Page 28 of Bitter Burn
Mark watches her. “And you believe him? You don’t think that he said what he needed to say to maneuver his lamb back into the pen for slaughter?”
“I do believe him,” she says, “because he strongly implied that same slaughter if my time here resulted in any more failures.”
Mark doesn’t reply, and I can offer nothing, because I’m just as clenched with anger and ferocious vigilance as I was when Isolde first told me. I want to build an outpost around her right now. I want air support and an entire company of troops on the way. I want to patrol her perimeter, and I also want to find her uncle and end this.
“So as you see, I’m here,” she says tightly. “I don’t want to believe you, and yet I’m here. I can barely stomach the idea that everything I’ve known to be true about my family, my faith, and my work as a saint is wrong, and yet I’m here. You’ve lied to me from the moment I met you, but my uncle has been lying to me since I was born, and I suppose that has to be worse.”
Mark straightens and walks toward Isolde, who stays completely still. He takes her hand. “You betrayed my only request. You left me and took the sole other person I love with you when you went. You are the niece of my enemy and the one person in this world who can do me the greatest harm. And yet I’m here too.”
Her lips tremble as he drops his mouth to the backs of her fingers. It’s a cold kiss, I think. More like the kiss of an enemy than a husband.
“I’m not your uncle or your God, Isolde. I don’t need your faith. Just stay until the gates of hell are shut. We can make it that long, I think.”
Twelve
Tristan
Footsteps come from behind me, and I turn to see a staff member wheeling in a dolly loaded with crates of wax candles, enough candles to make a firefighter whimper.
“Saturnalia,” Mark says, as if that clears anything up, and then he sighs. His fingers tighten around Isolde’s. “We should go up to my office for the next part.”
The next part?
There’s something grave in his tone, something that seeds worry in my gut. “Sir,” I say, and I lead the way upstairs.
For six weeks, I have quietly dreamed of the three of us together, reunited somehow by an elegant twist of love or by some undeniable atonement, restored to what we were on Samhain. Adultery forgiven, lies forgiven, everything come to terms. But when I shut the door to Mark’s office and the three of us are truly, completely alone, I don’t feel joy or relief.
I feel like I’ve just buried us alive.
“Sit,” Mark says into the hushed silence of the room, nodding at the two chairs in front of his desk. We do, me sitting with my feet flat on the floor and my hands on my thighs, Isolde crossing one leg over the other with her hands folded in her lap. Mark himself leans back against the front of his desk, half sitting on the edge, his hands in his pockets. His eyes, when they meet mine, are the blue of a glacier’s underwater heart. Lovely, unfeeling.
The air is so thick in here I think I’m choking on it.
“Tristan, I can’t have you at Lyonesse.”
His words take time to create meaning inside my mind. At first, they are only sound, and then they are language, and then they are?—
Exile. Death.
Damnation.
I think I make a noise maybe, a soft one, the instinctive inhale you take before a fall.
Isolde sits forward, features going bloodless with indignation. “If you want to punish someone, look to yourself first. We only left because of what I found in your safe, because you planned to kill my uncle?—”
“Who planned to kill me, via yourself,” Mark interjects.
“—and if this is a matter of adultery, of fidelity, I thought this was decided on Samhain, I thought we were in agreement. I want you both to be mine, and I also want you to be each other’s. Sound familiar?”
“The ‘mine’ part was rather stripped from the equation when you zip-tied me to a chair and fled the country,” says Mark, a little bitterly.
“So this is revenge? For six weeks’ worth of separation?”
“Or for four years of lying to me about the real reason you agreed to this marriage,” Mark suggests but then sighs. “I lied for the same length of time about the same thing, so we’ll leave that one as a draw, shall we?”
Isolde’s lips are white at the edges. “I thought my punishment for cheating was to know that you’d claim a right to Tristan’s bed as well. If we’re going back to retribution, why not return to precedent?”
“I’d love to, believe me,” Mark replies in a husky voice that I can feel on the nape of my neck and on the insides of my palms. “I’d like to itemize every lost hour—every excruciating moment apart—on your disloyal little bodies. I’d record my tolls and taxes with bite marks and splatters of wax.”
