Page 11 of Bitter Burn
His eyes burn brighter at the mention of his boss’s name. “You’re too late anyway, you scarred, perverted drunk.”
Good to know my reputation precedes me.
“You mentioned about being too late earlier. I guess I’ll have to go see for myself.” I step on his hand, pinning it and his knife to the ground. I bend down and pry the knife out from under his fingers and tuck it in my jacket. “I guess this is farewell,” I say. “Give Cardinal Cashel my regards.”
I’m stepping away, my mind already retracing our path through the medina, when he calls out, “God will punish her too, you know.”
This stops me as surely as any knife. I turn to face him, this murderer belly down in an alley, his ankles bleeding onto the dusty cobbles.
“Excuse me?” I ask pleasantly. At least I think I sound pleasant. I think I sound like someone in control.
His face is folded in pain and righteous fury as he twists to look up at me. “Your wife. She’s an apostate, and it doesn’t matter how well you’re hiding her. God will find her, and he will drag her weakness and her lack of faith into the light.”
It doesn’t matter how well you’re hiding her… So the saints think I’m hiding Isolde? Cashel thinks I’m hiding Isolde?
Could it be that she hasn’t spoken to her uncle since she ran away from Lyonesse?
“What does this punishing and dragging involve?” I ask, squatting down next to him. “You wouldn’t be talking about hurting her, right? My wife? That seems extraordinarily stupid to do, even for a zealot.”
“It is not up to me what will happen to her but up to God, and God has chosen me to find her and force her atonement, whether by purging her sins in this life or sending her to purgatory.”
“God has chosen you to force her atonement?”
“Yes.”
“Cashel condones this?”
“The cardinal only conveys the will of God. He doesn’t choose it for himself.”
I flip the knife in my hand, the inlaid rubies glittering in the scant light that’s worked its way down into the alley, and I catch the knife in reverse grip.
“Thank you for your honesty,” I say as I lean closer. “God would be so proud.”
I make sure he doesn’t bleed too much on the leather as I kill him. It doesn’t seem fair to the tannery workers to ruin all their hard work.
Six
Mark
When I reach the doorway that I presume leads to Father Minch’s apartment, I take a moment to place a quick call to Andrea. I hadn’t planned on doing any wet work, had only amended my plan after that sack of fanatical shit disclosed that he might kill my wife, so there is a fair chance I’ll need to bribe my way out of any unpleasantness coming from a dead body in the tannery. Andrea will help me find something suitable in Lyonesse’s vaults of information in case it’s needed.
I also tell her what the saint said to me about Cashel’s plans to kill Isolde. Andrea hates Isolde with a bitterness that I think will never be sweetened, but she still agrees to start shaking trees on her end to find out more.
“Will you bring her home?” Andrea asks. She doesn’t want me to, I can tell.
“If I do, are you going to undermine my authority at my own club again?”
Andrea doesn’t answer, wisely. Her exposing Tristan and Isolde in the garden a month ago didn’t just embarrass my bodyguard and wife but eroded trust in my power, in my control, and worse, it forced my hand.
And Andrea knows it. She recognizes she fucked up. She just loathes Isolde enough that there’s still some ROI in that fuckup for her.
“I want to bring her home,” I say. “She’d be safest at Lyonesse.”
But happiest? Better off? No. Not that.
I finish my call with Andrea and follow the drying blood to a low wooden door and let myself inside. The sounds of the busy square outside filter through the shuttered windows, and glowing slats of light come in through the shutters and from under the door. I can see well enough—enough to catch the blood leading to a curtained area in the back, enough to notice that there’s no overturned furniture or signs of a struggle. Just a Bible open on a table with a cup of coffee nearby. When I press the back of a gloved knuckle to it, I feel warmth. Fading but there.
It hasn’t been long since Father Minch was torn from his morning devotionals.
