Chapter 15

fifteen

PRESENT DAY

“Are you ready?” my uncle asks.

I turn away from the window to see him standing behind me in his black simar and scarlet skullcap, his hands laced behind his back. He’s framed by the grand dining room of Cashel House, the country manor just outside Wexford that’s been handed down through the Cashels for generations. My mother is dead and my uncle can’t own property as a cardinal priest, and so as the last Cashel standing, the manor is mine.

I’ve visited several times over the last two years, mainly under the pretense of overseeing an extensive renovation, but this time I came because I needed a few weeks on my own after my graduation from Columbia.

A few weeks before Mark came to collect his bride at long last.

Mortimer flew in from Rome two days ago to join me. For moral support, he said, although the last two days have been more about strategy than support. Mark and I have barely seen each other since that night in my penthouse—just the once for a fake collaring ceremony where he barely touched me and Dinah shuffled me into a car right after—and my uncle is eager for information at long last. Gossip, observations. Eventually, whatever treasures are inside Lyonesse’s electronic archives, the payments rendered for joining Mark’s depraved kingdom.

“Of course,” I say evenly. “It’s what we’ve been waiting for.”

My uncle steps forward to join me at the window, and I turn to follow his gaze. Cashel House looks out over a cliff-hedged cove, the shallow waters a gorgeous turquoise against the darker, deeper blue. There is a summer storm scudding overhead, forbidding and restless.

“You have made me proud beyond measure these last few years,” Mortimer says. His lilting voice is both serious and fond. “You’ve become everything I’ve hoped for and more. No matter what happens in your marriage with Mark, you’ve already brought God’s kingdom such strength and cunning that your treasures in heaven will be countless.”

I keep my eyes on the water. “Thank you.” Years ago, it was all I wanted to hear, but now my heart’s locked away, and my need for comfort along with it. A blade only needs sharpening, not encouragement. I don’t need his reassurances in order to keep slicing.

“You will make me proud in your new role, I know. And now that you are officially employed by your firm, you will be able to travel all the more easily for your other tasks.”

I nod. After my graduation, I formally accepted a role as an appraiser of religious art and artifacts for a firm owned by a friend of my uncle. And in order to properly appraise such things as they come on the market, I will of course need to travel. A very convenient job to have in my situation.

The window also looks out onto the drive, a narrow stretch of fresh, white gravel between Cashel House and the sea. The road that will bring Mark to me any moment now.

I look back to my suitcases, packed and waiting by the door. I draw in a breath, then another, feeling my core muscles expand and contract. My breath and blood and bone, entirely under my control. It took every minute of the last two and a half years, but the Isolde who believed Mark Trevena when he said he wanted her is gone.

Play it like you mean it, he said to me before he left that morning.

Well, I’m here now. More than two years of barely sleeping, of running and lifting and training and sweating. More than two years of perfecting languages, of making contacts through my father and uncle’s worlds, of getting flawless grades. Two years of answering my uncle’s summons and making sure the wicked knew that God was watching.

Mark once talked about passing through doorways that couldn’t be walked back through. I’d stepped over so many of those thresholds now that it was hard to remember who I was before. Not that it matters. That girl wouldn’t have survived what’s coming next.

“Why the yacht?” Mortimer muses as I angle myself to peer down the drive. Mark is close to being late. “Why not fly you home to Manhattan? What’s his design here?”

I’ve asked myself the same question every day since Mark emailed me and announced he’d like to pick me up himself from Cashel House and sail me home on his yacht.

So we can spend some time together before the ceremony, the email blandly said, but it makes no sense. Mark doesn’t respect me or desire me. I am a tool to him, a means to a shadowy end involving Laurence Bank. I don’t believe he is interested in seducing me, and I don’t think he would hurt or kill me. Not this early in the game.

So what then? Does he want to talk? Make sure our stories are straight before we’re plunged into the social churn of Manhattan and DC? Begin exchanging pieces of information like hostages?

“I don’t know,” I finally admit. I dislike not knowing. Not knowing is a way to end up dead. Or worse—defeated.

“Be careful,” Mortimer murmurs just as a black car emerges at the end of the drive. My heart—horrible, stupid, horrible heart—gives an abrupt thud against my ribs before I manage to get control of it. I will cut it out before I allow it to want Mark Trevena again. “You know who he is.”

“I will and I do.”

Even Mortimer doesn’t know everything Mark did in his previous life, largely because most of what Mark did in the CIA was never written down. Even so, the whispers and rumors I’ve heard about him in the last two and a half years are terrifying. He captured when he was working for the government; he maimed.

He killed.

One story claimed that he slid a knife between a harpist’s ribs while they played at a symphony concert in Vienna. Another that he cut off someone’s ears so they wouldn’t hear their own screams.

I have no reason to doubt any of the stories, but I’m ready for the game. Mentally, physically. It doesn’t matter how handsome he is, how rough his voice or possessive his touch. It doesn’t matter that when he tied me up, when he touched me, I felt like my soul was newly washed and floating to the stars.

I’m ready this time.

Except when the car pulls up to the house and someone steps out of the driver’s side door, it’s not someone with dark blond hair and a cold, indifferent expression. It’s someone I’ve never seen before.

My uncle and I both go to the front door, opening it just as the stranger is lifting his hand to grab the knocker.

“Hello,” the stranger says, dropping his hand. “Mr. Trevena sends his regrets that he can’t travel with Isolde himself to Manhattan. He’s asked me to escort her instead.”

He’s as tall as Mark, layered with muscles under his plain but well-tailored black suit, with fair skin that’s been lightly suntanned, dark, dark hair, and sage green eyes. He has a doll’s long lashes, a straight nose, and a full mouth that is shaped in a subtle pout, giving him a look of perpetual melancholy.

His jaw, cheekbones, and forehead are flawless, without the ruggedness of Mark’s features and all the beauty of a Victorian painting.

I have never seen him before in my life, and yet the moment his green eyes meet mine, it feels as if I’m coming home. My heart lifts, my pulse speeds. Something twists inside me like the honeysuckle pattern twists around my favorite knife.

“I’m sorry, I don’t believe we’ve met,” I say. Outwardly, I am composed and cool. Inwardly, it feels like a tide is coming in around my feet. One I can’t stop.

Why are his eyes such a haunting shade of green? Like a garden that’s been forgotten and then rediscovered in the fog?

“My apologies, Ms. Laurence; I should have introduced myself right away.” He speaks with a polite but direct voice that’s nonetheless musical for how controlled and American it is. He holds out his hand and I take it, something hot and sweet racing up my nerve endings as our palms touch, and then our fingers. His grip is warm and strong.

The tide is rising around my knees.

“I’m Mark’s nephew-in-law and bodyguard,” the stranger says. “Tristan Thomas, at your service.”

To be continued in Salt Kiss…

* * *

This wild trio is only getting started!

See how Tristan loses his heart and his body to both Mark and Isolde in Salt Kiss!