Page 81 of Salt Kiss
“Let me know how it goes,” she says. And then her eyelashes dip, once, and she looks at me. “Tristan?”
“Yes?”
“You weren’t hurt during the attack or anything? You’re okay?”
It’s not something I expected her to ask—or anyone to ask. No one asks if a bodyguard is okay because the whole point of a bodyguard is that they’re willingnotto be okay for someone else.
“I’m okay,” I reply, not sure what to make of this, if I like it or if I’m vocationally insulted by it. “I wasn’t hurt. But it hardly matters, because Mr. Trevena was.”
“It still matters. But I understand.”
The yacht rolls gently under our feet. It’s a big boat, but we’re in the open ocean now, the dark coast of Ireland having disappeared behind us sometime in the night, and the rain has brought rougher seas with it.
“I didn’t think I would have to kill anyone after I came back from Carpathia,” I say, and I have no idea why I say it, because surely she doesn’t care, and it doesn’t matter. Those men are dead, and I would have done nothing differently anyway.
And I’m bad at talking about these kinds of things with civilians. How do you talk about killing people when it’s part of a job? Like paperwork or replacing a tire—except it’s paperwork that gives you nightmares, and a tire that you sometimes see in front of you when there’s nothing actually there?
“You were protecting someone you care about.” When she meets my gaze again, her eyes are clear. “And killing is a part of life, as far back as Cain and Abel.”
“Which is a story about how killing is bad.”
“It’s a story about how ancient Israelites thought pastoralism was morally superior to farming and city-building,” she says.
Uh. “That doesn’t seem like a very religious take on things,” I point out. “Maybe this is the real reason you’re not a nun.”
She doesn’t seem offended, although her shoulders move ever so slightly. A stifled sigh. “Maybe. But I know this: you kept people safe that night in the club, including my fiancé, and I have to think that was by design. Sometimes,” she adds solemnly, “God needs us to do his work for him.”
Twenty-Seven
Another dawn,another call from Mark. I step in from the balcony, not wanting the sound to carry through the neighboring balcony doors to Isolde, who is certainly awake again. She’s an early riser like me, although she doesn’t seem interested in the sunrise. Her curtains stay shut even after her light comes on, and even though I watch them as much as I watch the sun, they never so much as twitch.
“You should be to the Azores in five days,” Mark is saying. “After that the satellite connections aren’t great, so we won’t speak again until you get to Manhattan.”
Manhattan. Where he and Isolde will see each other for the first time in two years. “Have you spoken to Isolde since we boarded? Sir?”
A pause. Tonight I hear some voices behind his, and a breeze. I think he’s on the roof with some guests.
“I haven’t,” he replies.
“You should call her.”
“Every day you’re away from me, you grow bolder,” he says. But he sounds amused, not annoyed. “You let me worry about wooing my bride.”
“Yes, sir,” I say, although I don’t think he’s worrying about it enough.
As if he can read my mind, he says, “I’m already doing it, in fact. Right now. You’re there in my place to woo her for me.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Sir.”
“Bolder and bolder,” he says. Ice clinks. He’s holding a drink. “But it’s not stupid at all. Make her pliant. Make her smile. And by the time she arrives in Manhattan, she’ll be ready for her fairy-tale wedding to me.”
I frown. “I’m not good at things like that.”
There’s another pause, and I hear laughter, a playful shriek.
Mark’s voice is like silk when he speaks again. “I think you underestimate your ability to disarm people, Tristan.”
The heat crawls up from my chest to my cheeks. I can’t think of what to say back to him, but it doesn’t matter.
