Page 88 of Honey Cut
He’s hurt. We hurt him.
I wish I could tear out my own ribs in offering.
“Has this—” He stops, and I realize he’s trying to wrest himself back under control. “Has this been going on since our wedding?”
“No,” Isolde and I say at the same time.
Mark looks at both of us. “Am I to believe that Belgrade is the beginning?”
“No, sir,” I say before she can. Not because I think she’ll lie, but because I don’t want her to try to shift any more blame onto her shoulders. “On the yacht. For about a week and a half. I started it.”
“He also ended it,” Isolde cuts in. “Right before we reached Manhattan. Nothing happened between then and two nights ago.”
“Nothing.” Mark laughs humorlessly. “Nothing but what? Glances? Goose bumps? A skipped heartbeat or an orgasm with the wrong name on your lips? My God, that I am jealous of this—” He shakes his head, as if he can’t believe himself. As if he’s surprised himself.
“I’m not any less yours,” says Isolde quickly, urgently. “And Tristan has never stopped being yours, whatever he’s told you. It wasn’t right of us to do it, of course we know that, but it wasn’t because we don’t need you or want to belong to you. Sir, I’m so?—”
His eyes flash at thesir, like she’s drawn a sword, and she stops.
His hands twitch at his sides, and abruptly I remember this conversation started with safewords. “I had one thing I asked of you, one rule that we were both to follow. Do you remember?”
“Of course,” she whispers.
“As faithful to you as you are to me,” he says. “The punishment should fit the crime, shouldn’t it?”
He moves too fast for me to stop him. It must be that I’m stunned, dizzied from this entire horrible encounter, too miserable to focus. Because he’s on me in a second, his hands fisting in my suit jacket and feet crowding mine until I’m off-balance.Protect Isoldeis all that comes to mind, even though the logical part of me is sure that Mark won’t hurt her. Not nonconsensually, at least.
But the rest of me only sees a carnivore, an existential threat, and I have to keep her safe, except?—
Except he’s not trying to get to Isolde at all. He hasme, he’s draggingmeback to the head of the table, easily resisting my every attempt to get away. This can’t be the same man whose reflexes seemed so sluggish during the attack on the club, the same man who puts away gin like water, and yet he is too adroit, too quick, too strong to fight off. I’m bent over the table like a paid whore, and his hand finds my belt buckle and yanks.
Isolde’s stepped forward, horror on her face, and Mark tosses my belt away as he repeats, “As faithful as you are to me, little wife. So isn’t this fitting? Isn’t this just? A wergild for the death of our marriage bed?”
He has his hand on my head now, keeping one side of my face pressed to the table. But I can still see when she looks at me, hurt and anger and shameful desire mixing in her face. My cock is so hard that I think it might rip itself open. It’s wet at the tip already and soaking through my boxer briefs.
“Well?” he prompts. “Does it not solve our little betrayal? If I have the bodyguard for every time you’ve had him yourself since we took sacred vows? But I’m not without mercy, Isolde, I’ll let you watch.”
A whimper comes from her throat, and I don’t know if it’s agony or arousal.
“What about you, my knight?” he croons. He presses his hips against me, his obscene erection huge and hard and seeking. “Do you think that’s fair?”
I have a safeword. So does Isolde.
I can stop this. I should stop this. She should stop this too.
This will break all our hearts and make no one feel better and just give us more ammunition for resentment and betrayal later on.
I can stop this. One word and it’s done.
He kicks my feet apart, spreading me, and when he shoves against me now, I feel the drag of him through our clothes. The inflexible bar moving against the place where I split open. His hand on my head is large and implacable.
It feels like everything I never knew to want until I met Mark.
I meet Isolde’s eyes again, and they are a shade of desperate turquoise that I’ve only seen in a bare handful of circumstances. When she was cuffed to a bed on Lyonesse’s stage, when she sat on the deck of Mark’s yacht in a green dress and cried salt down her face.
She’s caught in the same storm I am, a storm ofno no no, where the eye of the hurricane isGod, yes, do it.
How can I ever explain that to anyone else other than her? Anyone who hasn’t been caught and conquered by Mark Trevena? That sometimes my noes and my yeses mix together, that I want to bemadeto do something I know is vile and hurtful and immoral on top of it all? That I will let him do whatever he wants to me even when I don’t know what I actually want myself?
