Page 100 of Bitter Burn
I reach to the small of my back and pull the honeysuckle knife from the harness I took from my penthouse earlier this morning. I hand the knife hilt first to my wife.
“I need you to be my shadows and glass girl right now,” I tell her. “Think of what I said last night by the window.”
Her chest lifts once, hard, and her chin begins to quiver. She remembers.
He’s not made for this.
And we are.
Yes. We are.
Only Isolde is built to make a choice like this, to save Tristan at the expense of saving me. And I love her so much for it that I could weep.
Tristan watches this silent exchange and then starts shaking his head violently, seeing the shift in Isolde. “No, no, whatever you’re thinking?—”
“He’s right,” she says. Her voice is throaty and thick, but I see the clarity in her eyes. “We can save two of us this way rather than no one. It’s the only choice.”
More stone chips fly, razor-edged confetti, but I ignore it to yank Isolde into a hard kiss.
“I love you,” I say and bury my nose in her hair. Even amidst the gun smoke and pulverized stone, I can smell honey and flowers. “I would marry you again every day if I could.”
Tristan is staring at me like I’m asking him to shoot me in the throat, and when I kiss him, he clings to me.
“Don’t make me do this,” he begs. “Don’t make me leave you.”
I press my hand to his heart and then fold his hand over that. The black and silver ring presses into his palm. “Do you feel that?” I murmur. “I’m holding on to something good. You do the same for me.” I move my eyes to Isolde so he understands. “Carry it carefully for me. Okay?”
Veronica has crept almost to the dais, and I have to let go of Tristan so I can return fire.
“Go!” I tell them both. “Find Jago. Get to Anguish—she’ll be able to help you get somewhere safe, with Lox or back to Morois. But you have to go now.”
Isolde does it. With tears in her eyes and a steely set to her mouth, she yanks Tristan toward the door. And he is forever the Ruth to her Naomi—where she goes, he will follow. A flash of silver daylight, a cascading shatter as a bullet hits one of the stained glass windows, and they’re gone.
I pull back behind the pulpit again, on my knees in the shards of stone, and for the first time in a very long time, in the middle of a church being broken for the sake of my sins, I say a prayer.
Please let this fucking work.
I drop my gun, grab one of the sharp flakes of stone, and drag it against my forearm, over the wing of my tattoo. Right next to three other short, hastily made scars.
There’s no time to pray again before the saints round the corner. Pain flashes from the back of my head, and the world goes black.
Plane engines thrum underneath me. The edge of Veronica’s scapular catches the faint artificial light of the cabin.
An IV tube stretches up from my arm.
I think I prefer the darkness of unconsciousness to this, and that seems to suit the darkness just fine. It happily takes me back under before I see anything more.
I’m sitting in a chair.
It’s my first thought, and it’s a bad one. It’s never good to wake up in a chair, as I learned at the hands of my own wife last autumn. It’s especially not good to wake up when dried blood still crusts the side of your face and the hair of your forearm. One of my eyes is swollen enough to affect my vision—a gift from the saint I sent to heaven with an organ pipe—and the jagged wound on my forearm hurts so fucking much that I am certain I’ve accidentally severed a tendon or cut a nerve.
I’m naked or near to naked, wearing only my boxers, and I’m handcuffed with my hands behind the chair. They’ve taken my watch, which upsets me a great deal. My black and silver ring, they’ve left on my finger, which I remind myself to be grateful for.
“It’s good to see you awake,” says a soft Irish voice, and I look up to see the heterochromatic eyes of the man who ordered Eliot’s death and the death of his own sister. The man who would kill Tristan and Isolde if he had the chance.
Tristan and Isolde. They made it out the door. Did they find Jago? Did they get out of Albany and to Anguish?
“Are you thinking of my niece and the bodyguard of yours? I regret to say that they made the journey with you. I also regret to say that your driver did not. Although he did die bravely, trying to defend them.”
