Page 3 of Honey Cut
“Why?” he asked the young woman. His voice was gasping, grating. “Nebraska? Is that all?”
“All?” Disgust flitted across her face. “What would be enough, Your Grace? Two Nebraskas? Three? You with millions of souls already in your care having billions instead, and all for the price of your own? Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but underneath are ravenous wolves.” She stepped back, over to the window. The knife flashed, and he heard the snap of metal as she used its flat edge to pop open the lock. The window swung open.
“Where are you going?”
“There is one more after you,” she said. It looked like her hands were shaking the tiniest amount. “Just a couple streets over. A deacon.”
“You can’t—” Stitt found he could barely breathe. He was horribly cold. “You can’t,” he finished in a voice that was no longer a voice.
“But God can,” said the young woman, and she climbed onto the windowsill.
Stitt was dead before she was gone.
one
ISOLDE
PRESENT DAY
Manhattan crawls,seethes, in a summer haze below me, glass and metal and hot concrete choking the leafy tangle of Central Park.
It’s home, but it doesn’t feel like home. I feel like I’m still on the waves, untethered. Still on a yacht, being brought from my family’s ancestral seat to the home I know best, for a wedding I never asked for.
Maybe it doesn’t feel like home because of where I am—a slick high-rise stocked with blindfolds and rope and custom furniture. Or maybe it’s because of whom I’m in this high-rise with—Tristan Thomas, the man who stole my heart in the shattered moonlight of the Atlantic. Along with another man, the man who broke that same heart three years ago with the blood from my hymen still drying under his fingernails.
Mark Trevena. My fiancé.
I look down at the railing of Mark’s loft. My hands are pale and slender, the left hand glinting with rubies and gold. They are hands that have stolen, maimed, and killed. I try to keep them steady.
I have so much to do as Mark Trevena’s bride.
“You crawled to me here. Do you remember?”
Too late, I become aware of the presence in the loft, and I turn to see Mark coming to the glass half wall separating the space from the rest of the penthouse. Rather than stand beside me, however, he braces his right hand next to mine on the railing and stands just behind. Not close enough to touch, but close enough that I’m thinking of touching now. Close enough that I can feel the measures of his exhales.
Our hands are less than an inch apart; his is an expression of power next to my own. Its size, its placement. Two of the fingers on it have been inside my body.
“I remember,” I say. A neutral tone is second nature to me, a by-product of growing up the princess of an Anglo-American banking empire. And even if it weren’t second nature, I would be a fool not to be careful right now. Not to see that the board is set and Mark is ready to move the first piece. He’s been ready since we met, I think, ready for four years.
Four years.
Can it have really been that long? Four years of his ring on my finger, three years since he made me bleed while I panted and begged for it.
Three years since the morning when I made someone else bleed their life out onto the sun-baked Roman cobblestones…a loss of innocence that cut much, much deeper than the loss of my virginity.
It feels like it’s been a lifetime. It feels like it’s been no time at all.
At any rate, I have to be mindful what I show him now that we’re together. I have to make him believe that I am reluctantly besotted. I have to show him the submissive wife he craves.
Stolen victories don’t come from playing fair, after all.
With that in mind, I turn to face him fully, having to press my back against the railing in order to look up at his face. He keeps his hand planted where it is, not stepping back to give me room.
My immediate thought is that he’s not playing fair either, looking like he does. His dark-blond hair is swept away from his suntanned face, exposing a high forehead and the harsh curves of his cheekbones. His jaw, even relaxed like it is now, is strong and graven, with the first hint of a five-o’clock shadow coming through. His eyes are the sky just after dusk, just before dawn. Dark but undeniably blue.
Elemental.
He looks every bit of his thirty-six years, a man fully in his prime, and for a moment, I feel the full fourteen years between our ages. I feel it like a thrill, a jolt, a challenge.
