Page 43 of Bitter Burn
Isabella looks down at my hand. At the gold wedding ring there. “Is this to drive away interested suitors, or is it real?” she says, maybe trying to bring the moment back to some sort of casual levity. “If it works to keep the suitors at bay, I should demand that Hugo give me a ring too. Although we’d have to make it clear to Edouard that it’d be more like a collar than anything else.”
Isabella, first and foremost, is Hugo’s submissive, but she is only that. Unlike Mark, who can’t seem to love someone without also wanting to give them rug burn, Hugo is much more flexible when it comes to kink and romance. He’s happily married to a monogamous, vanilla solicitor, and Hugo has his vanilla solicitor’s permission to use Isabella to meet Hugo’s other, more unique needs.
Edouard has Hugo’s heart; Isabella gets his bruises.
The arrangement seems to work well for everybody—including Isabella, whose appetite for kink and attention is much like her appetite for shopping and who would probably wear out even an experienced Dom like Hugo if she wasn’t frequently getting topped elsewhere.
“It’s real,” I say, and then after a minute, “but it’s not mine. It was…exchanged.”
“Does the ring have to do with her? With Isolde?”
“It’s the one she gave Mark on their wedding day.”
Isabella pulls off a leather glove and then lifts my hand to examine the ring more closely. The nitrile-covered tip of her finger is satin-like as it grazes the skin around the ring. It’s as warm as her hand would be underneath.
“I hate that she’s made you like this,” Isabella says. There’s an edge in her voice that I haven’t heard before, and I turn to study her face.
“Like what?” I ask warily.
“Melancholy. Lost. I can see you thinking about her sometimes, and it’s like watching all the petals getting torn off a flower. Like even just thinking of her rips something apart inside you.”
I look away. I don’t like being that transparent. Professionally or personally.
“I was like this before I came to work for Mark,” I say, and it’s the truth, even if there are several other truths now sutured along its edges. “And Mark…Mark was the first, you know. I fell in love with him before I ever met Isolde. You know what he’s like. How it feels.”
I shouldn’t be telling her this. It’s about as professional as my unhappy disassociations when I think no one is watching, and Isabella has enough to worry about on her own. She doesn’t need my failed ménage à trois laid in her lap. But after ten days of being her shadow, I know so much about her—I know she does her puzzles with the inside pieces first and what brand enema she uses—and perhaps it gives me the illusion of intimacy.
And it’s nice, actually, to be able to talk with someone about this. Someone who knows Mark too. Who’s felt his shadow over their skin.
She runs her finger over my ring a final time and then offers me a small, sad smile. “Yes. I know how it feels.”
Eighteen
Tristan
I’m off the next night, a different member of Armorica’s security trailing Isabella’s footsteps, so I plan on eating a light dinner and reading a book. I open a kitchen cabinet and find the stock of things some staff member helpfully thought I’d enjoy as the resident American, pushing aside peanut butter and sugary cereal and then stopping when I see a box of Pop-Tarts. The s’mores flavor, Aaron Sims’s favorite.
I pull out the box and stare at it. I don’t need to open it to remember the shiny silver wrappers or pull one out to remember the sound of it crinkling. Sims would carry a package of Pop-Tarts with him into the strangest places and long past when you’d think his self-control would last. We’d be on a twenty-four-hour patrol or wedged in the back of a combat outpost or hunched inside of a stalled Humvee, and then you’d hear the rustle of plastic or see the shine and flash of the package, and he’d be happily munching away while we trudged or shivered or dozed in the heat.
It's a string of happy memories, of funny ones, of good-natured insults flung back and forth, of shared crumbles of dry pastry. Of Sims making everyone smile even when we were pissy or itchy or exhausted.
I want to hold on to those memories, I don’t want any other memories to crowd in, and I squeeze my eyes closed like it will help. Like I can block out what Sims looked like with a forest behind him and fog clinging damply to his uniform pants. Like I can block out how his hand shook as he trained his pistol on the new prime minister, as he planned to kill her husband and two kids.
Like I can block out what it looked like when I shot him through the throat before he could.
I put the box of Pop-Tarts back into the cabinet and decide to go down to the club before my own thoughts eat me alive.
Hugo and Kayden are sharing a table in the heart of the building, a lushly appointed lounge with floor-to-ceiling windows sunk into the dark blue walls. The upholstery and leather, the large fireplace and sumptuously stocked bar, could be in any exclusive hotel, but the windows themselves show the truth of Armorica: they open up to playrooms, some only barely lit, with shadows moving mysteriously inside. But some…some glow into the lounge, their happenings on vivid display. In the same field of vision right now, I can see an ornately framed painting of something impressionist and outdoorsy and then a woman pegging a man while he claws helplessly at the floor.
Heat seeps down into my groin, and I turn away, making sure to take a chair at Hugo’s table facing the opposite direction. At Morois, Isolde had confessed that she wanted to do that to me, that she wanted to see if she could make me come hard enough that I cried, and it’s now one of my go-to fantasies when I’m alone.
I don’t need the visual reminder in front of my new boss.
“Tristan,” Hugo greets warmly. He has a faint accent, the relic of a Breton childhood.
“Sir,” I say and then smile up at the server who’s appeared immediately and silently. I order a beer and then say hello to Kayden, who’s ignoring a tablet next to him—open to a dense spreadsheet—in favor of a whiskey-looking drink with a cherry at the bottom.
“I didn’t think we’d see you tonight,” he greets with an easy smile. “You’re hard to lure out when you’re not working.”
