Page 47 of Bitter Burn
Don’t leave. Don’t leave. Don’t leave.
Nineteen
Mark
My footsteps echo on the wooden floor in a quiet corner of the Smithsonian American Art Museum as I wait for Tristan to pick up the phone. I’m doing my best to look casual, like any other besuited asshole who thinks a museum is just another place to do business, but I’m not feeling casual at all. I’m feeling like I want to drive to the airport and fly to Montreal and handcuff Tristan’s wrist to mine.
“Hello?” comes Tristan’s voice, and it’s tired, so fucking tired, and I just want to hug him. I want to bring him home and feed him and then make him lie down in bed and sleep until he can’t sleep anymore.
“Tristan, it’s me. Hugo just called. I’m so sorry that I didn’t call you earlier. I didn’t know what had happened, and if I’d known, I would have?—”
A short breath from Tristan, like a huff. “You would have what, Mr. Trevena? Come up here? Brought me back to Lyonesse as soon as the police were done questioning me?”
It doesn’t bother me to be called Mr. Trevena rather than Mark—I enjoy Tristan’s little formalities—but it does bother me in that tone of voice.
A reminder of the distance between us. The distance I made between us.
“I don’t know what I would have done,” I admit. “But at the very least I would have checked on you faster. Are you okay? Are you hurt? Hugo said you weren’t, but I know how proud you are.”
“Oh, I’m proud? Remember when you tore your stitches open after Drobny’s attack because you were too proud to ask for help moving things around? It’s not right to throw stones, sir.”
I remember tearing my stitches open. Vividly. Although it wasn’t for pride.
“Please, Tristan. At least assuage my fears. I promise Hugo isn’t going to think less of you for a sprained ankle or a fractured rib.”
A pause. “I’m not hurt.”
I rub at my forehead as I pace in the empty room. The relief is honey-thick and sweet. “Good. Good. And Isabella, she’s okay? Hugo said her attacker got as far as tying her up.”
“He wasn’t in there long, we think,” Tristan answers wearily. “Maybe ten minutes at the most. I think almost everyone at Armorica is loyal to a fault, but there was a new doorman… Jovian was able to get to him, pay him enough to make the fake session and then create a distraction outside. Of course, the concierge and Isabella’s guard thought they were making the club safer by running out to check. Jovian slipped in during the chaos and attacked Isabella while she cleaned up after her last client.”
I don’t reply right away, and Tristan snorts.
“You’re very loud with the things you don’t say.”
“That’s not true.”
“But you think Hugo and Kayden are too trusting.”
“It’s an ailment common to trustworthy people that they assume everyone else is trustworthy too. Maybe you can help them peel those assumptions out of their procedures going forward.”
“Maybe. I can’t be accused of assuming the people around me are trustworthy these days,” says Tristan, and I hate the way he sounds right now. Cynical and alone.
My fault. I did that to him.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” I ask.
“I’m unhappy with how okay I am, but yes, I’m okay. I don’t—” He swallows. “It was easier than it was at Lyonesse. And I don’t think it should be. I don’t know.”
He’s too tender for this. It’s a stupid and foolish world that will take a prom king and send him to war. A hard and inflexible father who will drive his dragon-novel-reading son to R-Day at West Point and probably not even use the full ninety seconds to say goodbye.
In any fair and sensible universe, someone like Tristan would have become an artist or a teacher or a farmer. He would never have needed a taxonomy for killing—fair, unfair, in self-defense, in the defense of someone else. He would have never met me.
In that universe right now, he would be singing to baby lambs and a passel of kids and probably to the hills and trees around him, because if anyone would be happy singing to some trees, it would be Tristan Thomas. If anyone was ever born to the plowshare and not to the sword…
But it never mattered. There is nothing fair or sensible about our universe, and he spent four years being crushed into the shape of a fighter and the next eight in the mud and smoke of war.
“You don’t need me to tell you that you couldn’t have done anything differently, but let me also say this: goodness is not a stable currency. It’s exchanged on an open market with many others. It’s negotiated, it’s bartered, it’s sold. And if you have to sell a little bit of your goodness to make sure that an innocent woman keeps her eye or that a fellow soldier doesn’t assassinate an elected leader and her children, then I think it’s better to be on the market than to hoard your goodness like a talent buried in the earth.”
