Page 54 of Bitter Burn
“Why did you come looking for me in the garden?” she asks rather than answering.
I find a strand of silken hair and twist it around my finger. “I couldn’t find you. I was worried.”
“You haven’t tried to find me before.” Her finger still moves along my forearm, tracing the curved beak of the tattooed bird. A Cornish chough, which mates for life. She finds a long, raised ridge in its wing, a few raised scars nearby.
“It’s important to find a reputable tattoo artist,” I remark when she rubs at the ridge inquiringly.
But she doesn’t let me change the subject. “It feels like you’ve been avoiding me.”
There’s no point in lying. “That’s because I have been. I thought it better. For you.”
A dull laugh. “Yes. So much better.”
“You didn’t run away on Samhain because you wanted to keep sharing a life with me,” I state. “And you didn’t come back because you missed me. You ran because I lied to you and because you couldn’t bring yourself to kill me, and now you’re here again because it’s the best chance you’ve got at holding your uncle at bay. An uneasy alliance isn’t the same as trust, and I didn’t imagine we’d go back to blow jobs after breakfast just because your uncle has done us the favor of threatening you directly now.” And I don’t want you to hate me when this is done. I want you to know that I at least tried not to take more than I needed.
I don’t tell her those last parts though. They’re selfish thoughts, even for me.
“But that’s not all of it, is it?” she asks. “You hate us for leaving you, even if you still love us too. You want to punish me, and if Tristan were here, you’d want to punish him too.”
I acknowledge this. “Yes.”
“So I’m not supposed to believe that you’re staying away to hurt me?”
I sigh. “Give my mercenary nature a little credit, Isolde. Why would I choose a punishment that wounded myself? I can’t be plainer about this than I’ve been: if I were the god of my own little world, I would have you and Tristan at my fingertips, and I would spend my days and nights afflicting you with my attention. Like a pillar of cloud and flame, I’d be with you always. So no, I haven’t been staying away to hurt you. I’ve been staying away because the conscientious course of action also happened to be the most strategic way forward, and believe me when I say that almost never happens in my line of work.”
She shifts and turns so that she’s propped up on one elbow and looking down at me. “And today you decided that, what, it wasn’t conscientious to ignore me anymore?”
The light from outside filters in through the windows and the ceiling, a little mottled from the ice and rain, and paints her in shades of indigo and Alice blue. I find a new skein of hair and wrap it in a blue-silver curl around my finger. “You’ve been fading since Saturnalia. I thought maybe…I suppose I thought it was a protective measure, that you were only trying to give the club as little to work with as possible, that you were simply missing Tristan and your freedom and resenting me for taking both of those things from your life. I didn’t realize how much everything was affecting you, and I should have. I shouldn’t have been so far away.” I let out a tired sigh. “Forgive me, Isolde.”
She studies my face. “I don’t know that I should forgive you, but that’s the problem, isn’t it? It would be absurd to trust you ever again, and yet you know that and you agree. You’re not courting my trust or my forgiveness…and that in itself makes me want to trust you more. And then when we are stacking lie for lie, sin for sin, broken vow for broken bow—our sums aren’t so far apart in the ledger, are they?”
“I’m ahead,” I say. “By my reckoning.”
“Yes, you are still the bigger monster,” she says and lies down again, putting her head on my shoulder. “But I’m not far behind. And perhaps I’m worse, because I don’t even know why I am what I am anymore. You’ve at least scratched your sins into the ledger yourself. The things I’ve done…I think I’ve done them for something that isn’t real at all. For something that’s never been real.”
I hear it in that last sentence, the same desolation I saw in her face in the garden. The pointless stains on her knees from kneeling on frozen tree roots.
Opera music curls in my mind—handfuls of magnolia petals flutter down to a coffin lid gleaming in a hole.
There’s a faint trembling under my hands and against my side now. The shallow stutter of a breath accidentally catching in a cinched throat.
“You took the boxes with you, so you know that Eliot died in a friendly fire incident in Košice,” I say, stroking her shoulder. “But did you know that I was the one to drag his body into the dark and bring him home?”
“No,” she says a little shakily. The sobs are close, which is okay. I’m not frightened of her tears. “I didn’t know that.”
“I watched as he was shot by American soldiers—soldiers who’d been lied to, but God, so easily lied to—and I listened to a soldier render aid to one of his own. One of our own. And instead of asking for help, instead of helping them, I had to creep up to my husband’s dead body and tug him over wet cobbles and muddy grass and pray that no one heard me. His shoe came off—he was always so vain about his shoes, would never wear something practical?—”
I stop short, having forgotten that small ostentation of his. The memory lances clean through me.
Clearing my throat, I start again. “Whatever the informant was about to tell him, we never found out, so three people died that night for absolutely nothing at all. I remember watching them load his body on a commercial cargo flight, no flag, no airmen to escort him to Dover, and thinking that we’d agreed to this, he and I. We’d joined the agency knowing that we could die doing something the world would never know about, that our songs might go unsung and all that bullshit, but what I’d never considered is that we might die for nothing. And then I thought…if we could be dying for nothing…maybe we could be killing for nothing too.”
She’s somehow shivering and utterly still at the same time. A barely anchored boat on choppy water.
“The year I left college for the Army, I was happy to go to war,” I continue. “I guess you could say that I’d felt called to it. You’ve been to Morois. You’ve seen the Trevena family chapel and the little cemetery. The Trevenas and cousins of Trevenas and neighbors of the cousins of Trevenas—the men who went across the Channel were the small gods of our woods. My grandfather wore a poppy pin every time he left the house. Maybe I had a different flag sewn to my jacket, but I felt like my destiny had finally come, like I was doing what I was made for. That my country needed me and our allies needed us, and that if any virtue was synonymous with holiness in our day and age, it would be patriotism. Courage painted in bright colors—red, white, and blue. I believed in that then like you believe in God now.”
She moves a little against me but doesn’t speak.
“It was different in the Rangers, but only by degree. If the missions were more complicated morally, the fervor and belief in our cause were tenfold. We couldn’t be doing the wrong thing, because we were the right people. It was easy to squash out those little flares of curiosity, of concern, the rare unsavory moment.” I sigh. “And then came the agency. Their invitation. They’d already gotten Melody. They’d already noticed that I was more like my MI6 grandfather than my heroic soldier ancestors. They knew that my conscience was…different. I was a man with muffled morals who’d made a god out of his country, so they offered me an altar to sacrifice on. I said yes, because I believed that every threat, theft, murder, and criminal damage to property was a step toward an endpoint we’d all agreed on. It made sense to me, my grandfather’s grandson, that you had to fight darkness with darkness, and better me than some sweet recruit who just wanted to study Pashtun or Korean for the linguistic thrill, because it wouldn’t hurt me to do the things that couldn’t be written down in the reports. I didn’t lose sleep at night over them.”
