Page 115 of Bitter Burn
Mark pushes the button on the panel and turns to look at us while the doors close and we float up to our floor.
“It’s Isolde’s fault, this last secret. Because my plan for revenge, the one that seemed so clear in the beginning, started unraveling the first time Isolde crawled to me in the loft. Unraveled into looping piles during our first kiss, and the first time I made her come just from spanking her, and the night I found the holy card from her uncle. It became clearer and clearer that not only could I not kill her but that I needed to keep her shielded from the fallout. That I wanted her to have a future where she was safe, where she had someone to care for her with as much vigilance and affection as I would myself.”
The elevator bobs to a stop, and the doors open. We step out, and rather than ask any questions or take his words apart for details, I wordlessly reach for the scotch, and Mark hands it to me.
We walk through Mark’s office and into our home, the tall windows giving us a view of a silver sky outside and the huddled gray city underneath. I remember Lady Anguish’s snowdrop brooch, though, and think about how spring is already stretching its arms underground, stirring and sighing into the smallest exhales of hope and warmth.
Mark takes the bottle back from me and wanders over to the window, next to a table holding a chess set missing its queen.
I suddenly miss Petitcrieu with a fierce, irrational ache, a child missing a favorite blanket or stuffed animal. I know it’s for the best that Petitcrieu has been with Cara and Goran and Nat, but it just seems like playing with her giant paws would fix everything right now.
“It’s funny,” Mark murmurs, the words distant in the kind of way that makes me think he’s talking to himself more than us. “That the remedy for one revenge was inside another.”
I join Mark near the window, but I don’t stand. I sit at the table with the chessboard. Tristan stops near the bookshelves, framed by war poetry and yellowing paperback mysteries as he watches us with vulnerable green eyes.
“Tristan once told an interviewer that he was ready to fall in love at a moment’s notice.” Mark turns to look at Tristan, who gives him an uncertain look in return. “The interviewer wrote that he was a romantic at heart. Something I didn’t think about much when I first read the interview, other than to be annoyed by it. Who was this handsome baby murderer whose biggest problem was falling in love too fast? Why should anyone care when Eliot could never fall in love again? But it mattered after I realized I couldn’t bear to kill Isolde. It mattered after I realized that Isolde would need someone to keep her safe and well cared for after”—he gestures vaguely with the bottle—“me.”
I am several steps behind his words now, my mind unable to put the pieces together. “Are you saying that you hired Tristan to take care of me?”
My husband turns those complicated eyes toward me. “I hired Tristan to fuck you,” he says. “I thought I was making that obvious.”
Tristan has frozen in place, only his chest moving now. “I’m sorry?”
Mark sighs at us, his stolid and unlettered students. “I never planned on living past destroying Ys, but I knew that even if I managed to survive, Isolde didn’t deserve to be welded to me afterward. Even loving her as I did—because I loved her as I did—I knew it was better for her to be free after it was over, either by my death or by legal decree, and be watched over and loved by someone else. And then here was this soldier I’d been following for years, this soldier who was apparently an incurable romantic, who was infuriatingly, horribly good, a talented fighter and a kind friend and a certified hero. Here was someone who could keep Isolde safe and doted on if she’d let him. And then the irony being once I met you, sweet Tristan, I realized she could keep you safe as well. But you were both so fucking stubborn in your own particular ways, and it wasn’t as if I could sit you both down and rationally explain that I knew Isolde was a saint and that Tristan had killed my husband and also that there was a secret organization called Ys that might kill all three of us, or why it would be in your best interest to link together after I either died or granted Isolde a divorce, or that actually it would be better for everyone if you two went ahead and fell in love while you were at it. Yes, Isolde was safe from me, but I still needed her to get closer to Cashel, and if I still needed her, then I wanted to make sure she could leave me—or my graveside—with someone who could keep her safe.”
My nervous system is burned out over the last week—my adrenal reserves gone, my ability to respond to this with any semblance of dignity or pride gone. I simply stare at Mark with a dry throat and a heart that has no blood left to bleed for him.
“You wanted us to fall in love,” I say dully.
He takes a drink and then sets the bottle on the table, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “I wouldn’t use the word wanted with that much precision,” he finally replies. “I wanted it like I wanted to cut out my own liver, but the alternative, leaving you alone after what I’d dragged you into…I wouldn’t want to do that to anyone. Much less to a bride I treasured.” His eyes meet mine, and his voice is quiet when he adds, “A bride I loved.”
Some blood spills from my bloodless heart, wrung out with great force. I duck my head.
“I don’t—” Tristan is struggling with this, I can hear it in his voice. “You didn’t make me have sex with her. I did it all on my own. I felt fucking awful about it.”
“Tristan,” I whisper, looking back. This is all so long ago, and yet the bitter self-hatred in his voice is enough to pollute the room, it’s still that strong.
Tristan ignores me, his eyes firm on Mark’s. “I violated my own ethics, my professionalism, my sense of loyalty, my own feelings for you. I did that.”
There’s pity in Mark’s face now. “But I knew you would, puppy. I set you up to fail in every way possible. I made sure you left for Ireland angry with me and hurt and betrayed too. I put you on a yacht for three weeks with a sad damsel full of secret sharp edges—catnip for my hero, my masochist. I filled that yacht with your favorite books, with dresses for Isolde and translucent swimsuits too, with chapels and martial arts studios and basketball courts. I pampered you with ridiculous meals. I had you move rooms next to each other. I told you over the phone to woo Isolde in my place. I watched those cameras every day and night, you know, the ones on the yacht, needing to see my plan succeed. I was in agony when it finally did.”
“But your shoulder,” Tristan protests weakly. “You couldn’t have planned to get stabbed…you couldn’t have planned for the stitches to rip after.”
But Tristan underestimates the resolve in Mark, the kind of resolve that can spend almost a decade with this kind of single-minded vengeance as its only animating force. I stared into those ocean eyes in that abandoned church, and I saw the unshakeable, burning determination there. The determination to fight for us, to die for us. If ever a man were to get stabbed on purpose, it would be Mark.
“You are correct,” Mark allows. “I didn’t plan on getting stabbed. I was going to manufacture some kind of business that would mean I couldn’t go to Ireland, but when Drobny attacked the club, I saw a better chance, a stronger excuse. I took it.”
Tristan closes his eyes. “I’ve known since Samhain that you’ve been pretending to be bad at fighting, but it still hadn’t occurred to me…”
“That I would intentionally allow myself to be stabbed? It was one of my more adventurous ideas, I’ll grant you, and I knew I’d have to be careful if I wanted use of that shoulder later. But it healed too quickly anyway.” A heavy sigh.
“So you ripped open your own stitches.” Tristan opens his eyes. He looks horrified. “We thought you were moving furniture, ignoring your doctor, but you tore them open yourself. Mark, Jesus Christ.”
There’s a flash of fondness in Mark’s expression when Tristan speaks his first name. “Thank you,” Mark says, gratified, even though Tristan hadn’t actually complimented him. “I do consider that moment to be a high-water mark for me, at least as far as commitment to a goal goes.”
“I don’t understand.” My hands are on either side of the chessboard, my thumbs framing the bottom and my pointer fingers pressed against the sides. They shake enough to rattle the pieces ever so slightly. “You were so angry in Belgrade. You were livid, Mark, the kind of livid that can’t be faked. You were hurt. How could you have been wounded when this was your miserable fucking plan all along?”
He doesn’t answer for a long moment, his eyes on the fading sky outside. When he does speak, his voice is tattered and low. “I arranged for all this before I fell in love with Tristan. And it had been long enough since I’d seen you, Isolde, that I’d started to hope that I’d love you less this time. That maybe what I felt for you had been overblown in my memory, and you didn’t really have such power over me.”
