Page 93 of Bitter Burn
“And do you have something I can write with?” I ask. I’m handed a marker that looks like it’s meant for labeling boxes, and I write a single word on the back in neat, clear letters.
Nemi.
I cap the marker, set it on the counter, and then adjust the black and silver ring on my finger. “Actually, I have one more thing. If you don’t mind.”
Thirty-One
Mark
I call Sedge after I slide back into the car, and Jago starts maneuvering us north.
“Can we freeze the rest of my day?” I ask. “I’m taking a little field trip upstate, and I might not be able to take any last-minute calls.”
“Of course, sir.” A tactful pause. “I’m sure Dinah will be able to handle a club emergency, but it would help to know how available you’ll be if anything comes up?”
“I’ll be…Albany amounts of available.”
“Albany.” Dryly.
“Yes, it’s for a personal project of mine. I should be back in Manhattan by evening, and then Isolde and I will return tomorrow.”
“From your personal project in Albany. Yes, sir.” It’s spoken in the sober tone of an assistant taking notes, but Sedge is talented in the art of implying a reaction he’s not evidentially giving. In this case, a reaction of complete disbelief.
“Will you do me a favor, Sedge? Will you let Andrea know I’ll be back tomorrow, but Goran and Nat will be out for a while longer?”
“Are they going to Albany too, sir?”
“No, no, nothing like that.” But I don’t clarify any further. I haven’t told anyone aside from Tristan about Cara Sims…and therefore, I haven’t told anyone where Goran and Nat have gone. It seems easier to keep everything contained until we know more about what Cara’s future looks like.
“Yes, sir,” says Sedge when it becomes clear that I have nothing I’m willing to add. “Have a safe journey.”
“I’ve got Jago with me,” I say, catching my driver’s eye in the rearview mirror. “No one will dare touch me while I’ve got a giant, brooding Cornishman by my side.”
Jago just shakes his head and looks back at the road. But he’s smiling. He likes me, I know he does, because he once saved my foot from getting run over by a supply truck during a joint CIA and Royal Marines operation in Armenia. (With Jago, such a thing is essentially a proposal of marriage.) I poached him from the bootnecks the moment he was free, and he’s been silently squiring me around ever since.
I say goodbye to Sedge and then raise the barrier between me and Jago and attempt to return Lox’s call. She sends me straight to voicemail, which is the most Lox outcome I can think of, and then I occupy myself by pulling up the address of Regina Springer’s auto shop and examining the outside, the nearby buildings, the layout of the streets.
The city starts to breathe around us, the buildings getting lower, the trees pressing harder against the road. Soon we’re moving at speed, and I lift my eyes from my phone to watch the trees fly by, stark and skeletal, wetly reaching up for the gray clouds. I think of Morois in winter, of the sodden leaves and stubborn moss, the snowdrops and hawthorn that defy the cold and the axial tilt of the earth to bloom anyway. I think of Tristan gathering wood in the snow, of Isolde’s collarbone gilded by the light of the fire.
I once stepped into Isolde’s dojo curious about the girl who seemed like such a convenient answer to all my problems—as leverage against Cashel, as a potential asset who could be flipped, and in those early, dark days, as a vessel for retribution, a treasured body to pay Cashel back for the treasured body he once gave me in a dark alley. But I left that day with something more than curiosity, something deeper. The more I watched her, the more fascinated I became. They took her for gold when she was titanium; they admired her polish when she was nothing but swirling smoke underneath it all. And the first time she crawled to me, bowled over by a few seconds on her hands and knees, I considered that my plans would have to change.
I hired Tristan already knowing of him, of his heroism, his haunted beauty, his provocative hands. I invited him to apply for the job not because he was going to be Blanche’s stepson but because I already knew I could count on him to do the right thing even when it was hard, because I knew that he could protect Isolde—even from me if necessary.
Because I’d read the interview years before when a reporter asked why he was single, and he said it was because he was ready to fall in love at a moment’s notice. He said it like it was a liability, and oh, Tristan, puppy, you were right. It’s such a liability.
If only I hadn’t been liable as well.
The phone rings as we’re getting off the highway—Albany is hunched and grim under a depressing sky—and I see Lox’s name on the screen.
“My dear hacker,” I say. “Any news for me today?”
“No? Yes? I don’t know. We finished building the Revelata Scientia translation from the scans online and found our old friends in there, mentioned as a group of princes undertaking the study of alchemy.”
“Ys?”
“The same.”
“So that’s why Minch had it in his Bible.”
