Page 35 of Bitter Burn
A kiss comes gently, deliberately. A trace of his lips over mine, a press. A linger. And then warm air as he pulls away.
“You cannot,” he says. “You can’t pledge your service to me any more than you can stop being honest and kind and somehow still afraid that you are not enough of either of those things. Knights slay dragons, Tristan. Night watchmen drive the wolves away from town. I’m counting on that. You have no idea how much.”
My hands are freed, and cool air rushes between us, unwelcome, unwelcome.
“Sir, with all due respect, you don’t get to say whom I pledge myself to or what dragons I slay.” A deep breath, and then one last pathetic attempt. “Please don’t make me go. I’ll hide. I’ll fake my own death. Anything. Just don’t send me so far away.”
“Now you’re the one throwing dirt in my eyes,” he says tiredly. “You already know I’m weak for you, and only one other person alive can say that. Take that victory and claim your purple, but don’t ask for more. I can’t weigh your love against Isolde’s safety and have either of you be the better off for it.”
“My love against Isolde’s safety…along with your revenge against Cardinal Cashel. Right?”
“Did I not admit as much during all my rambles a moment ago? I’m sorry, but I can’t change who I am or what I’ve done, and both of those things mean I can’t change what I must do next. Not to mention that my love and my revenge are now bound together far past what can be cut through in the time we have left. Alea iacta est.”
I feel something brush against the sleeve of my coat—he’s reaching past me to turn the handle of the door. A wedge of light, diffuse and golden, blinds me briefly. But he stays there, his hand wrapped around the door, not making me move so he can open it fully, his head bent.
He braces his foot between the door and the jamb. “Let me see your hand.” His voice is strange. A little rushed, like he can’t believe what he’s about to do.
I do as he asks, and when his fingertips find my ring, the black and silver one he gave me before I went to Ireland to fetch his bride, my stomach falls to somewhere between my feet. And my heart hurts, it literally hurts, an ache that feels medical above all else.
He’s taking back his gift. Stripping me of his ring, like I’m an unworthy thane.
Mark works the ring over my knuckles with smooth, careful movements, easing it over the joints in my finger until it’s off.
“Don’t,” I say thickly. “Don’t do that. Leave me—leave me a memento at least.”
He looks up from my hand, and what I see there is so forceful, so terrifyingly intense, that I have to look away. I’m not sure what it is I see, if it’s empathy or anger or pain, but it’s so raw that I can now guess what his face looked like when he told me that he both wanted to be good and be the one to bury the embers at dawn.
He seems to realize he’s revealed too much, and he ducks his head again. If I did that, it would look bashful, I think, but when he does it, it still manages to look haughty. A little dangerous.
And when I dare to look down at my hand again, I see something so dangerous that my body responds like I’m under attack. Thumping heart, diminished hearing, tunneled vision.
Mark has taken off his wedding ring, the one Isolde gave him in a cathedral piled with peonies and hyssop, and he’s now working it onto the ring finger of my left hand.
Senseless and speechless, I let him.
“There,” he murmurs, the ring reaching the base of my finger. It’s warm from his own hand and just the tiniest bit loose. Not enough to move on its own but enough that I could twirl it easily around my finger if I wanted.
I stare down at it. “There,” I say faintly.
There’s an aching surrender in his voice when he says, “Now you have a piece of the dragon’s hoard.”
“And you, sir?” I ask, looking up to his face. The corners of his mouth are blanched as he stares down at my hand. “What will you have?”
He draws in a deep breath and then slips my ring onto his finger, in the same spot where his wedding ring was just a moment ago. “I’ll have a piece of something good,” he says.
It looks right on his hand, the black and silver of my ring, like it’s belonged on his finger from the beginning. I don’t know what it means to exchange rings like this—whether it’s something like a vow or a farewell so permanent that all we can do is hold on to these small, inert pieces of each other—but whatever it means to Mark has him blinking and looking away.
His throat moves once before he says, “I got the idea from an old friend. Changing the rings, I mean. Jago will be waiting outside by now. We should go.”
I don’t argue. I just curl my fingers around the warm wedding ring now on my finger and nod. “Yes, sir.”
Together, we leave the closet and round the corner. I know we don’t look untoward—we both smoothed our clothes before stepping into the lobby, and we didn’t kiss that hard—but I can feel the hush rippling through the space as we walk through it. The openly curious stares of the members, the hard gazes of the staff, eternally loyal to Mark and thinking of me as a Judas, a stealer of wives, a fox in the henhouse. A cruel joke, because who could steal someone as deadly as Isolde? Who could outfox Mark Trevena?
Mark walks just ahead of me, his stride brisk and his head up in that absolute arrogance I find irresistible. I understand why he detests himself for it, because arrogance is detestable, or at least it should be. But somehow on him it doesn’t feel like anything other than a sword cutting through a knot. A dragon flying above his mountain. I’m in a building of rich and powerful people—all of them used to moving the world with a single email, with a lifted finger—and they, to a one, make room for Mark as he passes by. They watch him for cues. They admire and respect him, and if they hate him, they hate him with a fear that borders on awe.
Thank God he’s not a different man. He wouldn’t have been able to build Lyonesse otherwise, much less sustain it.
The doors open for us, and then we’re walking across the pedestrian bridge to where Jago waits in the Maybach. The wind isn’t bitter, but it’s unpleasant, with small flurries dancing in the air, and I have to tilt my chin down so they don’t catch on my eyelashes. I see the gold of Mark’s wedding ring, unfamiliar on my hand, as I do. But I like it there.
