Page 117 of Bitter Burn
I come and stand next to my old ally. When I put my own hands on the railing, I see blood streaking my ring on the hand closest to hers. Andrea catches it immediately.
“Is that his?” Her whisper is almost reverent.
“It is.”
Her eyes linger over the dull rust of it, her lips parted. “Did you make him hurt?”
“I thought of every way I could flay him raw in the short window of time we had and all the ways I could keep him alive long enough to pluck out his right eye and cut off his right hand. I wondered if I could get creative and extremely literal with thirty pieces of silver.” I stare down at my hands a moment, flex them on the railing. I would have enjoyed doing any of those things—or all of them—immensely. “I gave his death to Isolde in the end. Of the three of us, he wronged her first and he wronged her the most, because he stole her future right along with her mother’s life.”
“He stole all our futures,” Andrea counters. “Anything we were, anything we were going to be, it all stopped that night in Kraków, and we couldn’t do anything else but destroy him.”
“We couldn’t, maybe,” I say, looking up at the hall itself, a cathedral of glass and concrete—a cathedral I built not for the glory of God but for the sweetness of revenge. “You and I aren’t built to forgive and forget where others might have. Others might have had futures with regular jobs and mortgages and healthy marriages. But you were twenty-four when McKenzie and Eliot died, and I was twenty-eight—we were old enough to choose what we did next. Isolde was a child when Cashel took her under his wing, and a child already prone to thinking love and pain were the same. I know you don’t like her, Andrea, but at least believe me when I say that I sincerely thought she had the greater claim to his life.”
Andrea sighs and looks out at the hall.
Her way of conceding the argument.
“It feels better than I’d hoped,” she says after a minute. “I see the news reports about the crash, the cardinals rushing back to Rome, all these obituaries, and I feel so good. I hated him so much, Mark. I hated him, I hated him, I hated him.”
Her words lift into the air like an offering, like a liturgy. I let them linger awhile before I speak. “All that’s left now is the Scales.” I’m a little surprised at the weariness I hear in my own voice. All I’ve wanted for eight years is to destroy Ys, and the hard part is done now. There is so little that remains, and yet.
Yet my appetite for revenge is changing. Shrinking. It’s like being brought a heaping plate of food after you’ve already eaten your fill.
“Ys is in disarray. So is the Church. The Scales won’t be hard to flush out.” Her voice carries through the empty air around us, full of energy and will. Her appetite for revenge is undiminished.
I’m envious of it—I wish I had anything burning inside me, anything at all, to distract me from missing Tristan and Isolde.
“Did Lox call you? I asked her to while I was in Nemi.”
“She did.” Andrea looks over at me with sharp, assessing eyes. “I don’t doubt her work, but it contradicts everything we’d thought about Ys. Everything we’d heard and from sources we trust too.”
“Cashel admitted it when he was dying,” I reply. “It’s true.”
She blows out a breath between thin but flawlessly painted lips. “It makes me feel a little gullible, actually.”
“That’s the genius of it. No one likes feeling gullible, so they don’t question it. But everyone likes thinking they know something deep and secret, so they swallow it whole. Cashel knew how to play us all, friends and foes alike.” I push back from the railing with an exhausted breath. I might have to skip the scotch and just go straight to sleep.
“And Isolde?” Andrea asks, not tentatively—she’s never been tentative about Isolde—but a little carefully. Perhaps out of respect for our fellowship, which has been steadfast, if mostly pragmatic at its core.
“I gave her the papers,” I say, and then I close my eyes against the sudden burn there.
Shit. I hate crying. Fuck.
“I’m sorry,” Andrea says a little awkwardly, as if she has to remember how sympathy works.
“You don’t have to pretend.” I still have my eyes closed, but it’s not helping. My throat has clamped shut, and I can’t breathe right.
How long has it been since I cried? And I’m going to do it here, in front of Andrea? What the hell?
Andrea’s words are deliberately chosen. “I know it’s not her fault that she’s Cashel’s niece, just like I know it wasn’t actually Tristan’s fault that he couldn’t save McKenzie’s life. I try to…remember that. That they are only tied to my tragedy, not responsible for it.” She pauses. “Will you be okay?”
I huff a laugh. It’s short and strangled. “Does it matter? This was always the plan. Them together, me alone, whether I was still alive or not.”
When I dare to open my eyes, I see Andrea’s face turned back down to her hands on the railing. Her hair is gathered in a sleek ponytail, exposing her troubled profile, the sudden sparkle of tears on her lashes. The shift is so abrupt that I can’t actually account for it, even after knowing her for eight years.
“I didn’t mean to infect you with my romantic despair,” I say as I swipe at my cheeks with the heel of my hand. I really have to get out of here. “I’ll be fine, Andrea.”
It’s a lie. I don’t think I’ll ever be close to fine again, but it doesn’t matter. She barely hears me.
