Page 65 of Bitter Burn
“Don’t say I can’t be a bad anything,” I laugh. “We both know it’s not true.”
He shakes his head, his firm lips moving against my finger. Tickling. Tickling. “You’re different than good,” he says. “You’re like the angels in the Bible, absolutely terrifying and yet completely holy too.”
I used to think that about myself too, that I was God’s will on earth, that I was practically glowing with his blessing to cleanse the Church of evil. And on balance, I think most of the people I killed were monsters in human skin. But how do you kill monsters without becoming one? And who gets to decide when death is the only currency left to spend?
“I think I’m more like the saints we have no business venerating, like St. Olga or St. Stephen of Hungary,” I sigh and drop my finger. I think again of Isabella, sweet and honest and probably closer to an angel than I’ll ever be, and I wonder if all the times I’ve been asking myself When can I be with Tristan again? I’ve been asking myself the wrong question.
Should I be with Tristan again? might be the question an actual saint would ask themselves.
“We’re ready,” says Dinah from the edge of the stage.
I look over to see Mark standing by a table covered with a sheet. Anything could be under it, and yet I see no St. Andrew’s cross, no spanking bench, no medical tables or dog crates or sex swings. There’s only a large mat on the floor.
I get to my feet, and Tristan catches my hand, his straight brows notched together in worry. “What did you tell him your limit was?”
“I didn’t,” I reply softly and pull myself free to join Dinah in the wings. I can hear the music and chattering outside, a casual furor that reminds me of nothing more than the noise in a theater before a play begins.
Mark and I will be the show tonight, the main attraction, and then afterward, the hall will fling itself into drinking and dancing and general depravity to usher in the new year. And as always, the playrooms will be open to everyone who’s under the drinking limit, with club Dominants and submissives waiting to serve the guests in the market for extra companionship.
“Are you ready?” Dinah asks. If she thinks any part of this is ridiculous or pitiable, she doesn’t show it. Her expression is one of translucent kindness.
“I am,” I say, and I do mean it, even if my hands are trembling at my sides and I can’t stop the goose bumps crawling up my legs. I’m wearing a short red slip with nothing underneath—the opposite of what I wore the last time I was at Lyonesse for New Year’s Eve, which was also a silk slip but in bridal white. If I’m going to do this, then I want to do it fully. No more dressing like I’m donning armor, giving them nothing to work with. I’ll look the part of the treasonous queen if it’ll season my suffering and wrench a deeper catharsis out of us all.
“Then we’ll begin,” Dinah says and gestures to the stage manager on the other side of the wings.
Soon the grand drape is coming up to wild applause, revealing the covered table and the devil himself, wearing a black three-piece suit with a white shirt and no tie. His hair gleams gold and his shoes gleam black.
His eyes are chatoyant under the stage’s lights. Otherworldly and feline.
Dinah waits until the applause dies down before she sweeps onto the stage. I wait in the wings like we’ve discussed and try not to think about Tristan behind me—several steps back so he can’t be seen from the audience—or Andrea or Sedge or Hugo or Isabella or anyone else whose opinion I might care about. My focus has to be on myself, on getting through what’s to come, whatever it is.
Dinah is stirring up the crowd now, telling a grand and chilling history of the trial by iron, about how Mark forbade such a thing from ever happening here, why it’s happening tonight. She is tactful when she talks about my absence from the club, but she doesn’t need to be. Everybody here knows what happened. Everybody here knows I ran away with the same bodyguard that’s here in the club at this very moment.
“And now, our lost little queen has returned to the fold,” finishes Dinah. “She seeks the comfort of her owner once again. She seeks his approval and his love, and she’s determined to earn it. She’s asked to undergo this lurid and unmentionable trial to test her loyalty and her faith in him, and he’s consented with great reluctance.”
It’s quite adept, the way she sets the scene. Me the penitent and Mark’s feelings a cipher, a mystery that they’ll be hungry to solve. Will he be angry? Hurt? Coldly inscrutable?
Will they witness a sliver of forgiveness, and if they do, will they judge it merciful or foolish?
“Come here, sweet queen,” cajoles Dinah, and I step out onto the stage. The crowd is silent, and without the music, without chatter or applause, the hall’s gravity feels like it’s tripled. Inhaling and exhaling now take three times the effort.
Dinah takes my hand, and in an upside-down nod to our wedding, she puts my hand into Mark’s, like I’m a bride she’s giving away.
“This is designed to test your limits and exploit your fears,” says Dinah. “But we are not demons. You can safe out at any time, just like any other scene.”
But unlike any other scene, this isn’t designed with foreknowledge and consent, for our mutual benefit and with my needs in mind. A trial by ordeal is what Dinah called it, and ordeal is exactly what’s on the menu.
“What you are about to see is a violation,” Dinah declares to the hall, “and suffering. This is the first time this has ever happened, and it will be the last. We hope it’s to your liking.”
She steps to the side but she doesn’t leave the stage, standing in wait like a Greek chorus. I look over to the table and swallow, then up to Mark, who is staring down at me with an opaque expression.
“You told me you already know my greatest fear and my hardest limit,” I whisper. “What is it?”
“You’ll see soon enough.” He yanks me into him so that we’re pressed together, and then he bends his head down to my ear and speaks in a low voice. “The two times I’ve had you up here before now have been simulations. Tonight is real. If you want this to work, then it must be real.”
“And you? Will this be real for you?”
His lips find the sensitive skin below my ear; he nips at me, and I’m so nervous that I jerk in his hold. “It’s always real for me.”
