Page 127 of Bitter Burn
“So you suggested altering the digital records. A brilliant idea for someone so young, Adam.”
The compliment seems to please him. “I’m nearly your age, sir, but I met Cardinal Cashel when I was just out of seminary, so I got an early start. He’d already begun his work when we met, but he was ready to expand, to make Ys into something global and enduring. I helped.”
God, how long can it take to get from the grotto? Did the elevator break down? I look back to the terminal screen where the room’s controls are still pulled up, and I’m about to click away to something else when Nimue’s words from this morning slide through my thoughts.
You should burn it all to the ground. Today, if possible.
I press a few keys, hit the Return key before I can think about it too hard, and then say, “But Father Minch saw through it, didn’t he? Did you ask him to help with the forgeries?”
Adam shakes his head. “He didn’t learn about Ys from us. And for the forgeries, we always used freelancers hired through layers of intermediaries. It was only bad luck that Minch discovered us and then the truth. We’ve spread our whispers quite far by now—he could have heard about Ys from any number of places. But somehow he found the digital forgeries in our own archives. Stumbled upon enough discrepancies to piece together the truth.”
Maybe I was wrong about Veronica coming here, about her being the one to execute me. But I can already feel the new bloom of warmth in the air, notice the fresh hush of half the fans having been shut down.
“To that end, I’d like everything in the treasury about Ys,” Adam requests quite politely, like he’s ordering from a menu he’s only just had a chance to peruse.
“As you’d like,” I say. “But we’ll need to move to the server itself and plug in directly. It’s isolated from the other CPUs and the terminal.”
That’s a lie—it’s connected to everything, just like all the others—but Adam nods and gestures for me to go ahead and lead the way, so it must sound plausible enough. I grab a laptop from the terminal and a cord and walk into the server cases with enough speed to make it look purposeful. I pick a case deep, deep into the maze, deep enough not to be visible from any of the cameras, and then stop.
“This one,” I say.
Adam waits patiently as I open the case and connect the laptop to a CPU I pick at random. A slight mist has begun to shimmer near his hairline. It’s noticeably warmer in here now; I think about Tristan being hot as well, bound and unconscious in the steamy grotto, and have to draw in a deep, careful breath. I can’t let the anger or fear surface right now. If I’m getting Tristan out of this, then I have to keep Adam engaged until either Veronica gets here or the dormant cooling systems sufficiently fuck shit up.
As the laptop comes to life, I turn to Adam and say, “You should know that I think of that afternoon in my apartment quite a lot.”
He stares at me, lips parted.
“I think about your offer. How lovely you looked while on your knees.”
His throat moves up and then down again.
“I think it must be a special skill of yours, making people crave you.” I’m moving closer to him, small shifts forward that have him stepping back too late, too awkwardly. His back is against a glass server case now. “Is that what you did to Aaron Sims when you were his chaplain?”
This is a guess—one I wouldn’t ordinarily make out loud without more evidence—but it’s ultimately a correct one. Adam swallows again.
“You know about Aaron?” he asks. “How?”
“I knew someone named Father Adam was special to him. I knew he tumbled into Ys’s loving arms after that Father Adam left him.”
Adam has to look up to meet my eyes now, that’s how close I am. I brace a hand on the glass by his head and then use my other hand to hold his hip. I press closer, my thigh between his.
“I don’t think Cashel knew how good you were at winning people over,” I say softly. “You might have toppled Lyonesse long before now if he’d understood any other human need as well as he understood the need for power.”
Adam is breathing heavier, partly from the heat, partly from my proximity. I press closer to him and remind myself—achingly—of Eliot, of how easily he seduced people. Eliot did it by falling in love with them genuinely, if only for a moment, and while I don’t know if I can fall in love with someone who’s threatened to kill Tristan or who’s attacked my club and put my guests in danger, I can try.
I can look down into those pupil-dark eyes. I can squeeze his slender hip. I can let him use my thigh to rock against. I can summon up what I felt that day in the apartment when I knew that if things had been different, if I weren’t in love with two other people, I would have had Adam bent over my kitchen table in a heartbeat.
I let him see all that in my face, let him hear the rumble in my throat as his yearning becomes evident against my thigh. I make myself bend toward him and run my nose along his jaw. He trembles.
“Such a meal I would have made of you,” I purr into his ear. I keep my eyes on the glass behind him, even as I slide my hand to the curve of his ass to make my point abundantly clear. “If only you would have waited for me. I would have caught up to you eventually, you know.”
I move my head to slot my lips against his. A drop of sweat tracks down the back of my neck as he mewls gently into my mouth, and I remind myself to be like Eliot, to summon up every true feeling I could have had for Adam, and I also keep my eyes on the glass. Which is why I see, the moment I flick my tongue against my betrayer’s and feel his hips jolt wildly, the reflection of movement behind me.
I duck just as Veronica’s knife arcs toward my back, dropping to a knee and turning as she rights herself and strikes again. Adam is stupefied, I think, kissed senseless, which is something that at any other time I’d feel proud of and right now I can only feel grateful for. I manage to land a kick on Veronica’s stomach, sending her back a few feet, and then I take off like a sprinter from both hands and a bent knee, scrambling down the row and then careening sideways at the first aisle so I can scramble toward the edge. Toward the elevator and Tristan.
She’s fast though, faster than I plan on, and I go crashing into a server case as she slams against me. I manage to catch her wrist before she strikes out with the knife, and my hands are sweaty, and her wrist is sweaty, and we’re frozen for a split second as I try to wrest the blade away from her even though I’m at the worst angle to do so.
“Should have brought a gun,” I say breathlessly. I’m stronger than her, but like Isolde, she knows how to twist and squirm in such a way that my strength is matched.
