Page 28 of Honey Cut
I return the feeds to the way they were when I found them and decide to leave well enough alone. If Mark still hasn’t said anything about it and the proof is gone…maybe it’s okay?
Maybe Markknowsand is fine with what happened and deleted the videos purely to protect the narrative that this marriage is a genuine one?
My phone buzzes. It’s Goran.
Sometimes the boss disappears
sometimes it’s better if we don’t know why
but if he’s not back in the morning, sound the alarm
Sometimes it’s better if we don’t know why. Yeah, that tracks.
I step away from the screen, checking it one last time before I leave. It’s interesting—all these properties, all this surveillance, and yet Morois House is nowhere on here.
But he keeps it private, he told me, so that only Melody, Sedge, and his bodyguards know where it is. I guess it makes sense that it wouldn’t be looped in with the other feeds accessible to all of the Lyonesse staff. The security system I found there must be a closed one.
I shut the mirror-door and then leave Mark’s room. Rain streaks the windows of the penthouse as I go downstairs and wander back to bed.
It’s a long time before I fall asleep, but I do eventually slip under, and when I wake, the sun is struggling valiantly against the skyline and Mark is in the kitchen, whisking eggs.
I blink as I stand at the edge of the hallway. My eyes are gritty, and I’m still clouded with sleep, but he’s undeniably there. Undeniably whisking eggs in nothing but pajama pants like some god of domestic porn.
“Good morning, Tristan. Would you like an omelet?”
“Yes, sir,” I say. I’m almost fully awake now. “Can I help?”
“You cannot,” Mark says. “This is a French omelet. I am required to be contemptuous of everyone else in the kitchen while I make it.”
I sit down at the kitchen island and watch him. The light of early morning catches along the muscles and lines of his back, along the small scars that dot and score his skin. The stab wound in his shoulder is red and gnarled—his doctor had been right. Any chance of it healing nicely had ended when Mark accidentally ripped the stitches.
“By the way,” Mark says as he’s dropping butter into his pan, “the person you and Goran were looking into—the one you thought might be following Isolde—will no longer be an issue.”
His voice is casual, the words nonchalant.
“How do you know?” I ask slowly. The butter hisses and spits as Mark gives the pan an easy swirl. “Did Goran learn anything else about him?”
“I actually caught up to him yesterday before I joined Isolde at her gown fitting. We had a conversation, and while it was a long one, it turns out that this is all a misunderstanding.” Mark pours in the eggs, stirring and shaking, his hands constantly in motion. “And he’s sincerely sorry for any worry he might have caused.”
“Oh,” I say.
Mark looks over his shoulder at me. “Don’t give me that Geneva Convention look. He is perfectly fine, limbs intact, all his teeth still in his head, and I didn’t even resort to financially destroying him either. He knows a few things he didn’t before, that’s all.”
More swirling of the pan, and then with a few deft movements, the omelet is turned out onto a plate, perfectly folded. Mark dusts it with sea salt and fresh tarragon and then slides it in front of me.
“Eat up, Tristan,” he says. “I need you strong.”
ten
ISOLDE
We call ourselves saints,and our sins sanctify us. Of this I’ve been certain since that first morning in Rome.
So why, when I see a fellow saint approach as the wedding planner leads my bridesmaids and me to the side door of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, does my stomach sink?
I’ve seen her once before, in Manila, her dark hair streaked with ash as we left a politician’s smoldering mansion together. Today, she’s dressed like one of the cathedral employees, with a metal nameplate pinned to a blazer, her hair in a neat bun.
“Miss Laurence, I’m so sorry to be a bother,” she says in American-inflected English, not the flawless Tagalog she was speaking in Manila, “but one of your relatives flagged me down to give this to you.”
