Page 114 of Honey Cut
“I’m sorry, sir,” he says. “I didn’t?—”
“Don’t apologize to me,” says Mark. “It’s my wife you insulted.”
The mobster turns wide eyes to me. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Trevena. Really. I didn’t mean anything by it! It was just a joke!”
Mark keeps his head braced on his hand but turns a little to look in my direction. “He says it was a joke, my little queen. Did you think it was funny?”
I suppose the kind thing to do would be to relent and not to condemn someone to the threat of blackmail, but I’m all out of kindness. If he doesn’t want to give up information about himself, he doesn’t have to. He’ll just be kicked out of a club where he gets his rocks off.
Some of us have real fucking problems right now.
“No,” I reply to my husband. “I didn’t think it was funny.”
Mark turns back to the mobster and shrugs, like,Queens. What can you do?
And then with visible pleasure, Tristan shoves him out of the room.
“God,” Mark says, turning his head so that his fingers can press in at his temples. “Enough.”
“Sir?” Tristan asks from the door.
“That’s enough,” Mark says, scrubbing his hands down his face. There are shadows under his eyes, and the torches show off the gold stubble on his jaw and the white scar in his hair. He looks more tired than I’ve ever seen him. “Shut the door, Tristan. No more people just now. I can’t.”
Tristan shuts the door, and then it’s only the three of us and the snapping of the torches as the veil behind us flutters.
“Isolde,” Mark says into his hand. “Come here.”
Dread is heavier than gold, heavier than the darkness crowding where the torchlight can’t reach. But I am all out of choices, all out of plans. There is only one plan, and that is to get Mark’s watch and then hope…and pray…
I stand and take the two steps to Mark’s throne, coming to a stop between his booted feet. He doesn’t look up at me. Behind me, I hear Tristan come closer and then stop.
“I am tired,” murmurs Mark, “of denying myself what I want.”
“And what is that?” I ask in a whisper, afraid to know.
He lifts his head to look at me, and then his stare moves behind my shoulder to Tristan.
“You,” he says to his bodyguard, and then he looks back to me. “And you.”
I’m not sure I understand what he’s saying.
“I want you both, and I’m sick of it,” he goes on. “I feel like all I do is want, and all I am is jealousy, and sometimes I think I could tear out my own veins, I’m so fucking afflicted with this…thisneeding. This wasn’t supposed to happen. You were a plan, Isolde, and Tristan, you were a mistake, and both had very specific limits on them. And now I find that I can’t stop craving my mistake and that my plan—mybusiness arrangement—has somehow become the reason I get out of bed in the morning.”
I swallow as he drops his hand away from his face. Even though I’m standing in front of him, even though I’m looking down into his face and he’s looking up into mine, I feel like I did the day I was fitted for my wedding gown. A blown petal in his palm. A single drop of blood shivering on the edge of a knife.
“I hate that you two have fallen in love with each other, which is the most ridiculous fucking thing I can think of, given the circumstances,” he says, his head falling back against the throne. It knocks the circlet askew the tiniest bit, mussing his perfect hair. It makes him look youthful somehow. Careless. “I covet every look you’ve cast each other’s way. Every instant you’ve linked hands. Every glimpse you’ve given each other into your secret hearts. I want them all and I want to lock them up in a glass cabinet and lock the two of you in a glass cabinet and keep you both trapped forever, mine, mine, and yet when I think of you two together, the jealousy is like—” He waves a hand, his jaw tense. Then he presses the heel of his palm to the place over his heart. “It hurts like praying hurts, like a good scene hurts. Like a hurt that hurts so good, I never want it to stop. A hurt that could keep me alive, if I let it.”
“What are you saying, sir?” Tristan asks. He’s right behind me now, and he touches the small of my back, a firm, warm touch. Like he wants to reassure me.
Mark laughs, and it’s caustic and tired and also soft and sad. Above all, it’s self-deprecating. As if he can’t believe himself, but he’s given up trying. “I’m saying I want you both. In my bed. All the time. I want you both to be mine, and I also want you to be each other’s. Not only because I don’t think I can stop whatever has grown between you, but because I don’t want to. I could have told anyone months ago that the two of you would wind up needing each other, but I couldn’t have known what the two of you needing each other would make me feel like.”
“What does it make you feel like? Not only jealous, I hope,” I whisper, and I dare to touch him, to ghost my fingers over his face.
His eyes flutter closed, long lashes against his proud cheeks.
“No,” he murmurs. “Not only that.”
“I love you,” I tell him for the first time. For the first time since we got married, since I consented to the engagement, since he walked into my dojo and taught me how to hold a knife like I meant it. “I love you, and it hurts. It hurts like how you’re hurting right now.”
