Chapter 12

twelve

THE NEXT WINTER

Iwas staring out the window of my family car, seeing not Manhattan in winter, but that Lyonesse stage, the lights, the crowd.

Mark had carried me offstage after I’d faked my orgasm, carried me into an elevator and then into a dark, spacious suite of rooms at the very top of the building. He’d laid me on a bed covered in black silk and rubbed something cold and slick on my ass and my back, and then he'd handed me fresh panties.

When I’d stared at them dazedly, not moving to change, he’d peeled off my old ones and then worked the fresh pair over my hips. I had been sat up like a doll, my hair brushed, and then a glass of water held to my lips.

I had sipped, looking down at where Mark knelt in front of me, holding the glass.

“Thank you, sir,” I’d managed to mumble, and that thing had moved behind his eyes again.

He hadn’t told me that we didn’t have to pretend when we were alone; he hadn’t reminded me that what had happened on the stage was all an illusion.

Instead, he’d wrapped me in a soft blanket and carried me back downstairs, where I had sat cuddled and warm in his lap the rest of the night. And despite the music, the noise, and the carnal displays happening on the stage, I had fallen fast asleep.

When I had woken up, I had woken up alone in my hotel room, with a tube of arnica gel, a bottle of ibuprofen, and several bottles of water to greet me.

The flight to Rome had been miserable with an ass that raw.

I hadn’t seen Mark since. And I was fine with that, I reasoned. We’d pulled off our little act convincingly. No doubt in anyone’s mind that I was the type Mark could conceivably choose to marry. It didn’t matter what I’d felt on stage and what I’d felt curled up in his lap after. That was irrelevant. Unnecessary. Sinful, even.

But then again, I was full of sins these days. New sins on behalf of the Church. Sins that made anything I did with Mark practically moral in comparison.

A whole sacrifice, my uncle had told me while I was in Rome. A burnt offering. The pain you feel over your sins to save God’s kingdom will be sweeter than incense.

I wondered if anyone else could smell the smoke coming off me, or if it was only God.

Preoccupied, I stepped out of the car when it stopped and the door was opened for me, slinging my leather backpack over my shoulder as I walked into my building. I was grateful for college because it gave me something else to focus on, to fill up my thoughts and hours, so that after a day of training, praying, studying, I was too exhausted to think of this last summer. To think of Lyonesse and Rome.

Both had been baptisms, in a way. Both had been confirmations too, but with pounding blood and fevered adrenaline instead of oil and communion.

I looked down at my hands as the doorman summoned the private elevator for me and I stepped inside. I wasn’t sure what I expected to see; they were still my hands. When I looked in the mirror, it was still my face.

Despite what had happened in Rome, I was still Isolde Laurence.

Happened. That word. Like I’d had no choice, like it was all something that had fallen into my lap. What had happened this summer was hardly that; I had chosen it all, every step of the way.

Your sins to save God’s kingdom.

The elevator doors slid open, and I stepped into the open expanse of the great room, already thinking I would grab something easy to eat and then spend the rest of the evening working on a paper for my pre-Columbian art class. My father was in London, Bryn was back at Wellesley, and I was alone.

Something I was a lot, it seemed.

But I’d only made it a single step into the penthouse before something tingled at the back of my neck.

Someone was here.

Silently, I bent down to unlace my boots and pull them from my feet. I slid my bag to the floor, pulling the knife with the honeysuckle blade from the front pocket and easing it from its black leather sheath as I crept toward the grand spiral staircase that led up to the library and then to the observatory. Someone was up there, I was certain of it, and it wasn’t my father, and it wouldn’t be cleaning staff at this time of day. The building was supposedly secure, but as I’d learned in Rome, that hardly mattered to someone with the right motivation.

I mounted the stairs in my bare feet, moving the knife from standard grip to reverse grip as I did, like Mark had shown me in the karate school more than two years ago. It had felt so foreign in my hand then, random and awkward, my movements random and awkward with it. Now—after years of being determined never to be bested like Mark had bested me that day—I felt certain and assured with any knife I happened to pick up, and

especially with this one. The way Mark had it made was indelible perfection: sometimes my hand felt wrong without the bone and gold handle nestled in my palm, rather than the other way around.

The bone was warm in my hand as the library came into view. Shelves and shelves of books collected over the years—my mother’s favorite books about medicine, chemistry, and botany, books Uncle Mortimer had sent from Rome written in all the languages I’d been made to learn as a girl. Even my father’s pretentious collection of leather-bound antiques, purchased for decoration, looked organic and at home with all the other titles.

Twenty-two windows lit the circular space, revealing the fading autumn light, and a massive globe gleamed next to two armchairs. It was open, and a decanter of whisky sat unstoppered inside it.

But that wasn’t what had caught my attention. At the far window, looking out toward the Hudson, was a man in a charcoal gray suit, a tumbler of my father’s favorite single malt dangling from his fingers. Even though it was late in the day, the suit was still immaculately pressed and his blond hair was styled perfectly in place.

“Going to kill me, Isolde?” asked Mark as I climbed the final step. He hadn’t turned around to look at me, so how—

The window.He could see my reflection in the window, knife and all. A rookie mistake—something that happened all too often around him.

I didn’t sheath the knife or put it away, however.

“How did you get inside?” I asked warily.

He still didn’t turn, merely lifting a shoulder and then raising the glass to his mouth. “I have my ways.”

Bribing the doorman, most likely. I’d have to look into that later. I could no longer afford the presumption that any space was completely secure. “Why are you here? If you wanted to arrange another training session or appearance at Lyonesse, you could have texted—”

“Have you spoken to your father recently?” Mark interrupted.

My father? “No. He’s in London right now.”

Mark took a drink and then braced his forearm on the window as he swallowed. “He spoke to me today. About our engagement.”

A thousand different possibilities swarmed through my mind.

Did Father want to end this betrothal, after being the one to force me into it in the first place? What would Uncle Mortimer think? And would it mean I could return to my original plan of taking vows after college?

Surprisingly, the thought didn’t bring the relief it might have once, nor the joy. I still wanted to live as a nun, of course; it was the dream that had been snatched from me—but—

But I didn’t know. Maybe I’d adapted too much to the idea of being joined to the cold, suited man in front of me. Or maybe I’d seen too much, done too much, to imagine myself as a bride of Christ now. I’d already begun creating a life as Christ’s mistress instead, seeking his love from the shadows rather than the light.

And perhaps it was the role I’d been shaped for anyway. Gathering crumbs for my uncle among the world’s elite, turning my body into a weapon…all of that would hardly be useful in a cloister, and I wanted to be useful above all. To serve God, not just with my prayers, but my hands too. And for better or for worse, serving was inextricably threaded with marrying the man across the room.

“And what did he say?” I asked. My voice was steady, even, though I felt anything but steady right now.

“He said”—Mark’s voice was rough and bitter, and there was heat in it. I wondered how much scotch he’d drunk—“he’d like some surety that we are following through with our engagement, and that our marriage is inevitable.”

“Surety,” I repeated. I had no idea what my father could mean. The prenuptial agreements had been long signed and filed away, and now that my graduation was only two and a half years away, there had already been some talk about hiring a wedding planner. As far as I knew, everything was happening as it was meant to.

Mark took another drink, dropped his arm from the glass. “This is the first you’ve heard of it, then?”

“I have no idea what you or my father are talking about.” Which I hated. It was never a good idea to be in the dark when it came to either of those men.

Mark finally turned to face me. Those sculpted lips were curled in an expression so disgusted that I would have taken a step backward if I weren’t still so close to the stairs.

“Well, then let me enlighten you.” The words were as hard as the look in his eyes. “Your father would like for me to deflower you. The sooner the better, in his mind.”

I stared at him.

The words didn’t fit together, didn’t make any kind of sense. And I don’t mean that in a metaphorical way—they genuinely made no sense to me.

Deflower.

The sooner the better.

Mark didn’t move or speak as his words finally, painfully, transformed into meaning—as my lips parted and my chest lifted in a sharp breath.

My father wanted Mark to fuck me.

It was so medieval that I almost couldn’t ascribe it to my iPad-wielding, Savile Row-clad father.

…Almost.

But—

“Why?” I whispered. “Why does it matter?”

Mark didn’t speak as I stepped away from the stairs, turning to face the desk in the corner of the room. My father worked in here sometimes when he was in Manhattan; Mother and I used to run up the stairs as fast as we could and try to jump in his lap. He’d act surprised and then tickle us both until we were shrieking.

And now I was staring at that same desk as I stood across from the man who’d bought me in marriage, whom my father had apparently told to claim my virginity like some kind of trophy.

Did he think Mark needed further incentive to marry me beyond what had already been agreed on? Did he think Mark was so easily won over? Mark had an entire club of people to fuck, and I didn’t doubt that he was fucking people outside of it too. One college student’s hymen was hardly going to tip the scales in either direction.

“He must know—he has to know that you’d have no remorse over this. That it won’t trap you into going through with the wedding if you decide you don’t want to marry me.”

I turned in time to see Mark’s jaw work to the side. “It’s not me he wants to trap, Isolde,” he said after a moment.

“But if he doesn’t want to trap you, then who does he—” I stopped, my breath catching. “Oh.”

“Yes,” Mark said. “Oh.”

My father wanted to trap me instead. Whether it was because he believed me secretly romantic and naïve, or because he wanted to manipulate my Catholic morality, I couldn’t be sure, but it didn’t matter. My father believed that if I had sex with Mark, I’d feel compelled to marry him.

It was insurance against my potential resistance.

Anger punched at my lungs, and I had to fight to keep my breath regular in front of the too-perceptive Mark.

But how could my father do this? When I’d already been so compliant, so fucking obedient, even when it came to giving up the life I’d always wanted?

“Bold of him to assume I’ve never had sex,” I muttered.

Mark gave a short nod.

“Not that I…what we did on the stage at Lyonesse—that was the closest anyone’s ever come to touching me—” I stopped, flushed. “I presume you told him that he had no right to ask such a thing?”

“I told him that I would do with my future wife whatever I damn well wished,” Mark said flatly. The words were just as medieval as my father’s demands, but I didn’t feel a renewed rush of anger at hearing them.

I also didn’t care to look too closely at what it was that I did feel.

“And what did he say to that?”

Mark lifted his glass to his lips but didn’t take a drink. “That he was prepared to make it an essential condition of our engagement. He doesn’t trust that you won’t be seduced back to God otherwise.”

An essential condition.

“So he would…what? Cancel the engagement if we don’t comply?”

Mark responded without inflection.

“Yes.”

That didn’t make any kind of sense! My father had been the one to demand this marriage—and now like a petulant child, he was saying he’d stop it from happening at all? If we didn’t give into his horrific demands?

“He’s minimizing risk,” observed Mark over his glass. “It’s what bankers do. If he can’t be certain the marriage will happen, he needs to know in enough time to dampen the embarrassment, to control the narrative. And potentially to position you for another alliance.”

I had to admit that all sounded like my father.

But maybe…maybe this was it. My opening, my chance—a door left cracked by my father’s arrogance. Whether it was because he was that confident he’d bend us to his will, or because he was so stubborn that he’d see this arrangement dissolved if it couldn’t be sealed in blood, I didn’t know. But what did it matter, actually?

What did it actually matter?

I’d never chosen this for my father. I’d chosen it for Mortimer and for my church; I’d chosen it for me. How funny that Father was afraid I’d renege on the engagement because of my faith…when I’d agreed to be scourged by marriage because of that very same faith.

And perhaps if my father knew the truth, we wouldn’t be here in this moment; he’d be secure in knowing that I was fully committed. But there was no way for him to know the truth without also revealing how Uncle Mortimer wanted to leverage the alliance with Mark, and there was no way to explain that without my loyalties becoming clear.

And it served no one for my father to learn that any loyalty to him ranked very, very low on a list of my motivations.

So the engagement couldn’t end. I’d come too far, changed too much, for that.

I closed my eyes and thought through our remaining options. If my father had gone so far as to speak to Mark about this, then he was determined to have it. In a battle of wills with Geoffrey Laurence, Mark Trevena very well might win—and so might I, although I never had before. But I had also learned a great many things from my uncle, and one of them was that pride should never come at the price of expediency.

“So we lie.” I opened my eyes to see Mark watching me. He still had the glass held up to his mouth, like he couldn’t decide whether to take a drink. “You tell him that we’ve had sex, and that my Catholic guilt has led me into a deep emotional attachment to you, and that you’re confident I’ll go through with the marriage.”

“You should know that your father has intimated to me that he’s already bribed your physician to keep him abreast of any physical changes. Or the lack thereof.”

Fresh horror washed through me. Pure, unwashed horror at the intrusion, the violation of it.

The evil of it.

My own father, the same father who’d sat on a kitchen counter and kicked his feet while he allowed my mother to feed him her culinary disasters—the same father who’d never missed a school concert, a teacher’s meeting, a chance to swing me on his shoulders—had done this. To me, his only child.

Had my mother’s death truly changed him that much? Or had it been my mother keeping him good all those years, and then after her funeral, he’d reverted to whatever reptilian being he’d been before he met her?

Mark drained the rest of the scotch in a practiced swallow. “I can, of course, out-bribe your father,” he said as he walked over to the open globe again. “And you can change doctors. We can select one known for privacy and discretion; we can make sure they are properly bribed or blackmailed too.”

Mark used the word blackmail so easily, so casually, that it startled me. I didn’t know why—what else was all that information he collected good for?

“But,” he went on as he poured himself more single malt, “we will have to contend with the possibility that we might be outmaneuvered at some point. He might flip someone loyal to us if he’s able to access the right leverage, or offer more money before I can counter. It’s a risk we have to take, but I anticipate we can minimize it as much as possible—”

“Wait,” I said, and then stopped, unsure of what I was going to say next.

He raised an eyebrow, thick and straight and a dark gold, nearly the same color as the drink in his glass. “Yes?”

“I—” I took a breath. “What are our other options?”

“There are no other options, sweetheart. We can lie and wait to be found out—or we can lie and blackmail someone into lying along with us.”

Sweetheart.

It was the first time he’d called me such a thing. Heat threatened to bloom on my cheeks; my heart was thudding. I had to force myself to think again.

Pride couldn’t come at the cost of expediency. And hadn’t I already expected something like this? Hadn’t I already anticipated that Mark would have sex with me? I’d intentionally given the green light when it came to my limits, after all, and after New Year’s Eve and what had happened on stage at Lyonesse, I had to admit that I wanted it.

I wanted to have sex with him.

And anyway, it was necessary for bringing Mark closer to me, for earning his trust and affection and anything else I could use to squeeze all the blood out of this marriage that I could.

Your sins to save God’s kingdom.

“There is one other option,” I said. Calmly. “You could deflower me for real.”