Page 91 of Bitter Burn
“That’s true, but I didn’t understand how much those feelings might change my plans until I found that gift from your uncle in your room. The holy card.”
“Julian the Hospitaller,” she says slowly.
“The patron saint of murderers. And written on the back, Tu me superbus.”
Her voice is hollow when she translates the Latin. “You make me proud.”
“I’d known your uncle was preparing you for sainthood—that little dojo of yours has churned out more than a few saints in its time. But I’d hoped he’d keep you in waiting a little while longer, allow you the rest of your college years at least. I’d hoped you’d get longer than I did after I joined the Army, that your hands would stay clean long enough for your heart to finish growing. But he didn’t. He made you into a killer at the age of nineteen, and I knew that if he’d dip your hands in blood, then he wouldn’t hesitate to use you against me the moment he was able. If we were close, clearly in love, clearly intimate, then the pressure would have begun right away. I wasn’t ready for that, and more importantly, Lyonesse wasn’t ready.”
I drop my hand, freeing her to look away, which she does.
“I wanted to stay that night with you more than anything,” I say tiredly, “but the game had already begun. Your uncle had made the first move. It was either my obsession with you or everything I’d built my life around since Eliot died, so I chose revenge. Not that it mattered. I thought of you constantly, wanted you incessantly. Every time I saw you after that, I knew I was only a sigh or a smile away from checkmate.”
Sadness haunts the shape of her mouth now. I run my thumb over the seam of her lips as if I could rub all the unhappiness away.
“At nineteen, you had the power to terrify me. Me. I don’t want to boast, but in any other circumstance, the idea of Mark Trevena being terrified of a nineteen-year-old heiress would be ridiculous. But I knew with a marrow-deep certainty that if you wanted, even if you only half wanted, you could knock me over as easily as a chess piece. Don’t waste a gift that rare on someone else’s idea of holiness, Isolde. Maybe you don’t think you’re good, but you’re able to protect good people, and if that isn’t its own kind of virtue, then I don’t know what is.”
She doesn’t speak, not to agree and not to argue, but she’s allowed me to caress away her pout, and when her eyes drift to the window, she seems pensive rather than miserable. I can’t resist. I tug her chin back toward me and press my mouth against hers.
She makes a noise in her throat and wraps her arms around my neck, fingertips swirling in my hair as I cajole her lips apart and stroke my tongue against hers.
“Clearly, I can still touch you,” she murmurs, and a hand drops from my head to the waistband of the lounge pants I pulled on. She reaches inside, circles the stiff flesh she finds there, and then I circle her hand with my own. Together, we work my erection into a flushed, weeping state, until all thought of logic and prudence has left my mind, and all my thoughts are of tight openings and arched throats.
“Bed,” I growl, standing up and lifting my wife in my arms as I do. And I carry her upstairs to bed and to Tristan, who is more than happy to be kissed awake for all the wicked little plots we have in mind.
Thirty
Mark
Morning finally finds Manhattan, and a cool gray light slants over their limp, snoozing forms as I get up and quietly get dressed. I’ve never needed much sleep, but war and life as a covert operative cured me of whatever need I’d had left, so a few hours feels like plenty as I lace up my shoes and then step back into my closet and shut the door.
There’s a narrow opening hidden behind the full-length mirror, leading to a small room with a built-in desk and an array of monitors. But I don’t bother with any of that this morning. I climb onto the stool so I can reach the paneled ceiling, and I press up until I hear a click. A section of paneling drops open with hydraulic-assisted leisure to reveal a ladder, which I pull down and climb. I have fond memories of my father doing something like this every Christmas, of how privileged and mature I’d felt when he’d finally let me go into the attic with him to get the tree.
Needless to say, we have very different attics.
The building I live in is a pretentious rod of glass and steel that has no business being as high as it is. I find its architecture distasteful for the same reason I built Lyonesse in a similar style—it conveys wealth and influence and nothing else. No beauty or meaning or innovation, only a callow flaunting of capital.
I much prefer Morois and its warped windowpanes and flagstone floors.
However, if you must live in Manhattan and if you are in a line of work that requires discretion, there is a distinct advantage to living in a pencil-thin fuck you of a building. Every structure of this height requires mechanical voids every ten or twelve stories, and while mechanical voids are crammed full of boilers and AC units and ducting, they also make a great place to store things. Like guns.
Or hired Slovakian muscle, as I once had to do before my wedding.
There is a section of ductwork that branches off from the rest, and I use a screwdriver hung neatly nearby to loosen the screw tacking the salient section of duct in place. Once I have my small armory exposed, I do a quick survey of what I have, select a compact sidearm and shoulder harness along with an extra magazine, and, on a whim, grab a knife harness too.
I’m fighting shivers by the time I finish replacing the ductwork—there are no walls or windows in the voids, just the steel supports and the equipment, and January is making itself known. I walk past the chair where I kept Drobny’s man tied down while I had a few words with him and past my small cache of fruit snacks and sports drinks (a few of my guests up here have stayed for longer than a day) and then climb back into my little security nook and replace the ceiling panel. There is another way into the void—a service elevator accessed from the basement—but I prefer only to use that when it would be impractical to use the ladder. I pay off the building’s security team quite handsomely, but there’s no need to provoke fate more often than necessary.
Tristan and Isolde are still asleep, both of them laid out like someone fucked them into next week—which I did—but Petitcrieu watches me with curious amber eyes as I buckle on my shoulder harness, slot the gun in the holster, and then pull a jacket over it all.
“Come on,” I whisper, and she jumps off the bed and races down the stairs and straight for her food bowl. I feed her, and while she eats, I write a short letter to Tristan.
I have an errand that can’t wait, and I might miss you before you return to Montreal. If that’s the case, I wanted to say what I should have said when we exchanged rings at Lyonesse.
I love you.
You are the best man I’ve ever known, and I have known many good men. When I first saw you at your father’s wedding—a green-eyed hero complete with regulation hair and valor devices—I thought of Maxen Colchester, another good man. But you are something else, something beautiful and apart, because you have kept your heart in your hands through it all. I don’t know if you realize how rare that is. Even Colchester couldn’t do that, not as nakedly or sweetly as you have done.
I don’t know how to say it other than this: I will always want to bury the embers at dawn, but you make me hope for the sunrise after, however unlikely it might be.
