Page 30 of Bitter Burn
Isolde starts pacing again, unsatisfied.
“Sir,” I venture, again trying to keep the misery out of my voice. “Am I fired? Evicted? How long do I have to find another job?”
Pity notches the space between Mark’s brows. “I should have explained things better, Tristan, I’m sorry. You’re not fired, and you’re not evicted, but I have found a place for you elsewhere—with a friend of mine, Hugo. He owns a kink club called Armorica, and he’s having some security issues around one of his submissives, something about an ex-member stalking her. You remember her. Isabella Beroul?”
Isolde paces even faster, and I give a short, tight nod. Yes, obviously I remember Isabella. Remember Mark fucking her atop the very desk he’s leaning against now.
“You’ll like Hugo,” he’s saying. “He’s friendlier than me, which will be a welcome change, and his co-owner, Kayden, is about your age and also a former service member. Of the Canadian Army though. Naturally.”
I can’t keep up. “Naturally?”
“Well, they are Canadian. Armorica is in Montreal.” Mark straightens and walks over to his credenza and makes himself a drink, like I’m not quietly panicking.
Montreal. Canada. I won’t just be in a different city than the people I love but a different country altogether. The word exile suddenly doesn’t feel strong enough.
“No gin?” Isolde asks acerbically as Mark knocks back a deep swallow of scotch.
A raspy laugh. “No, my queen. I assumed from the glass you left out on Samhain that my little habit had been thoroughly autopsied.”
Okay, now I really can’t keep up. “What habit?” I ask.
Isolde gives me a guilty look. “I didn’t tell you because it seemed—well, it seemed obvious once I figured it out.”
“Clearly, it’s not obvious,” I mutter. Petulance is strung through every word, but I can’t help it. I know they’re married, and now I know that they are more alike to each other than either of them is to me, but I hate the idea of all this private knowledge between them. I have no right to jealousy, but what does it matter now? We are all constantly, viciously jealous of each other, and I’m jealous of a glass of gin. Great.
“Isolde has learned that I’m not quite the dipsomaniac I’ve pretended to be,” Mark says, as if the glass of scotch in his hand doesn’t testify to the opposite. “My gin intake over the past several years has been more like…” A gesture with the glass that sends the whisky rolling inside. “Water. With some gin syrup added in, lest anyone get close enough to smell it. Or in case I kiss any bodyguards.”
“Water?” I echo faintly. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
My language takes both Isolde and Mark by surprise. Isolde pauses mid-pace, and both of Mark’s eyebrows lift.
“I am not fucking kidding you,” he responds. “How do you go from the great and terrible Mark Trevena, the Sea Hound, to someone barely worth remembering? Barely worth thinking about? You turn into someone sloppy and slow. You remind them that you’re no longer a young man. You show them a man so consumed with vice that he’s forgotten to look over his shoulder. So I learned to tolerate the taste of gin-flavored water. It’s not so bad, you know—it tastes like drinking from a Christmas tree stand. Or how I imagine that would taste. I haven’t personally done it.”
Isolde is moving again. “Montreal. How long?”
“I don’t know.” He does sound sorry about that at least. “As long as it takes.” Isolde seems ready to prosecute him over this, and then he adds casually, “As long as it takes to make sure we have no perceived gap between us and that there won’t be any more failures.”
She stops, something struggling to break free in her face. Her hands move in her skirt, fisting the fabric and then letting go. I know that phrase, perceived gap—Isolde spoke those very words on the yacht when she was explaining the nature of her arranged marriage to me. Something about it seems to be affecting her deeply now.
Why? A ghost of past promises? Of vows unkept or intentions bent backward?
Mark is already staring at her when she looks over at him, his expression as casual as his tone, but when she meets his gaze, something decidedly uncasual passes between them.
Ah, that jealousy again.
“Right,” she says, and there’s a new tension around her eyes and mouth. “As long as it takes then.”
“Sir,” I break in, “I will go wherever I need to go, for however long, but will this mean that we can’t…see each other at all? That we can’t speak?”
Mark seems to want to say something and manages to wrench himself back from the edge. But guessing from the glass-draining swallow he takes and the twist of his mouth, it’s something along the lines of You didn’t speak to me for six weeks. Clearly, you’ve been practicing for it.
“It’s smarter to keep our communication limited,” says Isolde.
I can’t keep the shock from my face. She didn’t want me to leave a moment ago. Now she’s saying we shouldn’t even talk while I’m gone?
She meets my gaze levelly, although her hands are bunched in her skirt again. “We don’t know who we can trust at Lyonesse, Tristan. I still think Andrea?—”
“We are not putting Andrea’s loyalty on trial again,” Mark interrupts with some irritation.
