Page 124 of Bitter Burn
“I don’t believe in fate,” I say, but now she’s leaving my office, like I haven’t spoken at all, like anything else I’d have to say is completely irrelevant. She really has been around Merlin too long.
After my office door swings closed, I lean down to stroke Petitcrieu’s ears, and she rouses enough to dozily lick my hand. This morning, she came to lie next to Tristan on the bed, and I was able to pet her while holding him at the same time. It wasn’t peace or happiness, but for a moment, it was the absence of pain. Relief from it.
My phone rings, and I pick it up.
“Sir,” Sedge says, “Ms. Lim has offered to take Petitcrieu to the vet for you today since the club is closed to guests. Would you like to bring her down?”
Right. The vet appointment. For the dog I got Isolde, which is now my dog, because Isolde’s no longer in my life, and she didn’t take Petitcrieu with her when she left.
As if she senses I’m thinking of my wife, Petitcrieu lifts her head from her paws to lick my hand again. I caress her fur, thinking of how happy Isolde was when I’d brought the puppy upstairs on Christmas. I think of her smiles, her laughter, such rare gems, whenever Petitcrieu pranced or tumbled over or licked her face.
“Thank you,” I tell the puppy, scratching behind her ears now. If nothing else, I have more of Isolde’s smiles to remember than I would have otherwise. Petitcrieu looks up at me with giant, liquid eyes and then tries to help me scratch behind her ear with a clumsy, oversized paw.
I get her collared and leashed, and before we leave my office, I stick the old book in the safe. And then I walk Petitcrieu down to the lobby, where Ms. Lim greets her with coos of praise and belly rubs.
“Thank you for taking her,” I say.
“I’m happy to, and I think you’re needed in the treasury anyway,” she says, not bothering to look at me while she ruffles the puppy’s fur. “Andrea sent me a message saying she couldn’t get ahold of you? She’s having trouble with the door.”
I glance at my phone. I haven’t missed anything from her, but the signal from the basement is notoriously terrible, so that doesn’t mean much. “I’ll go check it out. Have you seen Tristan, by the way? I haven’t seen him since this morning when he was going on a run.”
Ms. Lim shakes her head as she stands and takes the leash’s handle from me. “I got here not too long ago, so I probably missed him coming in.”
“Right.” There are any number of places he could be, and it’s only been a few hours since we woke up together, but I already miss him. Like someone has grabbed something vital from behind my ribs and walked away with it.
He doesn’t seem to mind, but I’m aware that I’m exploiting him rather shamelessly, venting my sadness and longing on his body. He’s dotted with love bites from the neck down; bruise- colored stripes decorate his skin from his hips to his knees. I can’t go very long without touching him, kissing him, pinning him down and feeling his skin against mine, exchanging inhales and exhales and proving to myself over and over again that he is here, he is here.
He misses her too. He understands. There is no cure, only a treatment that keeps death at bay, and the treatment takes several doses a day to be anywhere close to effective.
See, Nimue? I’m accepting one gift from fate at least.
I give Petitcrieu a final scratch behind the ears before Ms. Lim takes her out the front door to where our new driver waits. There’s a fist somewhere below my throat that squeezes and gradually releases as I watch the new driver help Ms. Lim into the car. I’d missed Jago’s funeral while being smuggled back into the United States, and I wish…I wish so many things. That he’d been spared meeting me, that I’d never asked him to come work at Lyonesse. That he hadn’t been so good at his job, that I’d known the church in Albany would turn into an ambush.
More debts to lay at the dead’s feet—bills that can never be paid now.
I glance around the lobby. Dinah is out sick today, and with no guests tonight, we’ve had the staff stay home with pay, and our security too. It’s only Andrea and Sedge and possibly Tristan here, and I can feel it—the emptiness of the space, the vacancy of it. All this vastness, this outlay of wealth and intention, and it might as well be a crumbled Greek theater now, a hollow monument to what used to be.
The vacancy is an extrapolation, a reflection, the kingdom mirroring the king, and while I’m mostly numb to it, I recognize in the staff’s faces a certain kind of melancholy. They helped Lyonesse grow and thrive, their satisfaction was in the satisfaction of our guests, and now all they can do is sit in the stale air of an empty building and wait.
For their sake, I hope this is temporary, that we soon have all the assurances we need to go back to normal. That Lyonesse is filled to the brim with its wicked children once again.
I take the elevator down to the treasury floor, and they open to the usual: a large vestibule capped with glass double doors and lit with blue lights. Beyond is a second set of doors and the server room.
I don’t see Andrea.
“She didn’t come in today, I’m sorry,” says a quiet voice from the corner closest to the elevator doors—the corner I couldn’t see as I stepped out. I turn to see Sedge standing there in trousers and a cardigan, his pale hair pulled back into a neat ponytail, his light gray eyes shining blue under the lights. “She didn’t text Ms. Lim either. But I’m sure you’re familiar with how to spoof a phone number, sir. You know how easy it is to do.”
The wrongness of the moment is a veil pulled between us, or perhaps it’s a veil pulled back, and now I’m really seeing Sedge for the first time.
My mild-mannered assistant of almost two years, his inscrutable expression no longer closed off but blank; my assistant who should not be down here, who has no reason to be down here, no reason to spoof Andrea’s phone number and casually ask for my help in the treasury in her name.
I didn’t plan for this. I didn’t see it.
And I have…nothing for this moment.
No favors, no secret armies, no extra information.
Nothing.
