Page 62 of Honey Cut
Ideally, I would have changed before coming down, but this is a window of time I don’t want to miss—security occupied with the hallandthe rooftop, Mark busy, Dinah and Andrea and Sedge nowhere to be seen. The darkness as a cover.
Soon I’m outside the building, on the small island it sits on. Lawn tickles my toes, and I give myself a brief second to admire the club from this angle—a tall glitter of reflected city. Orange and red lights glow from underneath and within the structure. Autumn colors. All it’s missing are some pumpkins and a harvest wreath.
Just beyond, the river laps at Lyonesse’s well-disguised retaining walls, and at the far end of the island, I see the black-stone partitions of my garden.
It is striking how peaceful it is out here, with only the faint party noises from the roof and the wind for company. My feet, silent everywhere else, make soft noises in the grass in between gusts of wind. The night air is turning cooler, pleasant, and for a stupid moment, I wish I were just taking a walk because I wanted to. That I had such a freedom.
I shake it off.
This is the whole reason I’ve been put here.
I find the fire door on the Virginia side of Lyonesse, set into an exceptionally narrow outdoor stairwell with two cameras trained on it. I notice a glassy door set into the wall here at ground level—I imagine so that security could come pouring out at the first hint of a breach. Motion sensors would be natural down there too, maybe infrared.
I think about this a minute.
I pad back to the garden, find a branch on the cherry tree that looks weaker than the others, and pull it free. After that, I go into my studio, where I grab a thick wool blanket from the corner that I use for my morning prayers and sling it around my shoulders.
Not a perfect tool kit by any means, but I’m not planning some kind of heist. This is fact-finding only, and I just need a second or two. Just long enough to look at the door without leaking heat all over the place.
First the leafy branch, wedged under the railing so it blocks the cameras, then the blanket tucked as carefully around me as possible to block my body heat. Then I stop and give myself a proper look.
The door is thick and metal, with a steel frame and no handle from the outside, but there is something unusual next to the frame. A small black pad, set into the concrete. I press on the door itself, to see if it moves in the jamb, but it holds fast. Whatever issue they’re having with the door isn’t resulting in it coming unlocked.
But a few seconds is as long as I want to risk. I shove the branch the rest of the way down to the stairwell so anyone who comes to check on the obstructed cameras will find it, and then I unwrap myself from the blanket, walking back toward the garden with ideas swelling and then popping like soap bubbles in my head.
I can’t access that door without a key—and even with a key, I’m still not sure I could get inside without a handle.
My uncle wants me to seduce my way into Lyonesse’s secrets instead, but Mark is something worse than a door without a handle, something more than an inaccessible room. I might as well try to strike water from rock as get Mark to tell me anything I wanted to know.
But maybe…
“Isolde?”
I freeze, spinning to see Tristan stepping out from the glass door near the stairwell. Under the blanket draped over my arm, my fist bunches in the wool, and my neurons fire, searching for a way to explain what I’m doing barefoot in a ripped-apart Jenny Packham dress…near the single weakness of Lyonesse’s server vaults.
Tristan steps onto the grass, the door closing behind him. In the faint orange and red light glowing from the club, I can see the furrow of his brow.
“What are you doing out here?” he asks. And then: “No wonder you have a blanket, you look like you’re freezing.” His hands reach out and chafe my bare upper arms, and they are so large and tender and warm. I hadn’t realized until he touched me how cold I was.
The door opens again, and before I can do anything about it, Goran steps out, immediately seeing us.
Seeing Tristan with his hands on me, the blanket, my skimpy slip and bare feet.
“Mark said he was going down to a playroom with some guests and I wouldn’t be needed, so I was just coming to check on Isolde,” Tristan says with that open honesty of his, so touching in its simplicity, in its certainty that it will be believed. He hasn’t had to spend years thinking of other people’s lies and how to evade them. He has never been in a situation where the truth wasn’t enough.
“And I was just taking a walk around my garden and decided to walk by the river too,” I say.
Goran nods, although it’s a slow nod. “There was a disturbance on some cameras out here, but—” He looks down into the stairwell and sighs. “Just a branch. That fucking wind. The news says a storm is blowing in.”
“We should get inside then,” Tristan says, tucking an arm around me and guiding me in. His fingers on my arm are spread, like he’s trying to touch as much of me as possible. It’s not the careful nudge of a bodyguard.
Goran’s eyes drop to Tristan’s hand, and I step quickly away.
“Thank you,” I say to both of them. “I should get in bed.”
“I’ll walk you there. I told Mr. Trevena I was going to check on you and make sure you were okay, since you left early.”
I can hardly refuse without drawing attention to the various oddities of tonight, although the way Goran is watching us right now isn’t ideal.
