Page 133 of Bitter Burn
I lifted the note to see what was underneath, and abruptly there wasn’t enough air in the room.
A wristwatch was packed carefully in a nest of packing paper. Its silver case winked in the sunlight, and the hands ticked with steady precision under its glass face. There was no blood on it, there were no scratches—no evidence at all that it had been ripped off my injured body after I’d been kidnapped.
The posting date was the day before we’d killed Mortimer. Somehow Sedge had known that my watch had been taken and had arranged to have it sent to Morois, where no one had been available to receive the delivery until after the post office had stopped trying to deliver it at all.
A glitter of airless sparks filled my vision as I tried desperately to inhale past the ache in my throat.
I’d never thought I’d see this again, this small, beloved piece of Eliot when even our wedding rings had been taken by the fire, and it was Sedge who’d given it back to me. Sedge, who’d been ready to kill me but ready to kiss me too.
In a way, this watch had started everything. It had been the flash in the dark on a wet night in Kraków, it had been the reason Tristan knew where to aim. It had been my talisman ever since I’d pulled it from Eliot’s wrist with shaking hands, and it had been a reminder every time I looked down at it of what I had lost and what I had left to do.
I stared at the watch for a long time. Heart pounding; sick with relief and also an inescapable kind of regret. And then I walked out to the graveyard, to Sedge’s stone, as Petitcrieu followed happily, scampering off between the headstones to chase fuzzy summer bees.
I slipped the band of the watch over the wreath hook fitted over the headstone. It dangled in the middle of the bright green wreath, right above Sedge’s name.
Petitcrieu came over and licked my hand and then she flopped down in the grass at my feet. I stood there for a long time, too long, trying to understand what it was that I felt, and then I heard two lovely voices coming from the trees.
My dear ones returning from a walk.
The dog surged to her feet and was gone instantly—off in search of attention—and I finally understood what it was that I felt.
Joy. Peace. Like the rest of my life was currently walking toward the house with a basket of mushrooms and an overeager dog.
I glanced back at the headstone and the watch and took my first real breath since lifting up Sedge’s note.
“I’m sorry too,” I said to the watch and the headstone both.
And when I went to follow Tristan and Isolde into the house, I didn’t look back.
In the here and now, I turn with the lit candle in hand. I see that Isolde has listened to me and with pleasing effect: she’s straddling Tristan with a knee on either side of his hips as she continues to abuse his stomach and chest with wax and he continues to twist and fret underneath her. Between the hot splatters, she allows her silk-covered cunt to press against his erection. She rubs herself back and forth on it, teasing him as he begs so, so sweetly.
I watch them a moment fondly, covetously, jealous of them individually and then jealous of them together—not in an envious way but like a jealous god. I want to hoard them to myself; I want the earth to shake when anyone dares to approach what’s mine.
If I thought time and a safer world would have blunted the edges of what I feel for them, then I was a fool, because time has only sharpened what I feel, and a safer world has only meant that I’m uninterrupted in my obsession, that I can feed it and tend to it and watch it grow like a fire, a funeral pyre for any other life I could have had without them.
They’re all I want now. All I live for. I never thought I’d survive, and if I had, I’d always planned on surviving alone, so this—this—feels like a treasure too precious to put down. A gift beyond my ability to ever repay.
A mercy, if I were to use Nimue’s words.
I play the voyeur for another minute or two, watching Isolde drizzle wax on Tristan with so much affection and lust together in my body that I don’t know how I’m able to contain it all. How I’m not ten feet tall with it, how I don’t fill every room wall to wall and corner to corner with what I feel for them. It’s a wicked thing inside me that can’t love without also thinking mine, but I can’t love them without also thinking theirs.
Theirs, theirs, theirs.
I approach and motion for Isolde to stay where she is, still enjoying the sight of her perched atop Tristan like a succubus, and come to the side of the table. Tristan lifts his lashes and meets my gaze with shimmering eyes of green and black.
“Just a little bit longer, I think,” I say, ghosting the fingers of my free hand up his wax-streaked ribs. “Can you do that for us, baby?”
He nods, dazed and drugged, his hair tousled and damp with sweat. I stroke it away from his face, practically purring at the feel of it, thick and silken. Isolde and I held a vote, and it was democratically agreed that Tristan was only allowed to cut his hair twice a year at most. Tristan, a believer in democracy, has bowed to the will of the people, and right now his hair is long enough to curl around his ears and neck again. Perfection.
My candle is set into a glass jar with a spout for easy pouring, the wax a pale tangerine that I thought would look nice with the pink and blue already painted on him. The colors of sunrise, of dawn. All the embers buried and nothing left to do but greet the day.
With quick efficiency, I pour a glug of wax over the inside of my wrist to test the temperature—paraffin is miles away safer than beeswax, but it’s always good to check—and then I decant a small amount onto Tristan’s chest, right in the middle of his sternum. Some wax rolls hotly down toward his abs, and some rolls in the other direction toward his collarbone. He shivers a little but handles it well, and then I nod at Isolde.
She answers me with a small, secret smile, one of edges and darkness, and then together we move our hands, tilting, dripping, flames dancing and wax like rain. We go until Tristan’s chest and stomach are covered, his head is tossing, and the heels of his feet are digging against the plastic covering the table so hard that it looks like it will tear. From underneath Isolde, I see the inflamed head of his cock, ruddy and miserable looking, dripping uselessly onto his wax-covered abdomen.
“There.” I pull my candle back and admire our creation. A loose approximation of a flower, rendered in pink and blue and orange, with ruffled petals spiraling out from a tightly furled center. “What do you think, darling?”
Isolde blows out her candle and runs her eyes over our wax-covered hero. Greed, plain as day, and carnivorous desire are all over her face. “I think I love the way he looks right now.”
