Page 116 of Bitter Burn
A rueful smile.
“But then I did fall in love with Tristan. Then you came back, and it turned out what I felt for you before had only been a ghost of the real thing. Yes, this was my miserable fucking plan, for the two of you to fall in love, but I didn’t count on loving you two quite so much, you understand. I have never, ever wanted two people to be so entirely mine, to the point that I sometimes can’t think straight for how much I crave you both. I’d rather tear my own stitches open again than watch the two of you be together without me, and yet it’s my own doing.”
I stare, lips parted.
Mark looks down at the chessboard, at the spot that’s still missing its queen. “And I guess I’d hoped,” he says in a quiet voice, “that our vows would mean something somehow. Our promise to stay faithful to each other. That even though you and Tristan had fucked on the yacht, even though you pined for each other after our wedding, that you’d wait until our marriage had ended to take up with him again. It hurt when you didn’t. I know that’s childish of me, but it’s the truth.”
No one speaks then, with Mark’s honesty burning the air, his deceptions and his obsessions crackling and searing the very atoms between us.
Even this, I think distantly, a little hysterically.
Even this.
Loving Tristan, something I’d thought was my very own sin, my very own miracle, had been manufactured. Like everything else in my life—my mother’s death, my uncle’s role as mentor, my sainthood, my marriage—all of it might as well have been chiseled in stone by fate itself.
Is nothing in my life my own? Not even my secrets and mistakes? Will there never be someone I can point to and say They chose me. All on their own, they chose me, and I chose them back.
Can I really say I’m not alone when the two men I love are only with me by design?
I’m reeling from this, floating several queasy miles above my feet, as Mark leaves the apartment and then returns with something in his hands. A folder, expensive-looking, the front cover made of a matte black and the back cover of a glossy white.
I think—dizzily, strangely—of the sails of Theseus’s ship. Like my fate is folded between those two colors, and tragedy will follow if I pick the wrong one.
“You’ll find everything in order,” says Mark, handing me the folder.
I manage to let go of the chessboard and take it. When I flip it open, I see the words Petition for Dissolution of Marriage at the top.
I am really floating now. Uncomprehending. “Divorce papers,” I say numbly.
“Per our prenuptial agreement, you are retaining all Laurence assets and taking half of my liquid assets that aren’t tied to proprietary information owned by Lyonesse. Petitcrieu isn’t in here, but she is yours. She was a gift.”
Tristan steps forward. Stops. “Mr. Trevena…”
Mark looks at him. “I’m giving you both a choice, Tristan. What I should have given you a long time ago: the freedom to walk away and the freedom to survive me. Let’s tally up my lies, shall we? I’ve hidden that Tristan killed Eliot, that I wanted to kill Cashel, that I knew Isolde was a saint, that I planned to kill you both. I knew and didn’t say, for however short a time, that Cashel had killed Isolde’s mother. I put the two of you together like dolls, the seeking one and the lonely one, and made you fall in love, and then I punished you both for it. In the last week, you’ve been shot at, attacked, kidnapped, and made to kill a pope.” He nods down at the folder and papers in my hands. “Isolde, divorcing me is the only logical option. But as a counterargument, I will offer this: every word I’ve spoken today is the absolute truth. Loving the two of you is like tearing open my flesh, and I would pay any price to continue doing it for the rest of my life. I love you and want you to be my wife. I love Tristan and want him to belong to both of us. But because I love you, I’m telling you the rest of the truth, and it’s that I’m sorry for what I’ve done. This is the plain black ink of my apology.”
He leans down and presses his nose into my hair, and despite everything, my pulse leaps. Then he takes the folder out of my hands.
“I’m putting this on the desk of my office,” he says. “Lady Anguish is downstairs, and she’s been instructed to take you wherever you want to go if you want to leave. All you have to do is take the folder and walk out the front door.”
I tilt my face up to his to see his expression better, and he drops a hard kiss on my lips. I taste scotch and old blood.
“I love you,” he confesses. “More than anything. But I’m sorry. I can’t watch as you leave me a second time.” He steps over to Tristan and cups his hand around the back of Tristan’s neck. “Take care of her and yourself,” Mark says. “I love you more than anything, baby.”
Their kiss is softer than ours was but still intense, and Tristan is panting when Mark breaks it off and walks out to his office, presumably to leave the folder on his desk.
He doesn’t return.
And for the first time since I met him at the age of seventeen, Mark Trevena is as good as his word.
For the first time since I met him, I am free to leave.
Forty
Mark
A clinically stupid amount of scotch is the next order of business, but I left the bottle in the apartment, and I don’t plan on returning anytime soon, so back to the hall I go. I’m aware that I need a shower and clean clothes and above all to sleep, but sleep doesn’t feel like enough to numb the end of my marriage, numb the end of whatever I have with Tristan, because he’ll leave along with Isolde, of course he will, and?—
And I remember one last thing I need to do before I can curl up somewhere and embrace my self-inflicted misery. I see my final chore alone in the hall, standing at the balcony with her hands braced on the railing and her head bent, the others gone.
