Page 109 of Bitter Burn
And Mark…looks like Mark. Casual, predatory, his proprietary fusion of cold disdain and magnetic charm dripping from his handsome features.
“At last, I get to meet Brittany Hill,” Mark greets, crossing his arms and leaning against the glass of the window. He has the sleeves of his black tactical shirt pushed up, and I can see the swollen red wound along his tattooed forearm.
Mortimer folds his hands in his lap, a busy gentleman being mildly inconvenienced. “I suppose I should ask how that name came across your desk.”
Mark smiles. “My desk. I like that. In this case, my desk is a drafty spot in Manhattan where I occasionally interview new friends. You remember Filip Drobny, obviously, and how he had Isolde followed? I caught up with one of those followers the day of Isolde’s dress fitting, and we had a nice conversation. He shared the name Brittany Hill with me. I did tell you my theory, about trouble in paradise?”
Mortimer nods benignly, gesturing for Mark to continue, which he does with good cheer.
“At first, I thought Brittany was the name of a mistress or a secret child. It didn’t fit with anything I knew about you, but then maybe you were more ordinary than I’d grown to believe, with an ordinary man’s flaws. But then I learned that you had a far more ordinary flaw than even a broken vow or two—bad teeth. Worse than bad teeth: bad luck. Bad luck that a tooth should give you trouble right before the conclave. Bad luck that a dentist’s chair was destined to be one of the few times you’d be truly powerless—and worse luck still that if you used the Vatican’s dentist, everyone from Rome to Reno would know when you’d be vulnerable to attack.”
Isolde’s uncle looks at his hands, sighs. “I hate admitting you were right, but perhaps I should have taken men like Drobny more seriously. Clearly, their discontentments had consequences. Trouble in paradise, as you say.”
Mark smiles at him. It’s not a nice smile. “It’s funny, Cashel, all these years I’ve been trying to find a way to kill you—wooing, seducing, hacking, spying—and all it took was going back to my roots and hitting someone tied to a chair. I did scuff the bottom of my favorite shoes doing it though,” he finishes and then adds, like it’s a crucial detail: “They were Ferragamo.”
“So you have found me, and now you plan to kill me,” states Mortimer. “And you’ve brought my niece with you and your little shared pet. Who shouldn’t even be here, really. He should be transitioning to civilian life and maybe meeting some nice elementary school teacher and settling down to dabble in raising chickens and growing tomatoes. And yet you’ve made sure he can never escape this small accident, this one understandable trespass, of killing your husband.”
I’m irritated at being talked about like a pet—and irritated at my irritation, because I know that’s the point, that Mortimer is trying to fuck with our heads—so it takes me a minute to process his mistake.
“I guess you don’t know everything,” I say with some scorn. I’ve come to stand in front of the long, low desk so I can see Mortimer’s face better; Isolde has done the same thing but in front of the window near Mark. The sunlight makes their hair glow, haloes of violent angels. “Mark’s husband died in Košice. I’ve never been to Košice.”
Mortimer laughs, a real laugh, his eyebrows lifting and a dimple digging itself into his cheek. “Oh, you don’t know at all! How unexpected.”
My irritation has returned. “I saw the newspaper article about his death. Eliot died in Košice. In Slovakia. Tell him, sir.”
Mark is staring at Mortimer, his face hard.
“Sir, tell him. Tell him he’s wrong.”
He doesn’t look at me when he says, almost gently, “I cannot.”
I can’t trust my own memories, my own mind. I saw the clipping, I heard Mark talk about Eliot’s death, I know I did. But the look on Mark’s face…
“The CIA does that,” says Mortimer in the wise and benevolent tones of a teacher sharing an important lesson with a favorite student. He’s still smiling. “You believed what they wanted you—and the entire world—to believe. You understand, surely: it’s extremely awkward when an American soldier shoots a fellow American, especially when said fellow American is meeting with a known arms dealer at the time.”
This is a lie, a blatant fiction. I would know if I killed a CIA officer, much less one who was married to the man I now love.
But Mark isn’t disagreeing with Mortimer. He isn’t scoffing or smiling or treating it like some kind of verbal ploy. He’s merely watching Mortimer like a man watching an opponent slide a piece across a chessboard.
Fear trickles down my spine.
“Sir…” I start. “That can’t—that can’t be right.” I dredge up the memories, of McKenzie dead on the ground, the snapping of bullets back and forth. “We’d had a report of insurgent activity there, weapons drops. The intel came down straight from Stuttgart, and when we got there, it seemed exactly like the report said it would be—and no one called back that they were friendly?—”
I try to remember exactly how it unfolded, all of it a messy, drizzled blur. We heard voices while on patrol, saw the two dimly outlined shapes at the end of the alley. We called out, announced ourselves, and a gunshot cracked through the air. McKenzie was the first to return fire, and then I got my weapon up just in time to see the flash of a silver wristwatch; I squeezed off three shots.
McKenzie had dropped to the wet ground, the other soldiers with us were hit—I didn’t see the wristwatch again, but the bullets still came—and I had to keep firing. I had to call for help. I had to render aid after the shooting finally stopped. And when help came, there’d been no one in the alley—no bodies at all, only blood, like it hadn’t even happened. Except it had happened because McKenzie was dead.
I’ve always wondered how they’d managed to vanish like that, if they’d been hit but not killed, able to drag themselves away. I’ve wondered why I didn’t hear anything else afterward, why I was lauded and praised and also not deemed worthy enough to know what the fuck McKenzie had died for, whether they had been insurgents or petty criminals or what. I’d wondered if any tiny, infinitesimal difference in the sequence of events would mean that McKenzie could still be here today—if we hadn’t heard anything in the alley, if she hadn’t been the first to return fire, if she’d been angled literally in any other direction when that fateful bullet struck.
I’ve wondered about so many things when it comes to that night, but I have never ever wondered about that silver wristwatch.
And I can’t make myself believe it; right now, it is simply the most ridiculous fucking thing I can think of—that the wristwatch from that night is the same wristwatch I never saw Mark without, that the person I was trying to kill was the handsome grinning man from Mark’s pictures. That Mark’s grief, Mark’s revenge, founding Lyonesse, marrying Isolde—every fucking thing that’s happened for the last eight years—every bit of it was because I saw silver glinting in the dark once upon a time.
I stare at Mark, and finally, finally, he looks back at me.
And for a split second, his control is burned away. I see every last bit of what these eight years have done to him. Fury and anguish and heartbreak. Hatred and obsession.
Love.
