Page 121 of Honey Cut
“I can’t make you believe anything, Isolde.” Mark drops his hand from his hair and stares at me. His eyes are silver with reflected moonlight. “This would be an act of faith. But it would be faith informed by chess pieces and sweat and the way it feels to wake up in each other’s arms. The way both of us are with Tristan.” A harsh laugh. “If you believe nothing else, then you must believe that I would never have planned for a complication like Tristan.”
“And what am I supposed to believe about you and the Church? The saints?” God, I wish I had my knife. It’s close, so close, just a few steps away. “No matter what, you used me to get closer to them. To hurt them?”
Mark sighs. And then lifts a shoulder. “Yes, Isolde. I would like to kill your uncle. And probably the Scales. Even after I realized I cared for you, those plans did not change.”
I take a step, edging myself toward the credenza. My thoughts are nothing, fluttering wildly, leaves in a storm. He’s confirmed that he wants to kill my uncle. Even just himknowingabout the saints is enough to condemn him to death. That my job is now to kill him without delay—that can’t be in doubt.
“But enough about my plans,” Mark says, stepping forward around the corner of his desk. His steps are easy and loose, and I remember the day he came into the dojo and showed me how to fight with a knife. How deceptively casual his stance had been then. How dishonest that cool, lazy posture. “What about yours, my wife? I would be surprised if it was simply to enrich your uncle’s intelligence with Lyonesse’s—or if it was only that. I have to imagine that your uncle came to the same conclusion about me as I did about him. I imagine that he knew he’d be safer and happier with me dead. And what better person to do it than the saint sharing his bed?”
He lunges then, fast, sofuckingfast, and later I’m going to be so angry at Tristan for telling me that Mark had become clumsy in his retirement, slow and obvious in his fighting, because this is the fighting of a killer in his prime. His hands graze mine—I twist and step and fling myself at the credenza—he’s where I’m stepping, somehow,already—I’m going to lose, I know it with bone-deep certainty, I’m going to lose and he’s going to take the knife and stab me in the heart like Absalom.
“What the fuck is going on?” comes a horrified Tristan’s voice, and Mark misses a beat, hesitates a half second, and that’s all I need.
My fingers close around the knife’s handle just as I hook my heel behind his. I shove, and suddenly I’m straddling Mark on the floor, my knife to his throat.
“I thought you loved me,” says Mark, and he’s way too calm for someone a quarter inch away from death. He doesn’t even sound winded. Just arrogant as always.
But the horrible truth is…
“I do,” I whisper. “I do love you.” And I can’t afford to cry, not when he can still fight back, when he can still try to kill me, but the tears drop onto Mark’s face all the same.
That same tender thing from the playroom, sad and happy and wonderful, moves in his eyes. His throat moves in a swallow, the act lifting my blade up and then down, and then his hands find mine. Slowly, carefully, and I let him move my hand. I let him because I love him and I think I’d rather he kill me than I kill him.
But he doesn’t kill me. Instead, he moves my hand to the side of his neck. “I could survive a cut trachea, Isolde, you know that. The artery is here. Messy but irrevocable. And we both know you’re not afraid of blood.”
I stare down at him, at the silver-edged features, a marble god on the floor telling me how to slaughter him properly.
“Go ahead,” says Mark. Almost kindly. “It’s okay. I know you don’t want to.”
His eyes…his mouth. When I met him, I knew he was a devil, and when I learned he wasmydevil, I’d been terrified. And then grimly and dutifully resigned.
Somehow, I’d signed my heart away along with my soul. I took a collar and a ring, and now something’s broken in me. Broken inside my faith.
“I love you,” I tell him again, crying, and I lower my mouth to his. Right as I shift the knife—not to drag the blade over his skin but to roll the hard, blunt handle against the side of his throat while I use my hand to press from the other side.
A choke, not a cut.
Unconsciousness, not death.
He lets me do it. He could stop me if he wanted, but instead he lets me obstruct the blood supply to his brain while I kiss him on the lips.
I think he really would let me kill him, and oh God, I can’t think about that now.
I let go of the pressure on his neck as soon as his lips relax under mine, swiftly sitting up, tossing my knife to the side, and yanking at the sash to my robe. A tiny, shallow cut from where my blade had grazed his neck, barely enough to nick the skin, glistens in the moonlight.
I look up to see a shell-shocked Tristan, who’s witnessed the whole thing. I could chide him for being an awful bodyguard, but I don’t have any humor left in me, and anyway, I know why he’s frozen to the spot. Not because he doesn’t love Mark, but because he lovesme. He loves me…and he’s just seen that he’s been in love with a lie this entire time.
I put my attention back on Mark’s unconscious form. I can’t bear to see the disgust in Tristan’s eyes right now. The horror. The recognition that I am a killer like him and like Mark, but so much worse because I am still killing. It’s still my calling and my destiny.
But then Tristan kneels beside me, and he rolls Mark onto his stomach and holds his wrists together for me to tie with the sash.
Our eyes meet when we’re done. We have only a handful of seconds left before Mark will stir.
“I’m sorry,” is all I can think to say. “I never wanted to lie to you. I hated it, every moment of it. But what’s between us, that is real. The realest thing in my life, I think.”
I sound like Mark now, I know, and the irony of it is bitter.
Tristan finds my jaw and cradles it. “I believe you,” he says simply.
