Chapter 14

fourteen

It wasn’t yet dawn when I woke.

I opened my eyes to a room lit only by the glow of the city, my room a chiaroscuro of gold and shadow. Mark stood by my window, his suit jacket and shoes back on, not a hair out of place. His eyes were on the glass, and something flipped between his fingers as he stared at the still-sleeping city.

I sat up, the sheet falling from my naked body. Even though it was still dark outside, it was close to when I’d wake up to pray anyway, and I didn’t feel tired in the least. Possibly because I’d fallen asleep much earlier than normal. Possibly because Mark was still here. Mark was here, and last night had happened, and everything had changed.

“You’re awake,” he said. “Good.”

He turned toward me, setting whatever it was he’d been twirling between his fingers on my desk.

I watched him, not bothering to cover myself, enjoying the way his dark gaze dripped over my collarbone and exposed breasts before coming back to my face.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

I stretched a little to test my body, noticing that his gaze followed my movements, and then I smiled a little as I felt the twinge inside me. What had hurt last night felt like a token this morning, a sweet memory. Proof that Mark had let me on the other side of his curtain. “I’m a little sore, but that’s all.”

I had no idea how to seduce him into more of what we had done last night, no idea how to even begin asking for it. But I wanted it. I wanted him to stride to my bed and put his hand between my legs. I wanted him to use me to get off again. I wanted—I wanted him. Us. I wanted this breathless ache in my chest to ease.

“Good,” he said. “You didn’t sleep well, so I was worried.”

“I slept better than I have in a long time,” I said. It was the truth. Ever since my trip to Rome this summer, nightmares had awaited me every time I closed my eyes.

My honeysuckle knife flashing in the dark; blood wet and coppery on my face. My uncle laying his hand on my gore-crusted hair in the already hot morning sunshine of Rome.

Your sins to save God’s kingdom.

But the dreams had been muffled last night, blurry. Unable to hurt me in Mark’s strong, possessive embrace.

Mark stepped closer without speaking, and I squinted to read his expression. It was impossible in this light, with his cheekbones and jaw lit in gold and his mouth and eyes partially draped in shadow. I thought of his face last night as he’d put his fingers inside me, as he’d come all over my cunt.

What a good little wife you’ll make.

“So did you figure it out?” I asked. I was unable to stop the excitement blooming in my chest. I was his. I’d fought it for the last two years, resisting him, resisting the way he made me feel, the way crawling and being bound and held and flogged had made me feel, but no longer.

I was his.

“Figure what out?” he asked. His voice was cold again, polite. Nothing like it had been just hours ago.

I should have known then, I think. That something had changed. But I was nineteen, feeling the first flush of submission and sex and love, and I didn’t want to know anything that wasn’t this heady, delirious thrill.

“What to do with me,” I prompted, dropping my legs over the side of the bed to stand. “What happens next.”

Mark regarded me as I stood, not moving. Him dressed, suited, and me utterly naked.

“I have,” he said calmly.

“And?”

“And,” he said, stepping forward, “we won’t need to meet again until the wedding.”

A new buzz started under my skin, but it was one of alarm. Just like before, my body knew before my mind did.

“Sorry?” I whispered.

“We’ve done a commendable job of selling our engagement as real so far, and we’ve now ensured your father has no reason to doubt you. There’s no reason for us to see each other until the wedding, unless, of course, we decide to present the illusion that I’ve collared you. We’ll need to make something of the collaring, a little ceremony at the club, but I’ll make sure it’s brief and to the point.”

“Illusion,” I said.

Yes, I want you, and I want you collared, and I want you mine. That should be enough to terrify you, because I would hold nothing back until I’d eaten your very heart.

I still couldn’t make out Mark’s expression, not enough of it, at least. All I could see was that sculpted mouth in the shape of utter indifference. His eyes glittering from the shadows.

“I don’t understand,” I said. The words were bitter on my tongue, and I knew it was because they tasted like failure, like defeat.

Even now, I refuse to admit to myself that they tasted like heartbreak.

“I think you do understand,” Mark said. He had a hand in his pocket as he looked at me. “I think you understand what’s happening very well.”

“But you said—” I stopped. I sounded childish. Pleading for a grown-up not to leave her alone in the dark.

Mark had lied last night. About wanting me to be his—possibly about all of it. His body hadn’t lied, but that didn’t matter. He’d used my body as a tool against me, and undoubtedly, he could use his own body as a tool when necessary. Same as a flogger or a pair of leather cuffs, his hands and his cock were just part of a scene. Even when that scene was entirely a lie.

I closed my eyes, shame dripping into my gut. Hot and viscous.

I’d believed him last night. I’d believed every word he said about wanting me, about keeping distance between us in order to keep me safe. Because I’d wanted to hear it. I’d wanted him to want me as much as I wanted him; I’d wanted him to give me no choice about being his.

I wanted to belong to someone, to be told I was doing a good job; I wanted to be hurt and cleansed and freed from what I did last summer in Rome, and then held until this loneliness finally, finally went away—

But that was a child’s wish, and I was no longer a child.

As St. Paul said, I had to set aside my childish ways.

Had I really thought I might have some kind of fairy tale with Mark Trevena? The man who owned a sex club fueled by blackmail and secrets? Who had done God only knew what for the United States government and had seemingly no remorse over it?

And what about me? Regular girls were allowed to fall in love, to hope for other people to love them back, but I was not a regular girl. I’d been promised to God too long ago, and my life had always been meant as a sacrifice.

That I’d hoped for more, hoped for affection and sex, showed how frail and selfish I still was. How imperfect my offering to God remained. The books on saints weren’t full of stories of people begrudgingly surrendering their lives to God or weeping over what they’d lost when they decided to follow him. They did it with glad hearts, and if they couldn’t do it with a glad heart, then at least they did it with a quiet, noble one.

So Mark had lied last night, and weak, hopeless sinner that I was, I’d believed him.

But I couldn’t find the most crucial thread of this—even after pushing aside the stinging humiliation, the hollow ache of rejection and loneliness, it eluded me.

“Why?” I asked. “I was the one who suggested we eliminate my hymen. I would have done it without—without all the things you said. Without you pretending.”

Even now, all this time later, I still look back on how my voice trembled with unshed tears and I shake with shame. We are called to forgive, but how can you forgive someone for seeing one of the weakest versions of yourself? How can you ever forgive yourself for showing it to them?

It was only the city light from the window that revealed the way his hand flexed after I spoke. The tiniest shift of his fingers. But his face didn’t change. And when he spoke, his voice was as cold as it had been the first day I’d heard it.

“I’m not willing to lose all that I could gain from this marriage to your father’s whims, even if it means temporarily courting his paranoia. And all that I could gain will be severely compromised if you grow to hate me because you gave this up for as clinical a reason as assuring your father. If you had spread your legs with no motivation other than that—even if you’d gone back to your room and wedged your own fingers inside of yourself without me there—it would have forever been a mark in your ledger against this marriage. Against me. One more thing you thought you were stoically surrendering when you were actually only hiding from yourself how much it hurt to have taken away.” He lifted a shoulder. “This way, you couldn’t lie to yourself later and say your hand was forced. You wanted it as much as you’ve ever wanted anything physical. It was your choice.”

“A choice informed by the lie you told me,” I said. I hated that I was naked right now, that my voice was still quavering, but I wouldn’t reach for the sheet or clear my throat. He wouldn’t get my shame from me as well as my weakness—at the very least, I’d keep that one thing for myself. “How do you know that I won’t hate you for making me believe that you wanted me? Making me believe you wanted me to belong to you?”

“A calculated gamble,” replied Mark calmly. “But one I felt confident in taking, because I know you, Isolde Laurence. You’ll always hate yourself first. When you look back on this, it will be yourself you want to burn alive; it will be your own choices you want to scourge yourself for. You might tell yourself that it’s because you’re so deeply sensible and logical that you know you could never control me or my actions, that it’s only worth agonizing over your own behavior. And you’d be partly right. But there’s a lot more to you than sense and logic, isn’t there? You were born guilty; you were born feeling stained and ready to suffer for it. God found you before anyone else could, and so now you’ll lay yourself on any altar you can find to atone for the sin of being alive when your mother is dead, for the sin of being mortal and therefore imperfect. For the sins you intentionally commit now in God’s holy name.”

My lips were open, my ribs were seizing, but the air wouldn’t come. I couldn’t seem to drag it back into my lungs, back into my blood.

“You can’t—” I finally managed a short, sucking breath. “You can’t know that.”

He can’t. He’s lying. Bluffing.

He stepped close enough to touch me, turning so that the light from the window caught more of his face. There was pity in it when he said, “Of course I know it, Isolde. Just as I know you think to play the game with me, capturing my pieces on the board, just as I hope to move your father’s. But I have played this game a lot longer than you and with people far more dangerous than you, and I will win every match, little wife, every bout, and I won’t even need to try when I do it. I know everything about you and you know nothing about me. I am willing to do whatever it takes to get what I want, and you will always be shackled to what your God asks of you.”

He reached out with the hand that wasn’t in his pocket, his fingers lifting my chin. I stared at him stonily, willing him not to see the tears pricking at my eyes, the fast swallow of my throat.

“You are terrified that your soul will be damned to hell. And I no longer have one left at all.”

I blinked at him, this cruel man I’d made an idol of, and he lowered his face, his mouth hovering just above mine.

“So you see? I am going to win. I will always win, not in the least because I know the game we are playing, and I know all the players, and I know the stakes. I will win because I’ve won before. I will win because I’ll die before I lose.”

His nose brushed mine, and then his lips ghosted over my own. My traitorous body responded instantly, craving more of him, his tongue and lips and everything.

“Decide what game you want to play, my honeysuckle queen,” he murmured into my mouth. “And then play it like you mean it. Even if you know you’ll lose anyway.”

And with that, he dragged his mouth to my temple and buried his nose in my hair, inhaling me. I meant to step back, to twist away, but by the time I could convince my body to pull away from his, he was already moving out the door, in long, predatory strides that reminded me of every time I’d lost or surrendered to him. In the karate school, on the stage at Lyonesse. Tonight in the library.

Once I heard the elevator chime and its doors close, I sucked in a long, quivering breath and let out a shattered sob. The tears came hot and fast and awful, and I bent over, unable to stop the noises that came out of me, unable to stop the pain.

It hurt, it hurt, it hurt, a thousand times worse than his flogger, than his fingers inside me for the first time. It was bad enough that I’d been forced into this marriage, but to have fallen in love with him too? To have been played, tricked, and now abandoned?

It was just salt in the wound.

And for my naiveté, my unconscious arrogance—my making a false idol out of Mark Trevena—I deserved it. Wound, salt, and all.

* * *

The daylight was makingmy room bright and horrible by the time the tears stopped. I had ended up on the floor somehow, curled on my side, and I was dizzy when I stood. Dizzy and yet clear, so keenly, sharply clear.

Like the entire world was made of knives and for the first time I could tell the spines from the edges. The live blades from the dull ones.

Mark thought I would hate myself before I hated him? He thought I would lose any game I played against him? He might be older, stronger, the devil sent to scourge other devils, but I was Isolde Laurence, and I had been forged for years into a weapon to be wielded against devils exactly like him.

Maybe he had no soul left, but I would lock mine away, where no one could touch it ever again, and when we met again for our wedding, we’d meet as equals. I would get what I needed from him and Lyonesse’s archives; he would get nothing that mattered from me. And one day, if God granted my prayers, he would feel the same crushing humiliation and heartbreak that I felt right now, naked and sore in my bedroom on a cold winter day.

I turned to leave for a shower, pausing as the thing Mark had been flipping between his fingers and then had dropped on my desk caught my eye. It was a holy card that my Uncle Mortimer had sent me after I’d come home from Rome. St. Julian the Hospitaller.

It read in swooping cursive underneath the prayer: Tu me superbus.

You make me proud.

And I would, I vowed. I would make everyone proud, no matter the cost to myself, no matter the pain.

My sins to save God’s kingdom, after all.

forged for years into a weapon to be wielded against devils exactly like him.

Maybe he had no soul left, but I would lock mine away, where no one could touch it ever again, and when we met again for our wedding, we’d meet as equals. I would get what I needed from him and Lyonesse’s archives; he would get nothing that mattered from me. And one day, if God granted my prayers, he would feel the same crushing humiliation and heartbreak that I felt right now, naked and sore in my bedroom on a cold winter day.

I turned to leave for a shower, pausing as the thing Mark had been flipping between his fingers and then had dropped on my desk caught my eye. It was a holy card that my Uncle Mortimer had sent me after I’d come home from Rome. St. Julian the Hospitaller.

It read in swooping cursive underneath the prayer: Tu me superbus.

You make me proud.

And I would, I vowed. I would make everyone proud, no matter the cost to myself, no matter the pain.

My sins to save God’s kingdom, after all.