Page 16 of Bitter Burn
He’s stopped walking, but I haven’t. I move closer and closer until I can see the fading twilight in his eyes.
“Playing house?” I ask, nodding at the bag in his hand.
He flushes. I come even closer.
“I would have let you play house with my wife if you wanted, Tristan. All you had to do was ask.”
His flush deepens, but the words are hard and protective when he speaks. He’s angry, not embarrassed. Or not only embarrassed at least. “She’s only your wife because you lied to her and to everybody else too. Forced her to marry you?—”
That surprises a real laugh out of me. “Forced? Do you really think she’s a damsel in distress? She chose to marry me because she planned on using me. She chose to marry me knowing that I’d use her right back. The only thing she didn’t know was the extent of what I knew. What you should know now too.”
He glances away. So he does know.
“That she’s a saint of the Church,” I prod. “Do you know what that means? It means she kills in the name of God. It means that her uncle gets to decide what in the name of God means. And I’ll never pretend that I haven’t lied or cheated to get what I want, but what Isolde cannot claim is that she wasn’t warned.”
A breath leaves his lips. He knows this too.
“You didn’t just lie. You lied to her,” he says finally.
“And to you. Or did you not open the third box you stole?”
He straightens his shoulders and looks back to me, like a schoolboy gathering courage to tell his teacher the truth. Oh, Tristan. Honest to a fault.
“I did open the third box,” he says. “I saw…what was inside it.”
“And?”
He swallows. “And yes. It was all about me. Pictures of me. Articles about me.”
“Don’t you want to know why?” I’m curious to know if he’s curious. If he’s put it together yet.
“It’s—” A breath. “It’s about Ys, isn’t it?”
I’m surprised again. I study his face, his beautifully transparent face. “Why do you think that?”
“The only thing you’d marked in the box was an article about Aaron Sims. You circled the name of the prime minister elect he tried to kill.”
A scrim of shame is now drawn over Tristan’s gaze, that guilt about his dead friend that he can never seem to shake. I’d relieve him of it if I could, shake the truth into him until his bones rattled. You saved everyone you could, I want to tell him. That’s better than most people get.
It’s this lie we tell ourselves about heroes, about what heroism is, that heroes are apart from such choices, from triage, from discretion. It’s a fucking cancer.
Tristan goes on. “His sister—I think you might remember that she was trying to get ahold of me—I called her in Belgrade, and she told me that Aaron wasn’t bribed into trying to kill the prime minister elect and her family. He was blackmailed. Threatened by a group called Ys. The same group that came up in the security meeting at Lyonesse a while ago, the same group you told Isolde about in the letter you left at Morois House.” He pauses. “The same group Isolde overheard you talking to your sister about at the engagement party.”
“Oh?”
“Something along the lines of Ys started the game. I’m only finishing it.”
Isolde had overheard that, had she? Interesting.
“So I thought…well, I guess it seems like the only reason you would have picked me. You’re trying to do something with Ys, and I’m tangled up in it because of Sims.”
Oh, Tristan. The only reason I could have picked you?
His eyes are on the ground, lifting to mine only briefly. “I don’t understand exactly why though. I stopped whatever Ys wanted to do that day by stopping Sims. Why do I matter?”
I make a choice not to tell him the real reason the third box is dedicated solely to Tristan Thomas, American hero, and it’s more cowardly than cruel. I’m not proud of myself, but as I’ve mentioned before, I never planned to care about Tristan. This is an unforeseen inconvenience, and I can’t be blamed for it.
“Do you know why Ys was in Carpathia?” I ask. “Why they wanted to kill that politician?”
