Page 34 of Bitter Burn
It’s my turn to step toward him. “Nothing’s changed, sir. We still love you. I still love you.”
He stares at me, eyes hard, his jaw flexed. Even in his pocket, I can see his hand twitch. I think he might respond, might argue with me at least, or show me a little bit of the man I’ve glimpsed at Morois or on Samhain. The one who mixes his cruelty with tenderness and makes his possessiveness feel like play. Whose coldest parts are the hottest to the touch.
But he doesn’t speak, not even for some cutting rebuttal. He just starts walking toward the door of his office. “Let’s get downstairs,” he says. “It won’t hurt to be early.”
Yes, it will. It will hurt me. Please let me have every last second with you, please, please.
But I won’t beg. Not like this.
We leave his office, and I try not to think about how every step toward the elevator is a step away from Isolde, a step closer to banishment. Banishment with Isabella Beroul of all people. God’s way of punishing me for that old envy, I suppose.
We get into the elevator, and he reaches past me to press the button for the ground floor. The smell of petrichor and wet, wet greenery—Morois after a spring storm—envelops me. I breathe it in, a last gasp of oxygen before going under, and Mark goes still next to me.
We start sinking down to the ground floor, and it hasn’t even been a year since I first stepped into an elevator with him, but it feels like my entire life now, the only life that matters, and how quickly that life is ending. Now there is only the afterlife, the limbo.
The elevator comes to a smooth stop, and the doors open. To our right is a hallway leading out into the open lobby, and this late in the afternoon, I can hear the din of many, many voices. Guests arriving, most of them blending business with pleasure in the low gloaming of winter twilight. Dinner will turn to drinks, which will turn to time in the hall or in a playroom, and the line between work and wickedness will blur until it seems like there has never been one without the other.
I know how to force myself into danger, even if it’s the lobby of Lyonesse and not an abandoned gas station filled with insurgents, so with an inhale and a brief touch of the black and silver ring on my forefinger for reassurance, I walk out of the elevator. I get a single step outside the doors when I hear Mark’s shattered groan, and then I’m yanked by my coat in the opposite direction of the lobby, around the corner and into a storage room that’s filled with even more candles and wax figures and strange disks made of terra-cotta and wood.
The door closes with a slam, plunging us into darkness, and then I’m shoved back against it and kissed. Hard enough that it nearly hurts, but I like it, I like the hurting. I open my mouth for him. I scrabble to touch the hard body trapping mine.
For a moment, he lets me explore him, his waist and hips and ribs, and the sheer pleasure of freely touching Mark Trevena is enough to wreck me. My knees soften; my mouth goes slack under his. I slide my hands up the rungs of muscle and bone and then down again to the barely perceptible dip of his waist. I can feel the heat of his skin through the expensive cotton of his shirt, and when I grab his hips to pull him closer, I feel the brush of his erection against mine. We both shudder together, burning with the same fever.
He reaches for my hands, seizing them, stopping them. His mouth breaks from mine on an uneven exhale.
I think I’m about to be lectured on touching and earning, and I’m ready to fight about it, ready to inform him that if my banishment to Armorica can’t earn me the right to run my hands up his clothed torso, then the currency of earning is inflated past all reason… But no lecture comes. No mock chastisements, nothing cold or mean to freeze me out. Instead, he presses his forehead to mine, still holding my hands. Slowly, so slowly, it feels like I must be making it up, his grip changes and his hands move. He is no longer caging my hands but holding them. And then, with a sigh so soft that it belongs in the blue hours of morning and not in the pitch black of a storage closet, his fingers lace with mine.
“This was never supposed to happen,” he says softly.
I can feel the words against my lips as they’re spoken. I can feel the trembling in his hands.
“You weren’t supposed to happen. Not to me.”
“You happen to everyone,” I reply a little peevishly, and it garners me a quiet laugh.
“I don’t want to.” There’s a scoured honesty to the words. A truth that had to be scrubbed clean of grime before it could be recognized at all. “I don’t want this life.”
I don’t know what to make of this. “You chose this life,” I say. “You built it from the ground up. What can you possibly not want about it?”
Despair haunts the words when he answers. “I don’t want to be spoken of in whispers. I don’t want to think in schemes and tricks. I don’t want a mind that works in angles rather than straight lines. I hate that night has always made more sense to me than day. I can’t stand what I can stand to do. I want to be like you, Tristan. I want to be good. I want to fight my enemies on a grassy field with the sun blazing down and everyone wearing their livery and the terms agreed on in advance. I want to die knowing I was a just and merciful man. Candid and kind and true, like you are. Like Maxen Colchester is.”
Like Maxen Colchester was, I nearly say but I don’t correct him. Mark so rarely illuminates himself—it’s like a full moon suddenly breaking through the clouds, and all I can do is witness the unveiling. Stand and gaze in fascination at the world I’m almost never permitted to see. Not that I can see anything in this closet, but maybe that’s why he’s speaking at all. Maybe this is a confessional or a tomb, a place where sins and secrets are extinguished. Maybe it’s just easier to tell the truth when no one can see your face and when you can’t see theirs.
We’re not real in the dark.
Mark rolls his forehead against mine, back and forth. He’s shaking his head.
“Even now, I can’t pretend to myself,” he murmurs. “I think of you and Colchester, I think of that grassy field, and all I can think about is how I’d throw dirt in my enemy’s face and jam a blade between his ribs while he was still scrubbing at his eyes. I think of what a waste bravery and courage are if they don’t get the job done. I think of how justice and empathy and generosity are absolutely fucking worthless if we think the rules of engagement are more important than the outcome. I think the meek can only inherit the earth if we demand the will is read first, and I want to do more than read it, I want to be its executor. I don’t just want to keep watch against our foes, I want to lay traps, I want to follow them to their dens. I want my enemies to have everything taken from them before they die, and I want to be the one to light their pyres and watch them burn in the dark. I want to be the one to bury the embers at dawn.”
His hands have stopped shaking now, and though his inhales still come in jagged intervals, there’s a growing clarity with every word he speaks.
Certainty in himself, that’s what he’d told me in Rome that he trusted above all else, and as he goes on through his dark litany, I can hear his conviction unfurl and bloom.
“So you see why it doesn’t matter what I want. You see why this was always a bad idea: you and me. The knight who thinks he’s serving a king but is kneeling on the clanking, charred spoils of a dragon instead.”
I move my hand, and he still hangs on to it, so I end up pressing both our hands against my chest. Letting him feel my heart pump blood and obsession. “Then let the dragon add me to his hoard,” I say quietly. “I still pledge to his service.”
We stand there in the dark for a century, a millennium, my heart squeezing and swelling against our hands.
