Page 39 of Bitter Burn
But she is pretty, with pale bronze skin and wavy, onyx hair that’s been pulled up and banded with white ribbons. She’s curvy, with a body that moves and forms against the St. Andrew’s cross as she’s cuffed to it. The length of white silk that tied her hands together still trails from one of her wrists, matching the ribbon in her hair. When Mark steps closer to speak to her, his mouth to her ear, she curves toward him like a heliotrope. And when he runs a finger down her spine, from the nape of her neck to just above the small of her back, she quakes and shivers, undone by this smallest attention. A perfect sub.
My hands are clenched so hard in my lap that I can feel my fingernails digging into my skin.
“Careful,” says a smoky voice. I look up to see Lady Anguish in a long chiton with vines stitched along one side, and a golden armband in the shape of a snake twined around an upper arm. Her dark hair is up and braided in a circle.
“Bona Dea?” I ask.
“Good eye,” she replies as she sits in the empty chair next to me—Mark’s empty chair. “I suppose a career in antiquities gives you an unfair advantage when it comes to iconography. Now, you must stop that before anyone sees.” She presses a cool hand over one of my balled fists.
“Right,” I exhale.
On the stage, Mark has stripped off his toga with all its cumbersome drapes and handed it to Dinah. The lights on the stage make a mockery of his long white tunic and then a mockery of us all, because we can see the silhouette of his strong thighs and narrow hips and powerful shoulders, and he’s the opposite of reduced for being so revealed.
“Your jealousy should have the flavor of shame and repentance, not anger,” Anguish advises in a low voice. It’s so husky that it barely carries at all. “Unless you want word to reach your uncle that you’re choosing your temper—or worse, the memory of your lover—over doing the job assigned to you.”
Mark is picking up two floggers from a tray offered by another submissive and giving them a few test swings. He seems to like how they feel, because he nods, and the person holding the tray melts into the wings of the stage.
“You are genuinely jealous though, aren’t you?” I can feel Anguish looking at me. “You’d walk down those stairs and drag Mark back to your rooms by that ridiculous golden hair of his if you thought you could get away with it.”
“I think it’s normal for a wife to be unhappy while her husband’s with a naked woman.” My voice is tighter than I’d like.
“You’re not normal, and neither is Mark,” Anguish points out with some amusement. “Tristan might be the closest thing to normal you know, but he won’t be by the time the both of you are done with him.”
I ignore this. Try to ignore the way Mark leans in to speak to the submissive again. I know he’s just checking her safeword, asking about any old injuries or areas to avoid, but it looks unduly intimate, his mouth so close to the shell of her ear.
“Do you really think word would reach my uncle?” I ask. I don’t doubt it’s possible, given that the Scales was able to smuggle in messages to me earlier this year—surely that means there is a line back to my uncle. But my uncle also didn’t seem to know everything when I talked to him in Rome, which means that line might be circumstantial. Or untrustworthy.
“Are you asking me as part owner of the club?” she asks back. “Or as the sister to Vivienne Moore, the aunt of the current president, and the wife of Merlin Rhys?”
I haven’t forgotten how well connected Anguish is, but I hadn’t considered that her connections might make her more insightful when it comes to a question like this. “All of it, I suppose.”
“As an owner of Lyonesse, I’d say that the NDAs are ironclad, the staff is better vetted than most national intelligence agencies, and you have the unique benefit of a community that does not want to fuck up the cone of silence for all their perverted sakes. As someone who’s been reluctantly watching politics since she was a teenager, I’ll tell you that nowhere is watertight, not really. Lyonesse is close, but I suspect your uncle is still able to catch enough drips to keep him satisfied.”
“So you know what my uncle is. What he does, I mean.”
“Anyone who matters knows that Mortimer Cashel runs the intelligence arm of the Holy See.”
I look over at her without speaking.
“But you mean Ys,” she states. Not a question.
On the stage, Mark starts swinging the floggers. Figure eights, in tandem, a steady brush against the submissive’s shoulder blades and then down to her backside. She arches for it above and below.
“It seems like everyone knows about Ys,” I say. “For it supposedly being secret.”
Anguish makes a hmm in the back of her throat. “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? About how secret they want to be?”
Mark had said something similar to Drobny when he killed him a couple months ago.
I think Ys wants to be feared, and you can’t be feared if you’re unknown.
“But very, very few people know about Mortimer Cashel’s connection with Ys,” she continues. “You, me. Mark and his twin sister. Andrea, Lox, and Lox’s boyfriend, Rafe de Lacy. My nephew and my husband. But the CIA and NSA at large do not know. My nephew’s cabinet does not know. It’s a small group. If we all died, no one would know what we died trying to end.”
“Are you trying to end Ys too? Why?”
Anguish looks down at her lap, plucks at her dress. “I made a mistake once, a lifetime ago. I’ve been trying to atone for it by doing some good in the world.”
On the stage, Mark’s flogging is a thing of elegance, light and glancing, with brief brushes of pain that have the submissive whimpering. And then, without warning, the lights go off, leaving only the candles and the tips of the floggers’ falls, which are now glowing orange and red and yellow. It looks like Mark is flogging her with flames.
