Page 27 of Bitter Burn
They stop gawking, but I don’t miss that they clock me, my protectiveness, and I know by tonight, the club will be churning. Mark’s wife is back, with the bodyguard, and you won’t believe how audaciously they were acting around each other, in broad daylight no less…
I can’t control it, and I don’t know if Mark will even care, but it makes me clench my teeth all the same. They don’t know anything about what’s between Mark and Isolde or Isolde and me. They don’t know that on Samhain, we’d held a fragile, glimmering possibility between the three of us. That for a few hours, it felt like we were the only people in the world.
On our way to the hall, we pass two employees and three members coming from a playroom, and it’s the same story. They all look at me, a skimming of mild disapproval, and then look at Isolde with an antipathy that is no less carnal for how censorious it is. The blame of it all, the stain of adultery and betrayal, have settled on her.
Not me. Not Mark, whose secrets and lies lit the fuse just as surely as anything else. Oh no. Only her.
And I know it won’t get any better after we get to the hall itself and I hear two very unwelcome voices: Andrea and Sedge.
Mark, who’s standing with them and Dinah in his usual nook, looks over to see us approaching. When he notices how I move between him and his wife, his hand flexes at his side.
“Sir, Mr. Thomas and Mrs. Trevena are here,” Ms. Lim says crisply.
Andrea stares at us with open dislike. Sedge doesn’t look at us at all, his face a freckled cipher, angled toward his tablet as he writes something down.
“Thank you, Ms. Lim,” Mark says. His voice is serious, his face serious too. He’s wearing all black today, just like he was in that Roman park, and in the silver daylight coming in through the glassed roof, his eyes are blue enough to glow.
It’s only been three days, but the shock of those eyes—that gold hair, those forearms exposed by rolled-up sleeves—is nearly enough to make me turn and run in the other direction. It’s one thing to meet in the twilight, already sundered, already hopeless, but to be here in daylight, hopeful, hoping—it’s like walking right at the enemy with nothing in your hands but a white flag.
Ms. Lim leaves in a jingling of keys and a tattoo of heels on concrete, and then Mark looks out over the floor of the hall. Turned like this and with the benefit of daylight, I can see the things I couldn’t in Rome: a hollow curve under his cheekbones, a new shadow under his eyes. The last six weeks have taken a toll on him, and I can’t scoff at the word heartbreak now, can I? Not when he looks like this.
Guilt is a hook behind my ribs. We had no choice on Samhain, but all those justifications feel strangely distant right now. Like they couldn’t have been worth this.
“I know we’re not finished with the Saturnalia planning,” he says, “but I’d like a few moments alone with Mrs. Trevena, if I may.”
I start to move, but he stops me.
“You stay, Tristan.”
I don’t know what would be easier to bear, the jealousy if I was sent away or the dread I feel now at being asked to remain, but either way, Dinah gives me a small, encouraging smile as she moves past. Sedge looks at neither of us as he leaves, and Andrea saves her venomous glare for Isolde. So much animosity rolls off the treasurer’s blazer-clad shoulders that I think she might throw Isolde off the balcony as she passes.
And then we’re alone, save for the staff downstairs currently unwinding protective padding on some very convincing Roman statues.
Mark braces his hands on the railing. “So,” he says to the hall and not to us. “You’ve returned. I’m glad.”
Before I can talk myself out of it, I ask, “Are you, sir? I’d rather be hiding from you for the rest of our lives than leave Isolde here if she’s going to be treated like she’s been treated so far today. So tell me that you are glad, that you aren’t just offering her a haven but a home too.”
Isolde draws a deep breath next to me but doesn’t speak. I can’t tell if she’s relieved I’ve dragged this into the open or if she wishes I’d shut up.
For his part, Mark turns and leans his side against the railing, crossing his feet at the ankles so that one dress-shoed foot is propped up on its toe. I catch the very faint, very fast flicker of amusement around his mouth. “Hiding from me for the rest of your lives?”
He doesn’t have to say the rest. As if you could is written all over his face.
I won’t squirm, even if he’s right. Waking up to his knife between us, the note tucked neatly underneath it, was like waking up to yellow eyes in the dark. The mammalian parts of my brain could only process it as the most immediate kind of danger, as a failure of vigilance. I slept through my watch, the wolf crept in, and now we would surely die.
“How did you find us?” Isolde asks. Her voice is pitched low so that it won’t carry any farther than the balcony railing.
“I have my ways, and to answer your earlier question, Tristan, I am glad.” A catch on the word glad, and then a flicker of muscle along the side of his jaw. Like gladness isn’t the only feeling burning inside him. He meets Isolde’s eyes. “I take your presence here to mean that Tristan passed along my warnings about your uncle?”
Isolde’s posture is as upright and graceful as Mark’s is careless and slouching, but I know them well enough now to know that they would be circling each other if they could, a skeptical lioness and an arrogant lion scenting the air.
She lifts a hand in a gesture that I take to mean to an extent. “What you told me in your note…what you told Tristan. You understand that it’s nearly impossible for me to believe. That my uncle is the head of some secret society while also being the Vatican’s head of intelligence. That my uncle would plan to kill me.” Her voice doesn’t shake, but I hear the wavering at the far edges of her words. She pulls in a deep breath. “You are asking me to believe the very worst of someone who was a father to me in every way that mattered and with no evidence save for your word. Your word, Mark, and you know how cheap a currency that is right now.”
“But you’re here now,” Mark observes in a soft, silky voice. “So really, how cheap can it be, little wife?”
Isolde clamps down on whatever emotion ripples through her before it can do more than rouge her cheeks. She looks down and to the side, and I can practically feel her fighting inside herself.
“I went to see him,” she says. Mark doesn’t bother to hide his displeasure at that, and she looks up and laughs joylessly. “Tristan wasn’t happy about it either. And funnily enough, my uncle wasn’t happy about Tristan. He called me foolish and weak for running away with him, so there’s unhappiness all around, it turns out. I told him that I wanted a second chance to rob your treasury. That it would take some time to regain your trust and that of course you’d need to stay alive until the prize was stolen. He wants what you have badly enough that he’ll change his plans to get it, so he agreed.”
