Page 4 of Bitter Burn
He’s singing “Hallelujah,” and it charms me to think he considers himself the baffled king, the overthrown Samson. There is something so piquant about a good person thinking they are bad, about a strong person thinking they are weak. It is a devil in me—a devil just like Saul himself had—that I want to encourage this. That I want to croon in Tristan’s ear that he is so bad, so very bad, that he is so weak to let me do the things he lets me do.
I finally open my eyes, starved enough for the sight of my soldier that it hurts like a stuck blade, and see him moving at the edge of the graveyard. Gathering sticks—for a fire later tonight maybe. He’s wearing one of my old coats, a wool thing Eliot bought me after complaining about my jacket and its pragmatic layers of recycled polyester. And seeing Tristan in that coat—at Morois, in this place that meant so much to me and Eliot…I almost have to close my eyes again.
It reminds me of this last spring, of coming here for the annual lament I’ve allowed myself over the years. Of looking up to see Tristan in the library, his green eyes brimming with concern, his lips parted enough to show the shine of his tongue.
God, what I’d felt then.
Anger, sawtooth anger, and a grief that wouldn’t stop bleeding. Lust like razor wire in my belly.
I did warn him, you know, and you can’t say that I didn’t.
With the screen of the trees, I can only see fractions of him, subdivisions of dark, overgrown hair and wool-clad shoulder. Gloved hands—his unknowingly wicked hands. Cradled wood. I watch him bend one last time for a stick and then straighten. He goes toward the house still singing, and like a sailor after a siren, I follow, helpless to do otherwise.
She’s in there, I know, waiting for him. With her honey hair and her unusual mouth, made while God was in a playful mood. With her turquoise eyes and her features so delicately shaped that you’d think she was part porcelain doll.
She is not a porcelain doll, obviously. Dolls don’t murder people.
I move silently toward the house, keeping to the trees and then to the chapel. Dusk comes early during a Cornish winter, and it’s easy to stay in the gloaming, in the cold obscurity of the shadows, until I’m looking into the conservatory. And there I see her, wearing a white shirt—mine—and linen pants—also mine—with my ring on her finger. The light inside the house trims her in shades of pearl and gold, and she could be a holy card right now, Our Lady of Perpetual Knives, a saint of masochism and lies. And Tristan—kissing her over the bundle of sticks before he carries them into the library—could be a knight in a stained glass window. Glowing with purity and carrying the weight of chivalry on his shoulders, drawn for a fairy tale but sculpted in war.
What do they think of me, I wonder, after a month away? Isolde, the loyal saint, Tristan, the valiant hero? Knowing what they know of me now? Having had time to put the pieces together…perhaps not all of them but enough. Enough of those bloody, jagged pieces.
At Lyonesse, they think me furious; they think me brokenhearted. Mark, the untouchable lord, the dominant of dominants, cuckolded in grand fashion by two submissives, his wife and his bodyguard, if you can believe it. Mark, who sits in the hall at night with his inscrutable features, who hasn’t touched anyone to play or to fuck since his wife left him for another man.
I guess it was too much to hope that their elopement would go unnoticed, not after I was found zip-tied to my office chair the morning after. Sedge would have stayed silent, I think, preferring to let his dislike of my bride and bodyguard fill the quiet cracks of conversations and linger in the pale gray flicks of his gaze. But Andrea has always hated this part of the plan, the Tristan and Isolde part of the plan, and perhaps, given everything that’s happened, she was right to.
At any rate, she saw no need to preserve either Isolde’s reputation or Tristan’s, and within a day, it had spread far past the club, past DC, all the way to the edges of the globe. Lyonesse members from São Paulo to Singapore knew. Other kink club owners knew; Isabella Beroul’s dominant reached out to me from Montreal; Nimue called me with advice that felt like something from a fortune cookie or maybe one of Tristan’s novels about dragons.
Good rulers are merciful, Mark, as well as just.
The fucking president of the United States called me to offer his condolences. And he just laughed when I asked him through my teeth if he hadn’t been the runaway bodyguard in this scenario. Yes, but the difference is that Greer’s husband would have never let us run away, he’d purred.
So anyway, the entire world knows what happened that night.
I’m cuckolded. I’m spurned. I’m humiliated. The young bride and the bright-eyed bodyguard, always such strange choices for a man like me, have stolen themselves away in the night along with my pride and my heart (although I’d rather be zip-tied to my office chair again than admit that last part to anyone else).
So, my singing Tristan, who tied whom to the kitchen chair? Who stole the throne and cut the hair? I thought I was every villain, every Saul and every Delilah, and yet here I am, the broken one, the overthrown. Watching the two people I reluctantly—oh God, they have no idea how fucking reluctantly—offered my affection to while they kiss each other, while they wear my clothes, while they carry my sticks.
Isolde stands in the middle of the house as Tristan disappears into the library, her hand drifting to her collarbone as she seems to stare at nothing in particular. The T-shirt she wears is far too big for her, and it exposes her slender throat and the dip of her clavicle; it hangs from the compact curves of her shoulders. You’d have no idea that under those baggy clothes were the coiled muscles of a predator, that the elegant hand at the base of her throat is the same hand responsible for the scar on my own. The same hand that has severed arteries, started fires, poisoned drinks, and has unflinchingly done so. My little demon, my little murderess. A swell of fond pride surges in my chest when I think of how she fought me in my office the night she left. Tristan interrupted us (and stole my attention for a crucial second), but I could have happily fought her for hours. The very first time we met, she was still learning how to hold a knife, how to face someone else holding one, and taking her down had been as easy as walking forward. And now look at her.
I step back into the gloom of a magnolia tree just as she lifts her eyes, abruptly alert. She searches the shadows through the conservatory’s windows as she steps closer, every line of her taut and alert, and oh God, how I’d like to come closer and show my face, just to see what she does.
Would she fight? Flee?
She wouldn’t freeze or fawn, not my wife.
Tristan would come and—and what? Help her run away again? Try to fight for her, which would be as adorable as it was unnecessary?
But I don’t step forward. I stay cloaked in darkness, utterly still, until she closes her eyes and shakes her head once, like she’s chastising herself for seeing things. She shouldn’t—she is correct that danger lies outside her door—but this close, I can see the dark smudges under her eyes and the sharp cut to her jaw. The last month has worn away at her like it’s worn away at me.
I don’t bother to suppress the bitter satisfaction I take in that.
She goes into the library then, and I sigh up at the magnolia branches above me, low and sprawling, and lumped with half-melted snow. My hand goes to the small chess piece I’ve taken to carrying everywhere with me. A queen made of cold, hard crystal.
What am I doing here? What did I hope would happen? That I’d stroll inside and they’d drop to their knees and beg my forgiveness? That they’d apologize for the one thing worse than their infidelity, which was their absence?
That they’d accept that I had planned to kill Isolde’s uncle—that I planned to kill him still? That I’d manipulated them both, and in Isolde’s case, that I’d done it for years?
No. Isolde might have spared my life, might even have meant it when she said she loved me, but she still ran. All those confessions of love from her and Tristan, all those promises of faithfulness, and all it took was one opened safe, and they were gone.
