Page 51 of Bitter Burn
Dinah’s watch lights up on her wrist, and she sighs when she looks at it. She gets to her feet. “Well, it’s not going to help any of these pressing reasons if Isolde looks like she’s being yellow-wallpapered while she’s kneeling at your feet.” Dinah scrunches at the curls hanging over one side of her face, looking troubled. “She asked me about the trial by iron, Mark. Last night.”
I stare at her. It is so far outside what I would have thought possible that I don’t even know how to react right now. “She what?”
“She heard Andrea mention it, someone else too. She wanted to know what it was.”
“And what did you tell her?”
Dinah levels a steady gaze at me through her glasses. “That she should forget she ever heard those words.”
I exhale. “Good.”
“I don’t know what’s happening between you two, and I don’t need to know. But whatever’s happening is going to break her apart if you don’t fix it. So, you know. Fix it.”
“I will. And, Dinah?”
“Yes?”
“Let’s pull aside the members who like her and make sure that they’re countering anything they’re hearing that we’re not. Anguish and Christopher will help too.”
“Consider it done.”
I stay at my desk for a moment after Dinah leaves. My thumb goes to the inside of the black and silver ring, toying with it idly. Thinking of the tracker inside, of the other ring currently on Tristan’s finger, which doesn’t have anything untoward inside it at all—something I know for a fact, having had it discreetly checked after my wedding. In my pocket, I feel the hard, cool presence of crystal shaped into a chess piece. A queen.
I touch it once and then get to my feet to find my wife.
Twenty-One
Mark
Outside the hall, I’ve been avoiding her, but it hasn’t been because I haven’t wanted to see her. Quite the opposite. Just like that night on her father’s desk, just like on Samhain, I sense myself at a precipice, willing to throw away years of literal blood, sweat, and tears simply to keep her close to me.
She deserves better than that. She deserves as little of me in her life as I can contrive to make possible.
So. Just the hall at night.
But Dinah was correct to point out that even the hall is extracting a cost from Isolde that I’m not sure she can pay. Every night, I see less and less of my vicious and conniving chess opponent; my arching, gasping wife who once nearly fainted just from crawling across a floor; my shadows and glass girl who can smell the same smoke on the air that I can, who knows what will and won’t wash away when the rain comes.
Every night, she is stiller, quieter, paler.
Of everything I’d planned for, I hadn’t planned for this one ridiculous thing: that the petty, grasping boredoms of my club would coalesce into this…this miasma of whatever the fuck is happening.
As if there’s not enough going wrong right now, as if there aren’t dead priests and rigged conclaves and smuggled weapons right there on the news. And I can’t even sort out my own household in peace?
Goddammit.
Isolde isn’t in the apartment. I see that the bed is rumpled—on my side. She’s been sleeping on my side, which hurts in a way I can’t find the words for.
I pull open the refrigerator doors and see it full of untouched food. The only dish in the sink is a glass still half filled with water. There’s a small bunch of bananas hanging from a hook below a shelf, and when I flip open the trash lid, I see three banana peels and a half-eaten sleeve of crackers.
Worry slides into my chest like so much cold mud as I leave the apartment and go to her office on the floor below. She isn’t inside, and judging from the fine layer of dust on the surface of her desk, it’s been a while since she has been. Maybe since before she ran away to Morois.
I go downstairs to find a similar fate for her studio. Dust on the rubber knives, a staleness to the air. I rub at the edge of the black and silver ring with my thumb and then look at the door to the garden outside.
The walls block the wind, but the garden remains a basin of miserable chill, and my ears and fingers are pinched with cold by the time I get to the back of the garden, where a dormant cherry tree zigs and zags and droops next to a fountain with a layer of ice at the bottom. Gas heaters have been installed at convenient intervals throughout the outdoor space in case we decide to use it for our guests, but only one has been turned on today, burning by the fountain like a lonely torch.
Isolde is nearby—not perched on the fountain or nearby bench but kneeling on the hard ground under the tree. She’s not praying. Her eyes are fixed on nothing in particular; her hands are loose and empty at her sides. Her face, when she looks over at me, is empty of everything save for hopelessness.
I walk over to her and kneel. I take her hands in mine. Despite the heater nearby, they’re frigid. “How long have you been out here?” I ask.
