Page 101 of Bitter Burn
Jago. Fuck.
I force myself to breathe, to think, even though I’m still groggy from whatever they used to keep me under during the flight here. “You kept Tristan alive,” I rasp.
“I decided he could be useful. As an incentive for you or perhaps Isolde. I’m sure you’ll appreciate that there are one or two things I’d like from you before the inevitable happens.”
“Lyonesse,” I say.
Cashel sits on a stool in front of me, piscatory ring glinting under the exposed light bulbs that hang from extension cords slung over metal girders. The floor is concrete; I don’t see any windows. A warehouse?
“It would be useful for me to know what you know about Ys, of course,” Cashel is saying. “But the rest of your treasury will be put to work as well. How funny to think that you’ve built a temple of secrets, all for the sake of destroying me, and in doing so you’ve created a weapon beyond anything I could have made myself. Thank you for that, Mr. Trevena, truly.”
Are Tristan and Isolde here too? Or at a different location?
I rub the inside of my injured forearm against the back of the chair and bite back a groan. Fuck, that hurts.
“I’ve always wondered though, and I hope you’ll indulge me by answering,” Cashel goes on, lifting a hand to press against his jaw once and then dropping it. “How did you connect me with Ys? I’ve worked hard to be careful, to keep a wall between the saints and Ys, making sure anything they did for Ys, they thought they were doing for the Church. That will change now, of course, no sense in wasting resources, but I like to think I’ve been careful.”
Talking is good. I should do lots of that, buy myself as much time as possible. I grind my forearm against the chair again and pretend that the pain is heat and then pretend the heat is light.
Harmless, bright light. It helps a little.
“John Lackland,” I push out. My voice is dry and strained with pain. “The deputy director of the NSA. Remember him?”
“I do. I remember also that you killed him last year. Very cleverly done.”
“I try.” It’s not pain in my arm. It’s heat. It’s not pain in my arm. It’s heat. “The NSA shouldn’t have anything to do with CIA business in ordinary circumstances, so after Kraków, the fact that Lackland coordinated the meetup between Eliot and our asset struck me as strange. It also struck me as strange that the deconfliction protocols were so flagrantly ignored. The only variable I could see that tied everything together was Lackland’s potential involvement with this group, this Ys that the asset had wanted to talk to Eliot about. Because if Lackland was implicated in something the asset knew about—if he risked exposure—then friendly fire in a troubled city was a neat way to tidy up both after the asset and anything that Eliot might piece together later and with a decent degree of plausible deniability besides.”
Fresh blood is dripping down my forearm now, hot and slick on my skin. I have to press my arm harder and harder against the chair as I discreetly rub it back and forth.
“It would have been a decent degree of plausible deniability if an angry, grieving CIA officer hadn’t been left alive after,” says Cashel affably, ruefully. “No one accounted for you in their plans. Though I suppose that’s what I get for trusting John Lackland. So how did you get from Lackland to me?”
“I went back to the arms dealers our asset was working for and worked my way inward over the years. I found myself happily torturing the brother-in-law of Filip Drobny’s cousin’s best friend one day, and he let something slip. Something about his boss’s boss. He’d never seen the man, only heard him a single time on the phone, but the Irish accent stuck with him. It left me with only a shred of a suspicion, but it was enough to start poking at the edges.”
“Or have your pet hacker Robin Loxley poke at the edges,” Cashel adds pleasantly. “But this is a lovely cast of characters, at least. And most of them now dead at your hands.”
The nice thing about the past twenty-four hours is that I don’t feel like I need to hide the occasional wince or grunt as I continue to abuse my bloody forearm with the back of the chair.
“I don’t think anyone will miss John Lackland,” I say. I sound breathless. “And Drobny couldn’t have been surprised after the attack on my club.”
“One wonders why you allowed him and his lackeys into the club in the first place if you knew they were connected to Ys.”
“Him, I wanted. His lackeys, not so much.” Blood is dripping off the ends of my fingers now. “I didn’t account for someone inside my club letting them in. A failure on my part, I freely admit.”
“I presume you wanted him as a guest of your hospitality?” Cashel asks with a smile. There is no doubt as to what he means by hospitality in this instance, and he would be correct. I’d wanted Drobny contained and questioned, and contained would have involved duct tape and an IV.
“At the time. My plans changed after I found his people following Isolde.”
“They were following her?” This seems to be news to him, which is interesting.
I flex my hands in the handcuffs, straining my fingers up, my forearm now so slick with blood that my fingertips slip right off my skin. “He used our wedding planner and at least one of his men, although I think there were probably more, to keep tabs on her. My theory was that he wanted some leverage against you—first as a threat, to send you pictures and the like to prove that they were following her, and second as more than a threat if needed. Which means two things: one, that Drobny didn’t know you at all and didn’t know that you’d sacrifice Isolde in a heartbeat if it threatened you, and two, that there was trouble in Ys paradise. And where there’s one unhappy arms dealer, there’s more, I’m sure.”
Cashel crosses his legs, his red leather shoes stark against his white cassock. “That’s a keen insight, Mr. Trevena, thank you. Oh, hello,” he says to a tall man striding into my line of sight. He bends down to whisper in Cashel’s ear while Cashel idly presses his fingers to his jaw again.
I use the opportunity to duck my head, clamping down on a scream as agony rips up my arm, panting hard for several long moments until I can think again. Luckily, Cashel is still listening to whatever his guard is saying and seems sufficiently agitated by it not to notice anything else.
“My apologies,” he says tightly, inclining his head. “I’m afraid I need to discuss something of a sensitive nature.” He gets up from his stool and sweeps off into the shadows with his foot soldier.
It’s time to pray again, and pray I do.
