Page 99 of Honey Cut
“Maybe I will pay for it,” Mark says, surprising me a little. I thought he’d scoff or roll his eyes or ignore the dying man’s imprecation altogether. “But not before I’m finished. First stop, Ys; second stop, Rome. Isn’t that right, Filip?”
Drobny doesn’t answer. It doesn’t seem like he can.
Mark checks his watch, as casually as a man would waiting for a cab, and then drops his wrist. He rolls his shoulder twice, three times. It’s the wounded shoulder, I notice. I wonder if it gets stiff.
He presses his gloved fingers to Drobny’s neck, waiting a full minute before stepping back. He stares down at the dead man for just a handful of seconds, his expression unreadable. He does sigh, though, like someone looking at a sink full of dirty dishes. And then with practiced—if resigned—movements, he starts cutting Drobny’s ties and moving his body onto the tarp.
I take that as my cue, and I retreat with silent steps until I reach the chilly night air, and then I bolt back to the penthouse, my thoughts in a haze, like incense smoke shrouding the altar.
Mark killed for me.
Mark killed,full stop. And I have to think that John Lackland was not a fluke;thiswas not a fluke. Mark may not work for the CIA anymore, but he is working.
For whom, then?
For himself?
Ys started the game. I’m only finishing it. That’s what he told Melody at the engagement party. So Mark is hunting Ys.
Ys is possibly hunting me.
And Mark has been setting the board for so much longer than I could have imagined.
thirty-eight
ISOLDE
“And that’swhen I left. He got back to the penthouse later that night, and we left for Lyonesse two days after. He hasn’t spoken a word about Drobny or about the associates of Drobny’s I killed in the club.”
My uncle and I are walking along the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial, me in a camel-colored coat and him with a magnificent scarlet cape over his simar. He was in town for some kind of conference when Mark, Tristan, and I returned from Serbia, and he thankfully extended his stay by a day so I could talk to him in person and tell him everything that happened in Belgrade. I could have delivered a report through the usual means, but I need his insight. I want to know what he thinks.
Mortimer looks lost in thought now as we walk, his eyes on the ground, his hands behind his back.
“Should I be worried about Ys following me?” I ask after a minute.
Finally, my uncle lifts his head, and he gives me a reassuring smile. “It sounds like from what you overheard that Mr. Drobny wasn’t operating on orders from Ys. I don’t think there is any need to worry.”
“But he was part of Ys too. Inside it. What if they know who I am now?”
“If Mark has been hunting them down for the reason he told Drobny, then I regret to tell you that they already know your name. But they don’t know that you’re a saint and that you have the power of the Church behind you. You’ll be safe.”
I don’t feel reassured, but I don’t truly feelscaredeither.
I’m more unsettled than frightened. I’ve lived my life with as much control as possible, with rigid boundaries and routines to keep my body strong and my soul clean, and now everything feels like it’s slipping out of control.
I fell in love with my husband…and someone else. I was supposed to seduce my husband, and now he barely looks at me…except he also killed a man, possibly or partly forme.
I’ve gotten no important pieces of information either from Mark himself or the server rooms, and I still barely know anything about Ys, and I have five new faces in my nightmares despite getting nowhere with anything.
And this morning when I prayed in my walled garden, I felt…nothing. No certainty, no peace. No beauty or hope or connection.
I felt hollow. And alone.
We turn the corner of the reflecting pool and keep walking, and I ignore the pain zinging up from my ankle every time I take a step. At least it’s not truly sprained. It was hard enough to sell the story the next morning that I’d twisted it during a late-night run—Tristan blamed himself for being asleep and therefore not going with me to save me from an uneven curb. Mark had only looked at me with an expression equal parts reserved and dubious and said, “You are ordinarily so graceful, Isolde. How strange.”
But I’d held his gaze and betrayed nothing of where I’d been or that I knew wherehe’dbeen.
The moment had passed quickly, however. We were packing up to leave the next day; I did actually have a few arrangements to make for that disagreeable bowl; and Mark seemed interested in spending as little time as possible with Tristan or me. Interested only in getting back to Lyonesse and hosting the swarm of powerful kinksters coming in for Lyonesse’s annual Samhain ball.
