Page 113 of Bitter Burn
Mark is already opening the door and climbing out. “Sure is.”
“Is it a good thing or a bad thing that the president is waiting for you, sir?”
I’m getting out of the car myself and see when Mark waves a hand—the nails dark with whatever blood couldn’t be washed off on the plane. “Probably a bad thing,” he says, sounding deeply unbothered. “He’ll lecture me about how he can’t just be killing popes whenever I ask, I’ll remind him of how much he enjoys Melwas being dead, and so on. The usual back-and-forth.”
“You’re really not afraid of the president being angry with you?” Tristan asks as we walk toward the doors leading to the club.
A scoff. Like Tristan had asked if Mark was afraid of his high school band leader. “I’ve seen that man go off in his pants while watching Maxen Colchester fish an ice cube from a glass. No, I’m not afraid of Embry Moore.” Mark says all this as we pass by the Secret Service agent standing by the Beast, and the two exchange nods. Then he adds, “You should shower and change while I’m indulging the president’s pique. Afterward, I’d like to speak with you both.”
His voice has shifted from its unruffled, dismissive tone to something a little more closed off, something shrouded, and worry nips at my tired bones once again.
Will you tell them? my uncle had asked.
The club is always quiet during the day, but today it seems utterly empty, and when we reach the lobby, Ms. Lim meets us and quietly informs Mark as to why. Lady Anguish—Nimue—has opened the club for weekend hours only until Mark’s warrant and asset seizure are completely put to bed, mostly to limit the guests’ liability should the FBI come knocking, trying to interview people or squirrel themselves into other caches of information. But to counter the perception that the club is truly in danger, Kayden and Isabella have come back down from Montreal to help Anguish charm and schmooze the guests when the club is open, to reassure them that while Anguish is in charge, their privacy is safe and Lyonesse will persevere.
“They are waiting in the hall now,” Ms. Lim finishes, gesturing up the stairs.
Mark nods and then waves Tristan and me to the elevators instead. “Shower,” he commands. “We’ll address everything else after that.”
Tristan and I shower together, a dazed, tired affair that nevertheless ends with him wedged inside me, his mouth open against my neck. I think I might be too wrung out to come, but Tristan coaxes me there anyway, to a quiet climax that leaves me slumped against the shower wall while Tristan uses my pussy to finish.
We dress—Tristan borrowing Mark’s clothes, me in trousers and a sweater—and we go down to the hall with skin free of dried blood and damp hair.
“How are you feeling?” Tristan asks in a gentle voice as we leave the elevator. “About what happened in Nemi?”
What happened in Nemi is too big a category to accord only one emotion. Right now, it’s defined entirely by its lack of emotion: I feel almost nothing.
“I should feel more,” I answer. “I should feel worse. I loved him more than I loved my father, and even after everything that happened this fall and I knew my uncle had started to see me as a liability, I never thought I’d—” I stop. It still doesn’t feel real. The crunch of bone, the runnels of hot blood over the hilt. The wheeze of punctured lung and the blood-smeared smile.
Like something from another life, even though it was only yesterday.
Tristan doesn’t say anything but finds my hand, holding it tight.
“But how can I feel more? How can I feel worse?” I ask, not really asking him or myself or anyone at all, just issuing an empty inquiry up to the sky. “Trying to kill me is one thing, but my mother? She was so good. Really good. I think not putting that knife into his chest would have been the greater sin, but I’m scared that I can’t tell sin from sin anymore, much less sin from righteousness.”
“I felt the same way after I killed Isabella’s attacker,” says Tristan. “I still feel that way. How many people have we killed in the last week, Isolde? How many people have been killed for the sake of our rescue or survival? They chose it, they chose to risk death in order to deal it to us, but I know I should feel something more, something like that slow rot I felt in the Army, and I don’t. Maybe because I know there was no other choice…but it still feels wrong not to feel wrong.”
We are coming to the hall now, to the balcony where Mark is talking with President Moore and Lady Anguish. Isabella, Kayden, Dinah, Andrea, and Sedge are waiting near the entrance to the hall, and a handful of Secret Service agents are scattered between them and the three people conversing in Mark’s usual nook.
“Ah, Isolde,” Kayden says, coming forward to take my hand and kiss it. Next to me, Tristan doesn’t physically react, but I can practically feel the air hum with jealousy. Fitting, because when Isabella gives Tristan an unhesitating hug—her glossy blond-red waves bouncing, her amber eyes large and limpid—I have the childish urge to yank him back.
The vagaries of jealousy are infinite, because the jealousy I feel in regard to Isabella is immature and stifling, but when I think of Tristan and Mark together, the jealousy is like a cathedral. Capacious and holy.
And yet on New Year’s Eve when Mark poured all sorts of poisonous fantasies into my ear about Tristan fucking Isabella, I came hard enough for my muscles to ache the next day.
My husband waves us over as President Moore straightens up. Mark is slouched against the railing, blood-spattered and still wearing clothes that could be described as need-to-know chic. Lady Anguish is in a green pantsuit with a white silk blouse, a snowdrop brooch pinned to her jacket, and she smiles enigmatically at Tristan and me as we mumble quick apologies to the Armorica visitors and walk through the cloud of Sedge’s and Andrea’s disapproval to the nook.
“I have more to protect than just a presidency,” President Moore is saying to Mark. He sounds a little grumpy but perhaps a little mollified too, like whatever Mark has been saying to him has sanded the edges off his irritation at being roped into a papal assassination.
“I know you do,” says Mark affably. He could be the devil of Lyonesse on any other night, wooing a prospective member into unlocking coffers of the darkest, strangest things they know. “I have no intention of endangering your wife or your husband, Embry. You know I like them both.”
Tristan and I both pause, our fingers twitching against each other’s, the same question arcing through us.
Your wife or your husband? President Moore only has one spouse—the First Lady, Greer Colchester-Moore, née Galloway.
The president searches Mark’s face for a moment. “I don’t think I like you knowing as much as you do.”
Lady Anguish trails a slender hand on the railing and says meaningfully, “Embry.”
