Page 115 of Honey Cut
He opens his eyes a little, slices of dark blue under gold.
“Nothing hurts like how I’m hurting right now,” he says quietly.
I think of what Tristan told me of last night, of the husband he lost and wasn’t able to openly mourn. I think of how he murdered John Lackland in cold blood years after the fact, revenge not just served cold but frozen into a jagged spear of ice. The kind of grief and pain it would take to fuel such an act.
I press my whole hand to the side of his face. Warm and stubble-rough. And then Tristan is kneeling, pressing his face to Mark’s thigh.
“Keep us in your glass cabinet, sir,” I say, and he stares up at me. “We like it there.”
“I am afraid of myself,” he says, but he threads a hand through Tristan’s hair. He twists his other hand in the fabric of my dress, just above my hip. “I am afraid of what I will do to all of us if I try to keep you both after all of this is over.”
After all of what is over?I nearly ask, but he’s hauling me into his lap with a roughness that steals the words from my lips and the breath from my lungs.
“But that is what safewords are for,” he growls and then bites my collarbone.
“Yes, sir,” Tristan says, nuzzling Mark’s thigh.
Mark lifts his mouth from my clavicle and finds my collar with his fingers. His other hand finds Tristan’s throat. We are both collared by him, both snared in place, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.
“No matter how this started,” Mark says in the low, fervent tone of a vow, “this is how it will end.”
forty-three
ISOLDE
I’m pulledby my collar to his mouth and given a hard kiss, and then he hauls Tristan up for a kiss too. There’s not really room for both of us in his lap, not on this fake wooden throne, but none of us seem to mind, and Tristan and I jostle for space, for Mark’s mouth, his attention.
I am floating anyway, floating right out of my body, dizzy and newly washed, and not with pain or atonement but with Mark and Tristan, as if they’re a holy fire burning me clean. Mark still wants me, and he wants Tristan, and he wants all of us together, and who cares if it’s messy, if it won’t be easy, if it doesn’t make sense? It’s the closest thing I’ll get to heaven while I’m a bloody saint, and I’m too selfish to throw that away.
Mark’s hands roam freely, from my collar to my braids to the inside of my dress, where he finds my naked breast and rubs the pebbled tip. He’s doing the same to Tristan, cupping Tristan’s groin, squeezing his hip, running fingernails over his throat.
“Ah, God,” Mark says, the words ragged. I can feel the massive pole of his erection underneath me. “The things I want to do to you two. Jesus.”
Tristan moans, his mouth now open against Mark’s throat, which is how I know Mark must be utterly lost to his lust because it’s the kind of familiarity I saw only after I agreed to be his wife for real. The kind of thing he loves but only allows himself to love in private: a submissive crawling all over him, worshipping him and practically purring in contentment.
“Isolde, on your throne,” Mark says. Pants. His antler crown is all the way askew now. “Dress pulled to the side. I want your cunt out.”
I do as he says, trembling with excitement and lust…and maybe even fear because it’s Mark and there is no love without fear. I am on the throne, arranging my dress how he wants, as he hauls Tristan by the tunic to me, shoving him to his knees.
“I know you like the taste of my wife’s pussy,” he says to his bodyguard. “So show me. Show me how much you like it.”
Tristan practically lunges forward, a starving man, his arms wrapping around my thighs to hike me closer to his mouth. When he gets his lips on my skin, we both moan, and Mark watches with hungry eyes as Tristan wastes no time in licking me open, in finding the swollen, tender jewel at the top of my sex and venerating it. The fake sword he wears around his waist scrapes against the floor, and I can hear the slide of his knees as he shifts and shifts, like he’s trying to lick his way into my body, one deep kiss at a time.
“How does it feel?” asks Mark, standing next to my throne. He’s watching with a tight jaw, with a flush across the bridge of his nose. “I know that mouth of his is something else. There’s none wetter or hotter. I can get my cock all the way down his throat, did you know?”
The idea of getting to watch that, getting to see Mark fuck Tristan’s mouth, is gorgeously obscene. I rock harder into the mouth in question, sliding my hand into Tristan’s thick hair. He looks up at me with wondering green eyes, like he’s the lucky one, even though it’s my clit currently being serviced with world-class enthusiasm.
“It feels good,” I manage to say, holding Tristan’s mouth right where I want it. “He’s going to make me come.”
“Yes, he is,” says Mark as he strips off the fur and then his cape and then his tunic. He’s only in the breeches and boots now. He pulls off the antler crown, but the gold torc remains around his neck, so like my collar but so different. It glimmers like the handle of my knife from the altar, like his flaxen hair. “He’s going to make you come, and then I’m going to fuck you in the place he’s made wet and ready for me. Would you like that?”
“Yes, please,” I breathe. “Yes, sir.”
“I thought so.” He loosens the ties of his breeches, exposing the dark-blond hair below his navel and around the thick root of his cock. Tristan is watching too, as much as he can from between my thighs, and his ensuing moans make me hotter.
And jealous.
And did I mention hotter?
