Page 106 of Bitter Burn
She looks at us as we approach, cerulean gaze wary and closed off. Mark isn’t intimidated by this at all; he strolls over to the window and half sits on the deep ledge, facing his wife.
“Well?” he prompts as I trail behind him and come to a stop just in front of the ledge, able to look at them both. “I know you want to ask, Isolde. No need to hold back.”
A minuscule shift of her eyebrow. “Okay then. Why are we really in Nemi?”
“To kill your uncle,” answers Mark easily.
For her part, Isolde doesn’t seem to react to this at all. Perhaps she already suspected this was the case—or perhaps she’s already accepted that it’s the only way forward. “And who are the people downstairs? Since you’ve exhausted the generosity of the Swedish intelligence service?”
Mark’s fingers are playing with the edge of the blanket around Isolde’s feet. “Some CIA officers we know can be trusted. They’re, ah, let’s say, an unofficial loan.”
“From whom?”
“Embry Moore owes me a favor,” he says offhandedly. His fingers have found their way under the blanket now, are stroking the top of one delicate foot.
Isolde stares at him. “The president of the United States owes you a favor,” she states.
“You remember our ceremony at Lyonesse, darling? When I cuffed you to a bed and fucked you until you came so hard that you cried?”
Isolde and I both blush, but Mark continues speaking and stroking Isolde’s foot, forever shameless.
“I’m sure you remember all the beautiful flowers we had too, nightshade and hemlock and oleander, that sort of thing. Well, I know it’s customary to send guests home with gifts, so I invited them to help themselves to anything they wanted before they left.”
“You sent our guests home with poisonous plants,” says Isolde in some disbelief, and then she and I come to the realization at the same time. “The poisonings last year…the artistic director in DC, the deaths in Vancouver and Tokyo…there was a connection between them all along.”
Mark’s caresses have moved up to Isolde’s ankle now. “Hundreds of guests were there that night, all of them witnessing each other rifle through our wedding’s little poison garden and select souvenirs for themselves, all of them now either complicit or indebted to me—or both.”
Her eyes narrow. “You said poisoning wasn’t your style.”
He sighs, put-upon. “It’s not my style, darling. I can’t help what people want to do with hemlock and nightshade after they take such things home. But that part isn’t important. The wedding gifts were merely the smoke after all. The fire was in the foxgloves.”
We’re both rapt right now, and he knows it. He smiles to himself, enjoying our attention a little too much.
“Do you remember Melwas Kocur?” he asks us. “I’m sure you do, but however much you remember him, I’ll tell you that Embry Moore remembers him much, much better.”
Given that all my deployments were directly or indirectly related to that narcissistic psychopath and his ability to radicalize people even while he was behind bars, I would say I remember him very well. But certainly President Moore and the First Lady would have cause to remember in a very different way, since Kocur kidnapped Greer Colchester-Moore, and both the captivity and subsequent rescue were a source of private and public pain for Greer, then-President Maxen Colchester, and then-Vice President Embry Moore.
Mark has started running his knuckles up and down Isolde’s leg, and she barely seems to notice, that’s how much her attention is on his words right now.
“It’s annoying to kill someone in a semi-responsible prison—and I promise it’s not a habit of mine—but for the sake of my own interests and Carpathian peace, of course, Melwas Kocur was a problem I was interested in solving. His medication and food were carefully watched, so I knew I couldn’t simply pay someone working at the prison to poison him. It would need to happen further upstream. Luckily for me, Kocur had one indulgence while locked up: tea. Custom-ordered from a place in France.” Mark massages the muscles of Isolde’s calf, propping her foot on his thigh. “Do you know how tedious it would be to check every single tea bag that gets pulled from the box? A sealed box exactly the same as all the other boxes that have come before? And anyway, who would think to look at the tea later, when foxglove’s poisonous compounds are the very same compounds in Kocur’s heart medication? And even if they did look at the tea, who would think to check receipts for some party flowers from half a year ago and half a world away?”
“So you supplied who knows how many people with the means for murder and had an imprisoned authoritarian killed, all so you could have the president owe you a favor.” Isolde’s voice gives nothing away, and her expression is reserved, but when Mark’s fingers reach her knee, her thighs fall apart as if they’d never been pressed together at all.
“Dear one, when are you going to admit it?” asks Mark. He slides his hand past her knee and stops midthigh, his thumb tracing slow semicircles over the silky skin there. Isolde’s lips have separated, her pulse pounding in her throat, but her eyes are still wary. They are fixed on her husband.
“Admit what?” she asks.
His hand moves, and I don’t have to see his destination. I can hear it. The wet drag of his fingers through the perfect place between her thighs. The careful and deliberate insertion of a finger. She arches under the blanket, her head falling back against the wall.
“That you like it when I do bad things,” he says, twisting his wrist. She inhales. “You like when I take a knife to the world and pare it like an apple.”
She doesn’t want to admit any such thing, but the evidence is undeniable. When Mark uses his other hand to push the blanket off her shoulders, the berry-pink tips of her breasts are erect and there’s a telltale flush on her chest. I catch a glimpse of her slick and blushing cunt as the blanket starts to come undone around her legs.
“Do you want me to kill more war criminals to woo you into my bed?” he asks in a voice that’s as sincere as it is seductive. He would do it, of course. He’d kill anyone it took to keep Isolde coming back to him.
Maybe he’d do it for me too, except all three of us know the truth—he doesn’t have to. He doesn’t have to do anything at all to keep me coming back.
Isolde’s eyes are glittering from underneath her long lashes, crescents of defiant blue-green. “I guess you’ll have to try it and find out.”
