Chapter 3

three

The rest of the year passed quickly.

I went back to Manhattan and my Upper East Side prep school. I turned eighteen. I lived my days as if I were already under vows.

I prayed; I studied the Bible; I studied Greek and Latin and Hebrew. And I trained. I woke early to run, to lift, to move through my katas. After school, I sparred and punched and kicked. I used the knife until it became an extension of my own hand.

I thought often of that suited stranger and how easily he moved, how easily he’d held the knife. I aspired to that ease, and I told myself that was why I thought of him so much. And if the evocative smell of him and those midnight eyes lingered in my mind, it was only because I was preoccupied with his competence and skill.

Mercifully, my father refrained from any more complaints about my future plans, and the university truce between us held. I would still go to Columbia, and there was no mention of whatever it was he’d discussed with my uncle over Christmas.

At night, I dreamed of pain, of suffering, and when I woke up, I was unsettled and strange-feeling. I should not lust. I did not lust. And yet when I dreamed, I woke up panting and wet between the legs. It shamed me, because my craving for corporal penance was pure and good, I knew it, I knew it beyond a doubt when I was awake. But when I was asleep, my cravings for pain became dark and strange to me. As if my body were no longer under my control.

Bryn and I graduated from high school, and as always, I dedicated the summer after to training, giving little thought to Columbia and the change that lay ahead. School was nothing but a concession for me, a necessary pretense until I could convince my father that my future lay with the Church and my uncle, and so it merited little of my attention.

What could be more important than a life dedicated to God?

* * *

It wasa warm July evening when I met my devil again.

We were on a rooftop in Manhattan, the verdant scar of Central Park to one side, a nest of skyscrapers everywhere else. I was playing two parts in my black silk gown tonight: the dutiful daughter on her father’s arm, looking lovely and gracious and expensive, and more invisibly, that of my uncle’s little mouse, gathering whatever crumbs I could find. So far from Rome, so removed from the world of ecclesiastical politics, it was hard to imagine that I’d hear anything relevant to him, and yet my uncle was always interested in what I’d acquired, even if it was only the party talk of bankers and businessmen.

It’s like panning for gold, he’d told me more than once before. Sometimes you have to sift through a whole river of silt.

At some point, my father and I danced, much to the delight of the crowd. We played the role well, of doting father and loving daughter, of a family buffeted by grief but still holding steadfast to one another, and it only added to the venerable reputation of Laurence Bank. Other banks were conglomerates, were faceless entities with no soul, but here was Geoffrey Laurence, handsome and silvered at the temples looking fondly at his daughter; here was Geoffrey Laurence putting his only child first, above all else. A Laurence would be loyal, steady, about values and tradition. You could trust a Laurence with your money, our little performance said. You could trust a Laurence with your life.

It was, of course, only a performance. My father was warm to me when people were watching, and no other time, and I was privately repulsed by Laurence Bank.

You cannot serve both God and money, we are told. And I didn’t intend to.

When we finished dancing, I felt someone approach. I knew to turn gradually, to give the appearance of slow reflexes and even slower perception—a trick Mortimer had taught me when I was a girl.

Always give the people around you a reason to underestimate you. Do it the minute you meet them, if you can.

But even years of tutelage from Mortimer couldn’t make me school my face when I turned. It was the stranger from the dojo.

And he was holding out his hand to me.

He wore a tux tonight, a dark, dark navy, and that giant watch again. His hair was styled back, and despite the shadow on his square jaw, he looked crisp and polished. His dark blue eyes glinted in a shade lighter than the night sky as he said, “May I have this dance?”

My father pushed me forward, so gently that it looked like a pat on the shoulder, but his meaning was unmistakable. “Go on,” he said in a friendly, fatherly tone.

Not that I would have refused anyway. I had so many questions for this stranger, so many things about him I wanted to know. They frothed inside me like foam on the sea as I took his hand and he led me out to the dance floor, and I had to consciously remember everything my uncle had taught me about finding answers, about sifting through people so subtly that they wouldn’t know you’d been sifting at all.

The band began a song, some slow old standard, and we faced each other, my hand in his larger one, his other coming to rest against the bare skin of my back. My gown was fairly conservative—bankers didn’t dress provocatively or with any kind of flash—but its one concession to sensuality was its back, which dropped all the way to the bottom of my spine.

I put my hand on his shoulder, which was just as firm and broad as it had looked under his tuxedo jacket, and we began to dance, moving effortlessly across the floor.

But when I looked up and met his eyes, I saw nothing of the polite man asking me to dance, nothing even of the unreadable stranger with a fake knife in his hand, ready to pin me to the floor.

He was looking at me with an expression so intense that I nearly recoiled in his arms. His mouth—fuller than I remembered, although I hadn’t made up how strikingly shaped it was—was set in a sharp line, and his dark eyes glittered in a way that made alarm flare up my spine. It took every bit of my control not to react to his change in demeanor.

“Isolde Laurence,” he said softly. “At last we meet for real.”

“I’m sorry,” I said carefully. “I think you have the better of me, Mister…?”

“Mark Trevena.” He moved us easily in the dance, leading our steps with such surety and grace that I could almost forget that there were steps at all.

“Do you know my father, sir?”

There was the slightest hitch in his movement just then, barely noticeable to anyone else. I doubt even another dance partner would have noticed it. But I felt it like an earthquake.

My question had surprised him, maybe?

“In a manner of speaking,” he said. “We’re business associates. When the business is mutually beneficial.”

His words were clipped, short. They betrayed nothing, which was something in and of itself. Actual business associates rarely had to be so cryptic.

Sometimes, both in sparring and in diplomacy, you had to stop dancing around your opponent and attack. I decided to take a more direct approach, just to see how he parried. “You don’t have to dance with me, you know. If you don’t want to.”

There was no hitch in his movement this time, but the faintest curl of amusement pulled at the corner of his mouth. “Who’s to say I’m not enjoying it?”

Our gazes locked. He was tall enough that I had to lift my chin to look at his face, and his strength was undeniable around me. I suddenly felt the yawn of years between us. Before now, my youth had been an asset, the way I moved through spaces as Mortimer’s eyes and ears, but for the first time, I felt it like a liability.

This man, so much older than me, could outplay me, outmaneuver me. He could even kill me, if he chose—that he’d made clear enough in the dojo all those months ago.

I didn’t think he wanted to kill me. But something about dancing with him under the night sky felt like dancing right into a trap that even I might not be able to escape from.

But then why did my chest feel so tight? Why did it feel like the air was falling, falling, right out of my lungs, as if it was suddenly made of something heavier than air, like iron or lead? Why was there was nothing left to keep my pulse moving normally?

And as we moved around the floor, our eyes still tight on each other’s, my blood was pooling in all the wrong places. A flush on my cheeks and chest. Thick and hot in the bottommost part of my belly. All from this man’s cold, perceptive stare.

I hated it.

The music ended, proof if I ever needed it that God was watching over me, and I managed not to yank myself away from the tuxedoed danger, managed to wait for him to walk me attentively to the side of the dance floor, where my father stood talking to colleagues.

I still hadn’t responded to his question about enjoying the dance, and before Mark released my hand from where he’d tucked it firmly in the crook of his elbow, he leaned in to murmur, “I took significant pleasure in our dance, Isolde. Worry not.”

And then he straightened, smoothed his jacket, and with a jagged sort of smile, left me.

I felt the place where his hand had been on my back the rest of the night.

* * *

I wokeat dawn the next day, my heart slamming against my ribs, slick flesh pulsing between my legs. I wasn’t ignorant of sex; I knew that I’d had an orgasm in my dream.

Just as I knew Mark Trevena had been in my dream.

I sat up and shivered on the edge of my bed, wanting—wanting—

My fingers twitched, my skin tingled. I imagined a knotted cord against my back, purging myself of unwanted lust, but my body was confused, too tangled from the dream, and the idea of whipping myself only stirred me more.

I shoved up from my bed and stumbled over to my dresser. I would pray and then I’d run, and I’d run so far that even my own dreams were left behind me.

Two hours and five miles later, a chipper Bryn came up beside me. It was already hot, even this early in the morning, and the trees lining the Riverside Park path weren’t enough to stop the pink flush under Bryn’s light bronze cheeks.

“I heard you met our Knife Guy last night,” she said by way of hello, matching my pace perfectly. “Lav told me.”

Lavender was Bryn’s older sister. Both Bryn’s mother and father worked at Laurence Bank; Lav was engaged to a vice president of global markets there. Bryn’s life was practically more involved with Laurence Bank than my own.

“His name is Mark Trevena. We danced.” I didn’t know why I added that last part. It didn’t matter.

Who’s to say I’m not enjoying it?

“Do you know what he does?” Bryn asked, looking over at me. Her dark ponytail swung in a long arc over her shoulders. She asked like she already knew, like the answer mattered.

“He said he was a business associate of my father’s.”

“Izzy, he runs a sex club.”

I stumbled, barely catching myself before I fell. Of all the things she could have said, I would have never—

Sex clubs were real? Truly real?

“Lav said it’s very secret, someplace in DC. And everyone goes there, like everyone who matters, and from all over the world. And it’s not just a sex club, but it’s like a fetish club or something. You know, spanking and people pretending to be puppies and stuff.”

“A sex club,” I repeated faintly. Our footfalls were back in sync now as we ran, but I felt like I could trip again at any moment. I’d never even been kissed, but I hadn’t considered myself innocent, by any means. Half the morsels of information I brought back to Mortimer were in some way related to sex—who was having an affair, who wanted to be having an affair, and so forth, and so I’d considered myself worldly when it came to matters of the flesh.

But I was realizing just then that I had a young person’s understanding of sex, that my notions of it were smooth and shallow and unshaded.

A sex club. A fetish club.

His eyes had been so piercing, had missed nothing. And that same gaze fell over the people at this club of his. Maybe while they were naked. Maybe while they were fornicating.

I didn’t know why it all made me feel so shaky, disturbed. It didn’t matter.

It didn’t matter.

“The real question is why he was at a Laurence Bank party to begin with,” Bryn said. “Do you think sex club owners make investments?”

I came to a stop near a railing overlooking the river and laced my hands above my head to help me breathe. “I don’t know,” I said. My words were ragged; sweat dripped down my chin. “I don’t know.”

“You know who would know.” Bryn gave me a look, and if I’d had any breath left in me, I would have sighed.

“Yeah.”

But Uncle Mortimer, the man who knew everything and everyone, didn’t answer my messages when I sent them.

Do you know a man named Mark Trevena? He was at the Laurence Bank party last night.

I paused and then added:

He came to the dojo once last fall too.

He knew my name.

There was no response.

For a day and a half, there was no response, and I tried not to let it preoccupy me. My uncle was a busy man, and Rome was a busy place, and as much as he loved crumbs, the work of his life was moving boulders. A stranger on a rooftop half a world away wouldn’t be the first of his concerns.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about Mark Trevena, about his club in DC. About the way he’d looked at me.

I disliked it, I decided. I was certain that was what I could call the tangle of confusion, fascination, and restlessness. Dislike.

And I wasn’t naive. I knew very few banks did business with exclusively ethical people. I knew that money was king in my father’s world.

But there was one thing more important to him than money, and that was reputation, and surely…surely my father didn’t know what Mark Trevena actually did. Surely he wouldn’t want Laurence Bank anywhere near even the idea of a sex club.

At dinner that night, I broached the subject, careful to wait until my father had finished his first glass of wine but before he started his second. Receptive but not so loose that he became dismissive. My father appreciated manners, and so I made sure to frame my question in the polite tones of dinner chat.

“Lavender Flores-King mentioned something to Bryn about a guest at the party last night. The one who danced with me?”

My father, who’d been in the middle of cutting a piece of chicken, stopped. Looked up at me. “Mark Trevena,” he said flatly.

“Yes.”

His fingers tightened on his fork and knife for an instant. I saw how he made them relax before he resumed cutting his meat. “And what is it that Ms. Flores-King said?”

I summoned up my dislike, my instinctive disgust, the residual fear left behind by Mark Trevena’s cutting stare, but I still kept my voice polite. “That Mark Trevena owns a sex club. A fetish club.”

“Ah,” my father said. “Is that all?”

Wasn’t that enough? “I thought we were doing our utmost to keep Laurence Bank’s image pristine. It would be one thing to take his money, but to allow him at our events? Allow him to dance with me?”

“Do you find what he does offensive?”

I stared at him. “Don’t you? My entire life—and especially since Mum died—all I’ve heard is how appearances matter, how we must be above reproach always. It’s what sets us apart from other banks. It’s why people trust us.”

My father’s gaze when he leveled it at me was intractable. “People trust us because we take care of their money, Isolde. There are certain necessary evils that come with that responsibility. Necessary evils that we must allow as a family.”

“But why should we? We’re called to be upright, to be salt of the world—”

“Save me your moralistic bullshit, Isolde. You are a child, and you have no idea what you’re talking about.”

I was utterly stunned. My father might have been cool, he might have been distant and painfully exacting with my academic and social performances, but he never, ever spoke to me like that. And he definitely never would have before my mother died.

My father set down his fork and poured himself a full glass of wine, nearly to the brim. And then he drank the whole thing as if it were water.

I watched as he set the glass down a little too hard and then wiped his mouth with his napkin. “I didn’t want to have this conversation yet, but it’s just as well,” he said shortly. “It was no accident that you met Mark Trevena last night. You will be seeing much more of him over the coming months—and years.”

There was something in his tone—in his face—that made my skin prickle, my muscles tense. Danger. After years and years in the dojo, my body often recognized danger before my mind could catch up.

“I will?” I asked, unable to modulate the wariness in my voice.

“Yes,” my father said. “Because you are to marry him.”