Page 11 of Honey Cut
I hear everything in acute detail just then, like the world has become sharper. The honk and roar of traffic below, the clatter of the servers behind us. The breeze, ever present up here, ever split and sundered by glass and steel.
My pulse is surging again, lashing at the inside of my veins, and then Mark drops his mouth to my skin. To my shoulder, to be precise. And I only have a moment to marvel at the first touch of his lips since that day on my father’s desk before pain blares through me, my nerves sparking, my breath catching.
He bit me.
I feel the swipe of his tongue at the precise moment the pain decants itself into something else, something that makes me feel clean and dirty all at once. I want more of it. I want to be plunged into the place where pain turns into freedom, where pain becomes a refining fire and a cleansing water, a baptism unlike any other.
“For my Lyonesse guests. If they know what to look for,” he says. He runs a thumb over the bite, and I shiver. “You’re so lovely when bitten.”
He smooths the chiffon back over my shoulder. Just like my leg through the slit, the bite will only be visible when I move or when the breeze is just right.
I have so much practice finding my center. When I’m tired, when I’m hurting. When God feels so far away that it’s like losing my mother all over again. But right now, with the impression of Mark’s teeth stamped onto my skin, I’m struggling.
It isn’t until I turn to see Tristan at the far edge of the terrace, his stricken gaze on Mark and me, that I remember the Isolde I was just a few seconds ago.
“Ah,” says Mark, looking at the elevator. “There’s the first of our guests now.”
* * *
A few hours later,the sun is gone, the stars are out, and I’ve found my footing once again as Isolde Laurence. Despite the devil occasionally at my side—and his wicked bite on my shoulder—this is a familiar dance. The rich, the powerful, partaking in the fruits of capital while music plays and champagne circulates.
I was born to be the perfect daughter in this world; my uncle, the cardinal, trained me to be the perfect spy. His little church mouse, gathering crumbs of gossip and scandal, of details both banal and salacious, to carry back to him. It wasn’t until I was in college that I fully appreciated what he did with this information, how he pieced it into a mosaic of the world. I’d known that he’d collected intelligence for the Church…but what use was intelligence if it wasn’t acted on?
And so it was—and is—my uncle’s job to act.
Or to have people like me, his saints, act for him.
I talk and smile and listen and automatically file away the kinds of details Uncle Mortimer is always interested in hearing. Who has new contracts in Colombia, who is hosting which congressperson for Labor Day weekend. Which divorcée has someone new on their arm.
After I excuse myself from a group of bankers—including my grimly satisfied father—to find a fresh glass of champagne, I hear Mark’s voice chased by a woman’s. Just around the corner of the covered elevator bank and barely audible over the din of the party.
I look around the corner and see that they’re alone, Mark with his customary glass of gin, his watch glinting in the dark, and the woman with her back to me. She’s tall and blond, wearing the kind of pantsuit that looks like it was worn to work earlier, although it’s still crisp and perfectly unwrinkled.
Melody, Mark’s twin sister.
I duck back behind the corner, but I can still hear when Melody says, “A mere missing person might not make the news, dear brother, but a body will.”
“I’m surprised a mere missing person didn’t make the news, given that it’s the director of the NSA.”
“President Moore wanted it kept quiet until we knew more, but now that a body’s been found, I don’t think it matters. By tomorrow everyone will know John Lackland is dead and that he died in Thailand months ago.”
“A shame.” Mark doesn’t sound sad about it.
A pause. “You were over there around that time.”
“Now,dear sister, I think you’ll find that I wasn’t in Thailand at all.”
Melody says something that makes Mark laugh, a dark, low laugh that sounds the furthest thing from innocent.
I look to make sure that no one is watching me eavesdrop and see that I’m well shrouded by potted plants and that the guests are preoccupied with themselves anyway. I creep a tiny bit closer.
“—a commercial flight,” she’s saying. “To Singapore and back.”
“I had business in Singapore. And I wasn’t alone. Tristan was with me.”
Tristan was there? I glance back at what I can see of the party, but I don’t see him. Last I saw, he was trapped in a corner with his father, and it looked more like a formal reprimanding than a casual father-and-son conversation.
I shouldn’t be surprised that Tristan was in Singapore with Mark. He’s Mark’s bodyguard—of course he was there too. The real question is if Mark had anything to do with the NSA director’s death.
