Page 53 of Honey Cut
“How are you doing?” he asks. “Any soreness? Do you want anything on your thighs?”
“I’m fine,” I say, which is the truth. The crop marks on my legs only sting in a good way, and my pussy is sore,obviously, but I wouldn’t trade that feeling for the world. If I’d ever feared I would have made a terrible nun, the proof is tingling between my legs. “But we need to talk. I want us to be?—”
I pause because Mark’s jaw has flexed. His hair is completely loose now, hanging over his forehead in a magazine-worthy mess, and his bow tie is undone. In the orange and pink light of sunrise, he looks not just handsome but infernally so. The colors of hellfire love him, gilding every slope and curve of his face.
“Isolde, I cannot let you ask for this right now.”
“Why not?” I ask, grateful that I sound normal and not angry or hurt. “You’ve warned me. I’ve thought about it and still want it. Wantus. Like you promised me the night you took my virginity.”
He passes a hand over his face, his eyes still closed. It is a rare moment of visible self-control from him. “The scene we shared was not a mild one. And then I spent another two hours fingering you, and then I fucked you again after that. It is not possible to overstate how much your brain chemistry has been manipulated tonight.”
“I wanted this before tonight,” I point out.
“Andthis—being a full wife to me—you understand what that means? That I am not vanilla in private? You would be my possession and pet and”—here his voice changes a little and he opens his eyes—“the fixation of my heart.”
My pulse skips at that last part. “You are already the fixation of mine,” I whisper. He stares at me.
“You didn’t want this four years ago,” he says quietly. “We agreed that it would be pretend. I want to believe that you’ve changed your mind, but I have to be sure.”
“What will convince you?” I ask. I feel strangely close to crying now. “How can I say it any plainer than I want to be your wife and submissive, your shadows-and-glass girl, for real? When will you believe that it’s not dopamine or oxytocin talking?”
He rolls his firm lips together. “A month. Ask me again in a month. When the charms of Lyonesse have become common and you realize how much sex and pain you can still get from me even while we’re pretending. I know you need the pain, Isolde, and you won’t go without, no matter what boundaries we’ve drawn between us.”
“But I’ll go withoutyou,” I say.
The sun has risen even more, its reflection in his eyes. “Yes,” he says.
“A month.”
He nods and looks down at his hands. “You won’t suffer,” he says. “Even when our agreement was entirely formal, I never planned for you to suffer.”
God, he doesn’t know the half of it. Between him and Tristan and my vocation as a saint, suffering isallI am.
“Give me one thing during this month,” I say, and my imperial tone seems to amuse him because his lips quirk.
“And what is that?”
“I want—I don’t want to sleep alone.”
He looks at me, his perceptive gaze made even sharper by the sunrise mirrored there. And then he holds out his hand. “Then you won’t sleep alone.”
And with the morning light filling the apartment, we get ready for bed.
* * *
My wedding presentturns out to be my very own martial arts studio, right there in Lyonesse. Mark shows it to me the next day after giving me a more comprehensive tour of Lyonesse than I’ve had before, and I’ve been silently cataloging the spots I’ll need to revisit—the security office first and foremost and then possibly Sedge or Andrea’s office to see if there’s any mention of Ys in Lyonesse’s more accessible records. And so it takes me a minute to recognize this space as something different.
Mark steps forward onto the pale wood floor, all the way to the glass wall, which can be rolled open like a door. The river licks just beyond the room, and a patio leads to a garden, walled and small. The garden itself has stairs leading down into a grotto, where Mark shows me a full spa—steam rooms, soaking pools, lap pools.
“There are showers down here too, if you feel like using the spa after you train,” he says as we walk back up to the garden and then around to the studio again. Racks of gleaming wooden weapons are mounted on the walls; mirrors reflect the light and glass and river. It smells like water and wood oil and a hint of the garden just outside.
“It’s perfect,” I say to Mark, and I mean it.
The look he gives me is arrogant, confident. “I know,” he replies, and it’s unfair that he wears every single victory so well. But he’s earned this one. I was already privately delighted by my new office next to his, with the river and city view and long glass desk perfect for laying out high-res images or archival boxes, but that is a room for work, for the job that is really only a cover for my real vocation.
This…this is for me. Tailored for me.
I blink fast, trying to stop the burning against my eyelids. Mark has ridiculous amounts of money and access to resources most people can only dream of. It was probably nothing to him to make sure I had a quiet place to train.
