Page 40 of Salt in the Wound
An essential condition.
“So he would…what? Cancel the engagement if we don’t comply?”
Mark responded without inflection.
“Yes.”
That didn’t make any kind of sense! My father had been the one to demand this marriage—and now like a petulant child, he was saying he’d stop it from happening at all? If we didn’t give into his horrific demands?
“He’s minimizing risk,” observed Mark over his glass. “It’s what bankers do. If he can’t be certain the marriage will happen, he needs to know in enough time to dampen the embarrassment, to control the narrative. And potentially to position you for another alliance.”
I had to admit that all sounded like my father.
But maybe…maybe this was it. My opening, my chance—a door left cracked by my father’s arrogance. Whether it was because he was that confident he’d bend us to his will, or because he was so stubborn that he’d see this arrangement dissolved if it couldn’t be sealed in blood, I didn’t know. But what did it matter, actually?
What did it actually matter?
I’d never chosen this for my father. I’d chosen it for Mortimer and for my church; I’d chosen it forme. How funny that Father was afraid I’d renege on the engagement because of my faith…when I’d agreed to be scourged by marriage because of that very same faith.
And perhaps if my father knew the truth, we wouldn’t be here in this moment; he’d be secure in knowing that I was fully committed. But there was no way for him to know the truth without also revealing how Uncle Mortimer wanted to leverage the alliance with Mark, and there was no way to explainthatwithout my loyalties becoming clear.
And it served no one for my father to learn that any loyalty to him ranked very, very low on a list of my motivations.
So the engagement couldn’t end. I’d come too far, changed too much, for that.
I closed my eyes and thought through our remaining options. If my father had gone so far as to speak to Mark about this, then he was determined to have it. In a battle of wills with Geoffrey Laurence, Mark Trevena very well might win—and so might I, although I never had before. But I had also learned a great many things from my uncle, and one of them was that pride should never come at the price of expediency.
“So we lie.” I opened my eyes to see Mark watching me. He still had the glass held up to his mouth, like he couldn’t decide whether to take a drink. “You tell him that we’ve had sex, and that my Catholic guilt has led me into a deep emotional attachment to you, and that you’re confident I’ll go through with the marriage.”
“You should know that your father has intimated to me that he’s already bribed your physician to keep him abreast of any physical changes. Or the lack thereof.”
Fresh horror washed through me. Pure, unwashed horror at the intrusion, the violation of it.
Theevilof it.
My own father, the same father who’d sat on a kitchen counter and kicked his feet while he allowed my mother to feed him her culinary disasters—the same father who’d never missed a school concert, a teacher’s meeting, a chance to swing me on his shoulders—had done this. To me, his only child.
Had my mother’s death truly changed him that much? Or had it been my mother keeping him good all those years, and then after her funeral, he’d reverted to whatever reptilian being he’d been before he met her?
Mark drained the rest of the scotch in a practiced swallow. “I can, of course, out-bribe your father,” he said as he walked over to the open globe again. “And you can change doctors. We can select one known for privacy and discretion; we can make sure they are properly bribed or blackmailed too.”
Mark used the wordblackmailso easily, so casually, that it startled me. I didn’t know why—what else was all that information he collected good for?
“But,” he went on as he poured himself more single malt, “we will have to contend with the possibility that we might be outmaneuvered at some point. He might flip someone loyal to us if he’s able to access the right leverage, or offer more money before I can counter. It’s a risk we have to take, but I anticipate we can minimize it as much as possible—”
“Wait,” I said, and then stopped, unsure of what I was going to say next.
He raised an eyebrow, thick and straight and a dark gold, nearly the same color as the drink in his glass. “Yes?”
“I—” I took a breath. “What are our other options?”
“There are no other options, sweetheart. We can lie and wait to be found out—or we can lie and blackmail someone into lying along with us.”
Sweetheart.
It was the first time he’d called me such a thing. Heat threatened to bloom on my cheeks; my heart was thudding. I had to force myself to think again.
Pride couldn’t come at the cost of expediency. And hadn’t I already expected something like this? Hadn’t I already anticipated that Mark would have sex with me? I’d intentionally given the green light when it came to my limits, after all, and after New Year’s Eve and what had happened on stage at Lyonesse, I had to admit that I wanted it.
