Page 41 of Honey Cut
I step forward, and he reaches around my neck, bending the gold to fit around the base of my throat. His face in the torchlight is rugged, shadow-chased, and in the flames, I can see the lines fanning from the corners of his eyes and the thin scar scraping back into his hair. A man, fully grown, old enough perhaps to be my father if he’d gotten an early enough start. They said he served as a cupbearer to King Arthur himself when he was a boy.
Girls are raised to expect their husbands to be of any age; it does not surprise me that my husband is older than me. I am surprised at how my body responds, though. To his age, to the heavily muscled power coiled in his frame. Heat burrows down in my stomach when I think about him on top of me, and I pull in a breath.
His eyes drop to my mouth, and his fingertips linger as he settles the torc against my neck. The weight of it is strange but pleasant too.
When he lifts his hands from my neck, I feel the absence like something physical.
“After tonight, you will be mine,” he says. “Are you ready?”
I feel Tristan behind me, his misery burning like one of the torches set around the circle. Mark’s eyes slide past me to his knight, and his mouth tightens.
And then the king leads me to the fallen stone and the priestess, where our hands are bound in the dark.
fifteen
TRISTAN
“Tristan?”Goran calls, and my head snaps up. I was checking my phone for any texts or calls from Cara.
There’s nothing, just like there’s been nothing since our brief call in Central Park. Pushing the worry and guilt down into my stomach, I give Goran my full attention. We’re all in the security office, planning for tonight. Though it’s members only, a mind-boggling number of them have RSVP’d, many of them with intense security needs, and so we have the full security protocol in place for the event.
Event.What a word for what’s planned.
“Yes, sorry,” I say. “You want me where?”
“I think you should be on the stage,” Goran says. “In the wings. That way you’ll be closest to Mark if anything happens.”
Security here used to be a mundane thing, a comfortable thing. We all felt assured that Lyonesse itself, a fortress of secrecy, was enough to deter danger. But since Mark’s stabbing three months ago, we are a little more on edge.
“Good idea,” I say, although as we take a last-minute tour of the hall before we open it to members, I almost regret agreeing.
There is a bed on the stage, made up with silk sheets, leather cuffs dangling from its posters. Behind the headboard, out of view from the hall itself, is a basket with condoms, lube, and a wand vibrator.
I realize that I will only be feet away from Mark fucking Isolde. I will be close enough to see if she flushes on her stomach and chest, close enough to see if his eyes hood at the first tight squeeze inside.
I should have left Lyonesse before all this.
What am I doing here? What could I possibly be hoping for?
Guests have been filtering in all day, to the bar, to the rooftop, to the lobby, where drinks and canapés have been circulating, and now that we’re ready, we finally open the hall to them too.
Murmurs and gasps fill the space as the guests file in and see the hall transformed. The dance floor has been set with row after row of wooden chairs, gleaming and dark, with a wide central aisle down the middle. Along it, all the way to the stage, candelabras march with long white tapers, and then on the stage itself, set against curtains of crimson velvet so dark that they’re almost black, there are more candles.
Hanging from the sides of the hall, swathed from balconies, and gathered at the front of the stage is a lavish amount of flowers and greenery, but it’s not the elegant, well-ordered displays of yesterday’s society wedding, not the tasteful arrangements that looked of a piece with the airy vaults of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Ivy chokes its way over chairs and up the stems of the candelabra; clusters of ferns waft softly in corners. Branches of trees I can’t name are suspended throughout the hall, some still clustered with bright red berries, some of them with wide leaves and clutches of acorns in different stages of brown and green.
And the flowers—they are no wedding flowers. Maybe the peonies, dark as wine, and maybe the honeysuckle too, since that was at the wedding yesterday. But the other flowers are the kind you’d find looking for mushrooms in the woods—slender bells of nightshade, weeping bluebells, spires of verbena, wild orchids in eccentric little blooms of white and pink. Foxgloves peek above the deeper arrangements, their blooms in every color, white spots just visible inside their bell-shaped petals.
Darkness shivers from an unseen cello, its melody like an invitation and a warning all at once.
It’s as if Mark’s brought the forest around Morois House here to Lyonesse, and it’s striking to see the hall, all concrete and glass, a place of vinyl and leather and synth, somehow made organic and alive. Poisonously alive, maybe, but I can’t deny the effect it has on the guests, and on me. It’s like being in the underworld…under the fairy hill. Here, work is play; here, the most beautiful things are the deadliest to touch.
Backstage, Sedge is bent over his eternal iPad, and Dinah is examining the arriving guests with an assessing eye. Sedge looks up at me as I come to stand next to them, and when his nearly colorless eyes meet mine, I have to blink. Despite the differences between us, I could be looking in a mirror.
He looks absolutely devastated.
But he must realize his expression is revealing too much because his face shutters and he looks back down at his tablet, tapping quickly on the screen.
Dinah, for her part, is glowing. She’s in a dress of pale-pink latex and tall boots, her lipstick a lush, matte black against her ruby-toned brown skin and her short undercut curls dyed the same vivid purple as the foxgloves sprouting on the stage in front of us. Satisfaction drips from the curve of her mouth. As the club manager, she loves seeing Lyonesse at its fullest and strangest. As a Domme, I think she likes the power swirling through the room like fog, the energy pushing through the deadly flowers along with the insistent pull of the cello.
