Page 86 of Honey Cut
“She’s right,” Isolde says, looking at Mark. Her dress, which I know to be a pale pink, is nearly white where the moonlight hits it. “Everyone at Lyonesse is loyal to you.”
“Are they?” Mark asks.
The hairs on my arms lift. I can’t say why. He hasn’t shifted, his expression hasn’t changed. But that new note in his voice…
Isolde hasn’t missed it, the adumbration, the shadow. She can school her body and her face better than anyone I know other than Mark, but I still see the pulse pounding in her neck. She meets Mark’s eyes with an even look and lifts her chin. “Yes, my husband,” she says, and there’s no sarcasm in the wordhusband, no unctuousness. Neither is there apology nor pleading. “Everyone. To a person.”
There is the sound of crashing glass—bright and tinkling, a beautiful sound for such a permanent thing—and then my mind catches up with my senses.
Mark has flung his glass against the terrace, hard enough to make it shatter into pieces the size of raindrops. His eyes at night always look black, but tonight, with the red and yellow light from the lamps reflected in them, they look hellish.
“To a person? Truly? Be careful how you answer because I measure loyalty in very specific terms.”
Isolde for her part hasn’t jumped or startled, isn’t terrified. The pulse still pounds in her neck, and a flush is rising on her chest, but she keeps his gaze, and her voice doesn’t waver. “Maybe it’s not the loyalty that’s at fault but the terms.”
For a moment, Mark loses control of his face. And it is fucking terrifying.
His jaw clenches, his nostrils flare. His mouth, the softest part of him, becomes a harsh and ruthless line, and his eyes glitter from underneath those straight brows. It is the expression not of a man, not even of an animal, but of a vicious and sadistic god.
I only realize that I’ve stood to put myself between him and Isolde when Isolde reaches up to touch my arm.
“Tristan,” she whispers. “It’s okay.”
Mark’s eyes have moved to the place where her hand still presses against my shoulder. His mask returns, but it’s almost more unsettling than his anger, because now I know what it hides so well.
“Andrea,” Mark says. His voice is sharper than the glass shards glinting wetly from the terrace. “Leave us.”
Andrea, who has been watching this whole time with undisguised interest, stands up. “Of course. You already know what I think.”
“I remember.”
She slides a look at Isolde and me, and pure disgust flits through her expression. It infuriates me that she looks at Isolde like that—Isolde who didn’t even want to marry Mark, who was made by her father to be here, Isolde who prays alone in her garden every day like the trees and stones can store up her pleas.
But I’m not infuriated on my own behalf. I deserve that look.
Mark is completely still as Andrea leaves, and surely, he can guess what I can, which is that she’s only walked inside and just down the stairs enough so that we can’t see her. That this still isn’t private.
Maybe Mark doesn’t care. The set of his jaw and the slashes of color on his cheeks make me think he doesn’t. I turn to face him, blocking his view of Isolde.
“Sir—” I start, and he stands up.
I know—objectively from the attack at the club, from the gin I’ve seen him drink tonight—that he cannot be half the fighter I am. But my brain and my body refuse to register that knowledge as relevant.
Predator,that ancient part of my mind whispers, as it has before.Flesh eater.
He is a leopard or a lion or a bear. He is taller, larger, faster, stronger. He is made for violence.
He does not lunge or grab or even step toward Isolde and me. Instead he puts his fingers to a cuff link and starts unfastening it.
“You both have safewords, do you not?”
It is not what I’m expecting, not an accusation or a demand. But it does not portend safe things.
“Yes,” Isolde says from behind me. Her voice isn’t entirely steady.
Mark is on the other cuff link now, and when it’s finished, he tosses them both carelessly on the table. They sound like thrown coins when they land on a silver platter laden with fruit. He takes off his jacket now, his muscles so horribly, wonderfully evident under his white shirt. “Tell me your safewords. Both of you.”
“Why, sir?” I ask. My heart is beating with the hard rhythm of battle, and I’m poised to defend Isolde against anything he wants to do. She doesn’t deserve this.
