Page 112 of Bitter Burn
For the first time, real panic enters my uncle’s voice. “You don’t need to do this, Isolde. We can talk about Ys—come to a negotiation about your future. I was hasty, I admit, and eager for solutions that felt elegant at the time. Isolde—please, we can pray together?—”
I think of my mother’s smile. Of how soft her arm was when she let me climb into bed with her and use it as a pillow. Of how she smelled like sunshine, even in winter.
I think of how Mortimer took me under his wing after she died. How every year brought me more and more under his control until I ended up married to someone who wanted to kill me, until I ended up alone and disconsolate and bereft of the belief that had pulled me through the years. My uncle had taken the sun from my sky, and he’d taught me how to kill without asking questions instead.
The knife feels right in my hand. And when Tristan comes behind Mortimer and holds him down with two large hands…that feels right too.
“Do you remember what I told you the day we met?” asks Mark. “About the knives?”
“Standard grip is for a fair fight,” I say. “Reverse grip is for when you mean it.”
I shift the knife in my hand so that the blade is pointing down from the outside of my fist and step forward. And when I bring the knife down, I make sure I mean it.
Thirty-Eight
Isolde
My uncle dies smiling, with blood smeared on his teeth, with his hands folded neatly over the wound in his chest as if in prayer.
Before his last breaths burbled out though, Mark leaned down and whispered something in his ear. My uncle, with a knife jammed between his ribs, couldn’t truly laugh, but it was a reflex he couldn’t seem to stop either. “Clever Minch,” he mumbled. Bloody foam flecked his lips.
“It fooled me,” Mark told him. “For years.”
“Just as you’ve fooled them. Will you tell them?”
Mark didn’t look up from my uncle, but I could tell by the care with which he stood up that my uncle had meant Tristan and me. Will you tell them?
God, what more could there be to tell?
My uncle didn’t seem to expect an answer from Mark, and he didn’t get one. He instead rolled his gaze up to my face. The knife was planted in his chest like a tree, and the rubies glittered like small, hard fruit.
“You are so like her,” he choked between sucking, drawing gasps.
The words were only wet, airless suggestions of themselves. They were his last words, and his smile was the same smile I’d seen a thousand times before, gentle and wise, as if nothing had changed between us. But his eyes, before they dimmed, seemed to hold an entire host of malformed emotions—regret and anger and maybe even longing.
Or maybe—after Mark said It’s over, Your Holiness. You can stop at last—maybe his eyes held a profound and exhausted relief.
I don’t know if I’ll ever entirely understand why he did any of it, but I’ve seen the effect of power on a person, stronger than any opiate, the burn of it more irresistible than liquor. I don’t think it matters whether he started this nightmare out of misplaced faith or impatience with the system or ordinary ecclesiastical ambition—once the power came, there was no other answer, no other longing, no amount other than more more more.
There is no time to linger over his body and reflect, however. Mark yanks my knife free with one forceful pull, Tristan guides me away. Palmer and Ferguson come in, and we’re shuffled down to the lowest level of the office, through a door to another building, out to a waiting car, which takes us to an airfield where a cargo plane is ready. We are shown to a run-down crew area with flat, hard beds, and I mean to stay awake, I mean to talk, but Mark makes both of us lie down, and then he sits in the chair nearby, watching us with a blue, inscrutable stare.
I fall asleep thinking about my uncle’s mismatched eyes slowly filming over in death, and I don’t dream.
Mark still has a warrant in the United States, so we land well outside DC on a quiet airfield, and while manifests are being presented and import processes are begun, we’re discreetly smuggled off the plane and taken to a car with the keys left inside.
There’s a moment when Mark gets behind the wheel and pauses, and I know he’s thinking of Jago. His hands tighten on the wheel once, and his long lashes dip and then lift again. He turns the key in the ignition, and the three of us are bound for Lyonesse.
It’s not a terribly long drive, but the silence is centuries’ worth of silence, eons of it, and yet no one moves to lift it. It’s too heavy to lift, too laden with the truth, and where would we even start? When Mark hired Tristan? The alley in Kraków? The scream of rubber on an Irish road at the end of my mother’s life?
It doesn’t matter how much sleep I’ve had on the plane; it’s not enough to bring any kind of clarity to the brittle snakeskin of secrets we’ve shed in the last twenty-four hours.
It’s strange and heart-twisting to pull into Lyonesse’s garage without Jago. I didn’t see him die, but I did see him trying to give us suppressive fire as we ran toward the car, and I wish—I don’t know. I wish I knew more about him. If he had a family, if he enjoyed working for Mark. If he knew that something as simple as driving a car for a kink club owner might end in his death.
Mark parks the car, turns it off; the interior lights come on with a bluish glow. He still has flecks of dried blood in his hair, and while the swelling has gone down around his eye, the bruise makes him look reckless and brutal. He looks like Hades himself right now in the otherworldly light.
“We have a guest,” he says, nodding toward a spate of black SUVs parked at the front of the garage. A man in a dark suit and coat stands in front of one, his hands linked in front, an earpiece visible.
“Is that…the Beast?” Tristan asks hesitantly. “Like the president’s car?”
