Page 48 of Salt in the Wound
I blinked at him, this cruel man I’d made an idol of, and he lowered his face, his mouth hovering just above mine.
“So you see? I am going to win. I will always win, not in the least because I know the game we are playing, and I know all the players, and I know the stakes. I will win because I’ve won before. I will win because I’ll die before I lose.”
His nose brushed mine, and then his lips ghosted over my own. My traitorous body responded instantly, craving more of him, his tongue and lips and everything.
“Decide what game you want to play, my honeysuckle queen,” he murmured into my mouth. “And then play it like you mean it. Even if you know you’ll lose anyway.”
And with that, he dragged his mouth to my temple and buried his nose in my hair, inhaling me. I meant to step back, to twist away, but by the time I could convince my body to pull away from his, he was already moving out the door, in long, predatory strides that reminded me of every time I’d lost or surrendered to him. In the karate school, on the stage at Lyonesse. Tonight in the library.
Once I heard the elevator chime and its doors close, I sucked in a long, quivering breath and let out a shattered sob. The tears came hot and fast and awful, and I bent over, unable to stop the noises that came out of me, unable to stop the pain.
It hurt, it hurt, it hurt, a thousand times worse than his flogger, than his fingers inside me for the first time. It was bad enough that I’d been forced into this marriage, but to have fallen in love with him too? To have been played, tricked, and now abandoned?
It was just salt in the wound.
And for my naiveté, my unconscious arrogance—my making a false idol out of Mark Trevena—I deserved it. Wound, salt, and all.
* * *
The daylight was makingmy room bright and horrible by the time the tears stopped. I had ended up on the floor somehow, curled on my side, and I was dizzy when I stood. Dizzy and yet clear, so keenly, sharply clear.
Like the entire world was made of knives and for the first time I could tell the spines from the edges. The live blades from the dull ones.
Mark thought I would hate myself before I hated him? He thought I would lose any game I played against him? He might be older, stronger, the devil sent to scourge other devils, but I was Isolde Laurence, and I had been forged for years into a weapon to be wielded against devils exactly like him.
Maybe he had no soul left, but I would lock mine away, where no one could touch it ever again, and when we met again for our wedding, we’d meet as equals. I would get what I needed from him and Lyonesse’s archives; he would get nothing that mattered from me. And one day, if God granted my prayers, he would feel the same crushing humiliation and heartbreak that I felt right now, naked and sore in my bedroom on a cold winter day.
I turned to leave for a shower, pausing as the thing Mark had been flipping between his fingers and then had dropped on my desk caught my eye. It was a holy card that my Uncle Mortimer had sent me after I’d come home from Rome. St. Julian the Hospitaller.
It read in swooping cursive underneath the prayer:Tu me superbus.
You make me proud.
And I would, I vowed. I would make everyone proud, no matter the cost to myself, no matter the pain.
My sins to save God’s kingdom, after all.
fifteen
PRESENT DAY
“Are you ready?” my uncle asks.
I turn away from the window to see him standing behind me in his black simar and scarlet skullcap, his hands laced behind his back. He’s framed by the grand dining room of Cashel House, the country manor just outside Wexford that’s been handed down through the Cashels for generations. My mother is dead and my uncle can’t own property as a cardinal priest, and so as the last Cashel standing, the manor is mine.
I’ve visited several times over the last two years, mainly under the pretense of overseeing an extensive renovation, but this time I came because I needed a few weeks on my own after my graduation from Columbia.
A few weeks before Mark came to collect his bride at long last.
Mortimer flew in from Rome two days ago to join me. For moral support, he said, although the last two days have been more about strategy than support. Mark and I have barely seen each other since that night in my penthouse—just the once for a fake collaring ceremony where he barely touched me and Dinah shuffled me into a car right after—and my uncle is eager for information at long last. Gossip, observations. Eventually, whatever treasures are inside Lyonesse’s electronic archives, the payments rendered for joining Mark’s depraved kingdom.
“Of course,” I say evenly. “It’s what we’ve been waiting for.”
My uncle steps forward to join me at the window, and I turn to follow his gaze. Cashel House looks out over a cliff-hedged cove, the shallow waters a gorgeous turquoise against the darker, deeper blue. There is a summer storm scudding overhead, forbidding and restless.
“You have made me proud beyond measure these last few years,” Mortimer says. His lilting voice is both serious and fond. “You’ve become everything I’ve hoped for and more. No matter what happens in your marriage with Mark, you’ve already brought God’s kingdom such strength and cunning that your treasures in heaven will be countless.”
I keep my eyes on the water. “Thank you.” Years ago, it was all I wanted to hear, but now my heart’s locked away, and my need for comfort along with it. A blade only needs sharpening, not encouragement. I don’t need his reassurances in order to keep slicing.
