Page 82 of Bitter Burn
She takes a hit off her vape pen while she thinks. “I don’t think so. Aaron never talked about new girls. It was always the same four or five from the town we grew up in. He was kind of stuck in the past that way. I would remember if he’d mentioned anyone new.”
I’m about to thank her for talking to me when she adds, “He never talked about new girls, but there was a priest he talked quite a bit about around his third deployment, the one before his last.”
I don’t move, listening intently.
“You wanted to know if they were using churches and things for what Aaron was doing, and he never mentioned anything like that, but the deployment before this one, he was closer to the Polish border, and there was this priest there, like with them on base, God, what’s that called?—”
“A chaplain?”
“Right, right. A chaplain, Father Adam. Aaron talked about him kind of the way you’d talk about someone you had a crush on, you know? We’re Catholic, but we’re pretty laid-back, and Aaron was the laziest of all of us about it. He never wanted to go to church, and he hated dressing up. Wriggled out of everything he could after his confirmation. And then all of a sudden, he’s into rosaries and chaplets, and he’s wearing two different kinds of scapulars and telling me and Chloe to go to Mass and reconciliation and all this stuff? And you’d think that if his conversion was about mortality or killing people or whatever, it would have happened during his first deployment, but it didn’t. It was after he met Father Adam.”
“Did he share that deployment with Tristan? Could Tristan have met or seen this Father Adam? Maybe could recognize him now?”
“Tristan wasn’t there—Aaron complained about that constantly. He was the kind of friend who needed his buddies around all the time”—a flickering smile—“but I think that’s part of why he latched on to Father Adam so hard.”
“Did he mention anything about Father Adam being younger…older…anything distinctive?”
Cara’s fingers tap idly on the pen. “He mentioned that Father Adam did PT with them, so he probably wasn’t older? I guess? But Father Adam was gone by the end of the year. Maybe his chaplain assignment ended, I don’t know, and then Aaron abruptly stopped talking about him. Then the religious stuff kind of reversed itself too. He was very cynical at the end.”
Arms smuggling will do that. “Do you think there was any relationship between his newfound faith—or the flagging of it—and when he started working for Ys?”
She looks tired all over again. “It’s impossible to tell, isn’t it? He never mentioned anything like that to me—that he felt compelled to send us extra money out of his newfound Christian duty or whatever—but maybe inside, he felt that way? I don’t think it’s out of the question, but Aaron was always obsessed with being the man of the family, with providing for us, so it could have been something he did all on his own. Organic Aaron,” she adds, a little wryly.
My questions exhausted and a new name cataloged—Father Adam—I get to my feet. “Thank you for talking to me. This has been immensely helpful, and you are safe here as long as you want to stay.”
“This is the most sleep I’ve gotten in months. Even with Nat’s cooking, this feels like paradise compared to some of the places I’ve been hiding in.”
“Then you’re welcome to it. I hope it won’t be required for long.”
She looks up at me. Dark lashes, sharp eyes. There’s a certain beauty to the hardness of her face…she reminds me a little of Andrea, actually. Flawless marble that’s been used for crenelations and arrow slits instead of statues and fountains. “You’re going after them, aren’t you?” she asks. “Downstairs, they didn’t know anything about Ys when I asked, but you know things like you’ve been trying to know things.”
I pause for a moment, my thumb toying with the inside of Tristan’s ring. “They killed my husband,” I finally say. “Eight years ago. I knew the day I watched them spread dirt over his grave that I was going to make them pay.”
Cara doesn’t ask anything else. She just sucks on her vape and nods. “Kill the bastards. Kill them twice if you can.”
Twenty-Eight
Mark
The following evening, after my bodyguard has escorted Isabella through every glass-fronted temple to consumerism that exists on Fifth Avenue, he comes to the penthouse.
“Ah, Tristan,” I say from the kitchen when the elevator doors open and Petitcrieu scrabbles across the hardwood in a flurry of flapping ears and noisy claws. “Thank you for coming. I know you had a long day.”
Isolde, who is eating at the kitchen island, betrays nothing of her myriad feelings about Isabella Beroul save for the tiniest hesitation in the movement of her fork. Tristan, for his part, sighs as he shrugs off his wool coat and scarf.
My wool coat, I notice with some pleasure, the one from Morois. I like that he keeps wearing it. I like seeing it on him. I also like the idea of punishing him later for the casual theft of it.
“Is there any dinner left?” he asks as he comes into the kitchen, bending down every other step to pet the dog. He’s wearing a black suit with a tie still knotted at his throat, and he starts tugging at it as he drifts to Isolde’s side. Little magnets, the two of them. “I’m starving.”
I fetch the plate I have warming for him in the oven—seared steak and rosemary-flecked potatoes, the first thing I ever made for him—and then I add some kale salad before setting it in front of him with a fork and knife.
“Are you not eating?” he asks as I go to pour him a glass of wine.
“I already ate,” I say. And then I add, softly, “It’s nice to see you.”
He looks up from where he’s already started tucking in, a blush spilling from the apples of his cheeks to the neatly trimmed sides of his hair. “You just saw me,” he says and looks back down.
“It’s been a whole day. It feels like a lifetime.” I watch him for a moment longer, the strong jaw, the straight nose, the dark eyebrows and lashes, the full, rosy mouth. My Pre-Raphaelite knight, wrenched into this ugly world. “Tomorrow night, you’ll return to Montreal, and then who knows when I’ll get to steal you back?”
