Page 79 of Bitter Burn
We meet at Isolde’s mouth, a kiss that’s one kiss and three kisses all at once, and there’s something so softly awkward and earnest about it that it could be a first kiss, a first kiss for all three of us, fumbling and heartfelt and spontaneous.
We linger there for a breath, for another breath more, as the din from the hall fills the room. The lights outside are frenetic and dazzling, like we’re suspended inside lightning itself. Here there’s only eternity, sweet and quiet and golden.
It doesn’t make fate any less cruel that the three of us can taste eternity on each other, but it does make it so much harder to fight.
When the kiss ends, Isolde says quietly, “Will you promise us something, Mark?”
He looks at her, blue eyes veiled. “Maybe.”
“No more lies,” she says. “No more secrets. Please. Just…the truth, and all of it, no matter how ugly, because I can endure ugliness, but I don’t think I can endure being made apart from you, even if the divide between us is only a few whispered words.”
He doesn’t hesitate. “No more lies,” he says. “I promise.” And then he kisses us to seal his vow.
As the kiss breaks, I close my eyes and try to pretend what’s coming isn’t coming—but even fate can’t stop time. When I open my eyes, I see Mark staring at my hands curled between the three of us, like my hands hold the secrets of the universe.
“Isolde and I should go back to the hall,” says Mark, though he doesn’t sound happy about it. “At least for a few minutes.”
Isolde and I don’t argue—we both know it’s what should happen—and the three of us reluctantly get out of bed and find our clothes. I’m sore inside and out; Isolde’s body is still engraved with the memory of the ropes. Mark keeps watching us with a look that would make any rational person feel hunted to extinction.
It’s a kind of sin, dressing, leaving each other, but we commit it together, tugging on clothes and running fingers through hair, making our way to the door and pressing the button indicating that this room was recently in use and needs cleaned before the next guest comes in. Mark and Isolde leave first, together, Isolde with one last quick kiss and Mark with a hand around my neck and his forehead pressed to mine. Three hard breaths, and then he lets go.
And then they are gone.
I wait a few minutes and open the door. There is a cloud of people at the far end of the hallway, laughing and chatting around the open door to a playroom, but it’s too late; it would be more suspicious to slam the door closed and hide at this point. I send up a flimsy sinner’s prayer that they won’t notice and slip out of the room. I use the staff elevator to descend a level and then walk down a long hallway to my apartment, suddenly so tired I can barely keep myself moving.
I make it to my door with a pained, pitiful relief, fantasies of falling face-first into bed occupying my mind, which is possibly why it takes me a second longer to notice her than it should.
Isabella Beroul, standing by my window in a gold lingerie set. She’s partly turned away, her gloved hands at her sides, and she doesn’t look in my direction as I close the door.
“Ms. Beroul,” I say quietly, coming to stand a few paces away. “Everything okay?”
“Your door was unlocked,” she says to the window.
“It usually is.” Lyonesse is generally only accessible to its members, and even if a member broke in here, they wouldn’t find anything I’d care about being stolen. Some books, some clothes, a service cross from my first deployment that might as well be a miniature headstone for McKenzie Reed. A thief would be welcome to all of it. “Is there something I can help with, Ms. Beroul?”
She turns a little to face me, her eyes red but dry. Goose bumps pepper her arms and curvy thighs, like she’s been standing by the window for a long, long time.
“Hugo’s husband has carved out New Year’s kisses as one of his privileges,” she says with a rueful sort of smile. “And you left early, and I thought maybe you’d need someone to kiss at midnight like me. So I came to find you, where you said you’d be.”
“And I wasn’t here,” I say, understanding.
“Were you with them?” she asks.
I don’t want to lie, and she’s not whom we need to convince of our lies anyway, but there’s something curled in the way she asks, something trying to protect its soft belly. Like an affirmative answer would gut her. And she’s been through so fucking much…I can’t stand the idea of being the one to hurt her again.
It doesn’t matter. My hesitation is all the answer she needs. Pain darts through those wide brown eyes before she gets a chance to duck them down, and she starts to leave.
“Isabella,” I say, breaking my own protocol. “I…”
She reaches me and then lifts up on her toes to kiss my cheek.
“It’s okay,” she says. “I don’t know why I let myself hope anyway.”
It’s after the door closes that my phone buzzes in my pocket—it’s Mark, and it’s nothing but a picture.
A plume of white smoke under the canopy of a dark Roman sky.
The conclave is over. They’ve elected the new pope.
