himself had called my name to summon me from my dreams.
The moon is bright still, and even through the excellent soundproofing of the club, I can hear the faint thrum of music.
I look at the clock. Near midnight. I look back over at Mark and Tristan. At some point, someone had pulled the blanket over all of us, but Mark’s leg is hooked around the outside, like he’d gotten hot. Tristan, who is between Mark and me, is draped shamelessly over Mark’s chest, and his fingers are slotted through Mark’s, the linked hands resting at Mark’s side.
I know what Mark meant when he said that his jealousy was a hurt that he never wanted to stop. Because I feel so many things when I watch them holding hands in their sleep, when I watch their matched breathing, their soft, parted mouths. I feel greedy and covetous and wounded, yes, and also fond and protective and…happy.
And the one thing I do not feel, even in the smallest amount, is lonely.
Its absence is an astounding thing. Weightless. Warm.
The watch.
The thought comes to me with a clarity that makes my pulse thud. This is the perfect time, the perfect window. Mark is deeply unconscious, there’s enough ambient noise humming through the club to cover my movements, and I have unfettered access to his things.
And I can save him. Save us all.
It’s too easy to slip out of bed, to walk silently through the room to the bathroom, where our costumes ended up in careless piles. I step over abandoned boots and fake furs and take the large silver watch off the counter. Mark is normally a bit neater than this, but we were in a hurry to get in the shower, to get to touching each other again. Understandably.
I find a short nightgown made of gold silk and pull it on. I continue walking through the apartment until I leave, as silently as a cat, and pad to my office.
There are a few things I keep in here that aren’t strictly necessary for evaluating antiques, and so I keep them under a panel in a drawer in my desk. A lock-picking kit, a small debugging kit. It’s the last that I pull out and set on my desk. And then I flick on my work light, a light meant for illuminating minuscule lines of filigree or ridges of oil paint impasto.
It works very well for someone prying off the front bezel of a watch and unscrewing the tiny screws the bezel reveals.
With my micro-screwdriver and micro-tweezers, I manage to get into the case of the watch, where—yes. Yes, that must be it.
I pull the tiny chip from the back of the case with the tweezers and hold it to the light, feeling the ridiculous urge to kiss it, like a priest with the holy host.
But this is holy too, in its own way. A way to pacify my uncle, a way to keep Mark alive.
I put the watch back together, a tedious process, and tuck the chip into one of the small plastic bags I keep in my office for the occasional stray artifact fragment. I need to return the watch, and then—well, and then I should get as much as I can, as quickly as I can. I’d considered taking the entire watch and trying to get into the server rooms tonight, but with the club so active and so patrolled for the Samhain celebration, it feels like an unnecessary risk.
But so long as Mark doesn’t need in his safe or in the server room in the next few days, I could find time to get what I need and then somehow replace the chip before he ever knows it was missing. Maybe I could get the Scales to clone the chip too…
I’m setting his watch back on the bathroom counter when I settle on a decision. The safe tonight. I could take a peek in there. I don’t think it will hold near the value of whatever’s in the server room, but it’ll still be something, and it’ll be so easy, and Mark and Tristan are so deeply asleep that I can hear their breathing all the way in the bathroom. It makes me smile.
I shut the apartment door and go into Mark’s office, the bag with the chip in it tucked into my robe pocket. I see my honeysuckle knife on top of the credenza and have the vague memory of setting it there as we were coming up from our playroom, too preoccupied with touching Tristan and Mark to have it in my hands any longer.
I decide to pour myself a glass of something from Mark’s credenza, a useful prop if anyone finds me in the office before or after I’m digging through the safe, and also it sounds nice.
I make myself a glass of neat gin, since I don’t have any ice to complete Mark’s signature drink, and then take a long swallow.
And then pause.
I lift the glass back to my mouth, sniffing before I sip. Juniper and citrus peel and coriander. It’s undeniably the scent of gin and even the taste. But there’s no burn of alcohol, no bite.
I take another sip and then pour more from the decanter into the glass, try again.
No, this is definitely gin-flavored water. I hold the gin up to the moonlight currently pouring through the window. I can see the faintest ribbons curling through the glass, almost like syrup. Like a gin syrup mixed with water and then passed off as gin in a decanter.
I… I am not sure what to make of this.
I set the glass down, pull on the archival gloves I brought with me from my office, and go to the picture on the wall that hides Mark’s safe. I’ll puzzle out the gin-water later.
I swing the frame open and then use my freshly liberated chip. It works like a charm; a flash of green and a soft pop. The door is unlocked.
I remove the items in the safe. Three wooden boxes, all told. Identical, slim.
The top one must be the one that Mark pulled out for Tristan last night. Mementoes of his dead husband, pictures of a grinning, charming man. I indulge my curiosity for a moment or two, using gloved fingers to wade through the pictures and clippings, holding one or two up to the moonlight. In one of the pictures, I can clearly see Eliot wearing the same silver wristwatch I just disassembled. Mark must have taken the watch for himself after Eliot was killed. I replace everything and close the box. My uncle will be interested in Mark’s past marriage, but I don’t know if it will be enough to convince him that Mark should stay alive.
Onto the second box, then.
I open the lid and set it aside, getting ready to flip through it as quickly as I did the first…and then I freeze.
There is a picture on the top, a candid shot.
It’s me.
I’m at a gala, I think, on the arm of my father. It was before I graduated high school, before I’d met Mark Trevena in my dojo.
And then there’s another picture, me at a karate tournament accepting a medal. First place in sparring.
And then another one, me in London, walking side by side with my uncle in Hyde Park while his black simar blows around his ankles.
The faded clippings and printouts of internet articles underneath the pictures are a mix of my uncle and me, going back to my mother’s death. Sometimes earlier, in the case of Mortimer. An article about his appointment to cardinal a couple decades back. An interview about the Catholic perspective on the Carpathian war. And then?—
Our engagement announcement, folded neatly in half.
A floor plan of Cashel House.
Another floor plan I don’t recognize, but with labels in Italian. My uncle’s name is typed at the top.
First stop, Ys; second stop, Rome.
Mortimer was right. Mark is planning something—but it’s not about the Church, not about the pope, it’s about my uncle.
And…me?
Why am I all over this box? Why are there pictures from before Mark and I even met?
Why—I don’t?—
“It’s old-fashioned of me to keep so much committed to paper, but I thought you as a saint would understand,” says Mark from the doorway to the office.
He arrived silently, is already leaning against the doorjamb with his arms crossed. Drawstring pants hang low on his waist, but he’s otherwise undressed.
You as a saint.
No.
No, he can’t mean?—
But here I am, his safe open, his wooden boxes in front of me. Here I am in the dark, in his office, alone.
And he doesn’t seem surprised in the least.
“After all,” Mark continues easily, “the Scales prefers paper, doesn’t he? We are alike in that way. I, of course, wouldn’t keep everything in a safe; I’m not a complete Luddite. But it is nice to have some things close at hand, convenient reminders for when the way forward is murky.”
The Scales.
How does he know about the Scales?
My hands are shaking. I press them to the glass top of the desk to hide my nerves.
“Why are there pictures of me in this box?” I ask. My voice isn’t steady, isn’t controlled, and I hate it, I hate that he’s now strolling toward me like nothing has changed, and I feel like I’ve been yanked underwater. Under cold, dark water.
Mark stops a few steps away from his desk and looks down at the scatter of pictures and articles. When he lifts his face to mine, it’s unreadable in the moonlight.
“You can’t guess?” he asks quietly.
I shake my head. I don’t trust myself to speak right now.
“I told you,” he says, “that first dinner of ours. Do you remember? I asked for you because I wanted you. Did you think it was because you were the Laurence heiress? Because I wanted to fuck you?”
I stare at him. I had thought that. That I was a business opportunity who also happened to be desirable.
“Your uncle, the spymaster. The head of the saints.” Mark’s voice is still quiet, but it is cold. So horribly cold. “The Scales, an identity no one can crack open. But what luck when I hear that his beautiful niece wants to join the Church when she grows up. His beautiful niece, a saint in training. His beautiful niece with her vain, foolish father who will give her away without wondering why an invaluable opportunity happened to fall into his lap without him seeking it. With her sly uncle, who will convince her the marriage is a sacrifice to God.”
Something runs down my face, fast and hot, and drops onto the desk.
“If I wanted His Eminence Mortimer Cashel, if I wanted the Scales, what better way than this lovely, sad girl, doomed to kill and kill again and forever be told it’s not enough. It’ll never be enough for God.”
I’m actually crying now, my lashes laden with tears, and I try to wipe them away. “I don’t understand how you know,” I whisper. “I don’t understand how you know what I’ve done.”
He gives me a pitying look. “I’ve always known what you’ve done, little wife. Since that first summer in Rome. I did warn you, didn’t I? That I’ve played this game a long time?”
“So was any of it real? Ever? What you said on our wedding night? What you said tonight?”
Something flashes through his face. “Yes, Isolde. All of that was real.”
“How? How can it have been real when our entire marriage is a lie?—”
“I don’t know!” he roars, and I step back, my fingers flexing instinctively in search of my knife—oh God, the knife he gave me knowing how I’d use it.
“I don’t know,” he says again, stabbing a hand through his hair, suddenly as undone as I am. “It wasn’t supposed to happen, Isolde. I was supposed to use you and keep you at a distance. I was supposed to play the part within the part, the untouchable man inside the respectful but unattached husband. But then things started unraveling, tangling, and I thought putting distance between us would help, truly. It helped nothing. You came back, and I wanted to trap you inside my rib cage again, keep you inside me and next to my heart.”
“Am I supposed to believe that?” I manage to say. My voice is thick and choked with tears. “Am I supposed to believe that this isn’t another layer to the deception? So you can use me to…to what? To kill my uncle? To find the Scales?”
“I can’t make you believe anything, Isolde.” Mark drops his hand from his hair and stares at me. His eyes are silver with reflected moonlight. “This would be an act of faith. But it would be faith informed by chess pieces and sweat and the way it feels to wake up in each other’s arms. The way both of us are with Tristan.” A harsh laugh. “If you believe nothing else, then you must believe that I would never have planned for a complication like Tristan.”
“And what am I supposed to believe about you and the Church? The saints?” God, I wish I had my knife. It’s close, so close, just a few steps away. “No matter what, you used me to get closer to them. To hurt them?”
Mark sighs. And then lifts a shoulder. “Yes, Isolde. I would like to kill your uncle. And probably the Scales. Even after I realized I cared for you, those plans did not change.”
I take a step, edging myself toward the credenza. My thoughts are nothing, fluttering wildly, leaves in a storm. He’s confirmed that he wants to kill my uncle. Even just him knowing about the saints is enough to condemn him to death. That my job is now to kill him without delay—that can’t be in doubt.
“But enough about my plans,” Mark says, stepping forward around the corner of his desk. His steps are easy and loose, and I remember the day he came into the dojo and showed me how to fight with a knife. How deceptively casual his stance had been then. How dishonest that cool, lazy posture. “What about yours, my wife? I would be surprised if it was simply to enrich your uncle’s intelligence with Lyonesse’s—or if it was only that. I have to imagine that your uncle came to the same conclusion about me as I did about him. I imagine that he knew he’d be safer and happier with me dead. And what better person to do it than the saint sharing his bed?”
He lunges then, fast, so fucking fast, and later I’m going to be so angry at Tristan for telling me that Mark had become clumsy in his retirement, slow and obvious in his fighting, because this is the fighting of a killer in his prime. His hands graze mine—I twist and step and fling myself at the credenza—he’s where I’m stepping, somehow, already—I’m going to lose, I know it with bone-deep certainty, I’m going to lose and he’s going to take the knife and stab me in the heart like Absalom.
“What the fuck is going on?” comes a horrified Tristan’s voice, and Mark misses a beat, hesitates a half second, and that’s all I need.
My fingers close around the knife’s handle just as I hook my heel behind his. I shove, and suddenly I’m straddling Mark on the floor, my knife to his throat.
“I thought you loved me,” says Mark, and he’s way too calm for someone a quarter inch away from death. He doesn’t even sound winded. Just arrogant as always.
But the horrible truth is…
“I do,” I whisper. “I do love you.” And I can’t afford to cry, not when he can still fight back, when he can still try to kill me, but the tears drop onto Mark’s face all the same.
That same tender thing from the playroom, sad and happy and wonderful, moves in his eyes. His throat moves in a swallow, the act lifting my blade up and then down, and then his hands find mine. Slowly, carefully, and I let him move my hand. I let him because I love him and I think I’d rather he kill me than I kill him.
But he doesn’t kill me. Instead, he moves my hand to the side of his neck. “I could survive a cut trachea, Isolde, you know that. The artery is here. Messy but irrevocable. And we both know you’re not afraid of blood.”
I stare down at him, at the silver-edged features, a marble god on the floor telling me how to slaughter him properly.
“Go ahead,” says Mark. Almost kindly. “It’s okay. I know you don’t want to.”
His eyes…his mouth. When I met him, I knew he was a devil, and when I learned he was my devil, I’d been terrified. And then grimly and dutifully resigned.
Somehow, I’d signed my heart away along with my soul. I took a collar and a ring, and now something’s broken in me. Broken inside my faith.
“I love you,” I tell him again, crying, and I lower my mouth to his. Right as I shift the knife—not to drag the blade over his skin but to roll the hard, blunt handle against the side of his throat while I use my hand to press from the other side.
A choke, not a cut.
Unconsciousness, not death.
He lets me do it. He could stop me if he wanted, but instead he lets me obstruct the blood supply to his brain while I kiss him on the lips.
I think he really would let me kill him, and oh God, I can’t think about that now.
I let go of the pressure on his neck as soon as his lips relax under mine, swiftly sitting up, tossing my knife to the side, and yanking at the sash to my robe. A tiny, shallow cut from where my blade had grazed his neck, barely enough to nick the skin, glistens in the moonlight.
I look up to see a shell-shocked Tristan, who’s witnessed the whole thing. I could chide him for being an awful bodyguard, but I don’t have any humor left in me, and anyway, I know why he’s frozen to the spot. Not because he doesn’t love Mark, but because he loves me. He loves me…and he’s just seen that he’s been in love with a lie this entire time.
I put my attention back on Mark’s unconscious form. I can’t bear to see the disgust in Tristan’s eyes right now. The horror. The recognition that I am a killer like him and like Mark, but so much worse because I am still killing. It’s still my calling and my destiny.
But then Tristan kneels beside me, and he rolls Mark onto his stomach and holds his wrists together for me to tie with the sash.
Our eyes meet when we’re done. We have only a handful of seconds left before Mark will stir.
“I’m sorry,” is all I can think to say. “I never wanted to lie to you. I hated it, every moment of it. But what’s between us, that is real. The realest thing in my life, I think.”
I sound like Mark now, I know, and the irony of it is bitter.
Tristan finds my jaw and cradles it. “I believe you,” he says simply.
I could be struck by lightning and I’d be less shocked.
It’s that easy? He just…believes me?
“And I heard part of your fight, and I don’t know exactly what’s going on, but I know he’s lied to you. And I know you’re supposed to kill him, and I know you won’t.”
“I don’t know what to do,” I admit. “I can’t kill him. I can’t not kill him. I can’t trust him, but I love him anyway. And he knows! He knows who I am and what I do, and he wants my uncle dead, and I…I just don’t know what to do.”
Tristan looks at me, at Mark, at the boxes on the desk. And then his gaze returns to me, and he gives a decisive nod. He plants a knee on top of Mark’s chest, as if making sure that Mark won’t be able to move if he starts waking up. “I know what to do.”
The certainty in his voice is magnetic, alluring beyond belief. “You do?”
“We can’t stay here. We need to go somewhere safe, and if we can get there undetected, then I think we can hide there even from Mark.”
“You’re talking like you have a place in mind,” I say.
“I do,” he says. “It’s called Morois House.”
“It belongs to Mark.”
“I know the security system. I think—I think I can cover our tracks while we’re there. And no one else knows it exists. Not even your uncle.”
My chest caves at the relief I feel at that. How far am I down the rabbit hole that I want to hide from the one person who gave me my God and my calling?
“And you said we… Are you really coming with me?”
Tristan presses his forehead to mine. “I’m coming with you, Isolde. But we need to leave now. We need to tie him up, grab our things, and slip out of Lyonesse as quickly as possible.”
“Okay,” I whisper. “Okay.”
And it’s that easy to break an entire life.
To break wedding vows and the wordless pledges the three of us made to each other not hours ago.
To leave behind all certainty and race into the shadows.
Luckily, Mark’s apartment makes the issue of restraints an easy one to solve, and within a few quick moments and only minor grappling on Tristan’s part, my husband is zip-tied in a chair, gagged and still groggy. Tristan is already out of sight, packing our things, and I’ve made the impulsive decision to take the contents of the three boxes with us.
But before we go, I’m dabbing at the accidental cut on Mark’s throat, a very shallow, short thing that I find myself irrationally worried about. Worried that it’s deeper than it looks. That it will get infected.
I finish cleaning it and look up to meet Mark’s eyes. Still dozy from the unconsciousness.
“So much for the honeysuckle,” I say. “The bad luck came anyway.”
He blinks at me.
“You knew all along. Why I was made of shadows and glass like you. Why I deserve to hurt and be punished. You saw that I felt that way even before I became a saint.” I step behind him, taking a small object from my pocket and pressing it into his hand.
Quartz from Ireland, carved into the shape of a chessboard’s queen.
“You were right to warn me about playing the game with you. I think this is you winning. Checkmate.”
We leave Mark there in the Samhain moonlight, the cut on his neck still shining with blood, his fingers wrapped around the chess piece, his eyes growing more alert and dangerous by the second. We leave with hastily packed bags and dark street clothes, slipping underground to Tristan’s car, heading for a private airfield on the outskirts of the city.
We leave the glass castle of Lyonesse and fly to an unknown fate across the sea.
And it won’t be until almost a day later, when we stagger exhausted into Morois House after jumping planes to trains to buses to shake any possibility of someone tracing our path, that I pull off my wedding ring and read the words etched along the inside, just as I’ve done every day since Mark put the ring on my finger.
Quarto Optio.The fourth option.
The same words inscribed on Tristan’s ring. And I am a fool, because it was right here for me to read all along: scratched in metal, indelible and fixed.
Mark wasn’t choosing war or diplomacy or covert action to carry out his plans. He was choosing us.
We weren’t pawns; we were the board on which the game was being played.
And if I hadn’t seen that obvious and horrifying truth…what else had I missed when it came to Mark Trevena?
* * *
To be concluded in Bitter Burn, coming early 2025.
(I know, I’m sorry!)