Chapter 5

five

Three weeks later, and I was climbing out of a black car in front of a Midtown skyscraper, trying to quell the nervousness that kept crawling under my skin.

When my father had informed me that Mark Trevena wanted to have dinner with me, alone, I’d almost refused.

But then I’d relented. What was the point in refusing? I’d agreed to marry him; negotiations between him and my father were nearly finished. It felt childish to deny him dinner if I was already conceding my future, my life, my soul.

I would be resolute. I would be courageous.

I would make Marcus Aurelius and Jesus proud of me.

I wore a silk pewter blue dress, tea length and long-sleeved, with a lapeled neckline that revealed nothing more than my clavicle. I’d worn minimal makeup and had pulled my hair into a sleek ponytail.

As if by dressing simply enough, I could pretend to him and myself that I hadn’t been having arching, twisting dreams for the last three weeks—dreams that featured cold blue eyes and large, capable hands.

It meant nothing. It meant only that lust was nipping at my heels like any other temptation, but I would beat it back.

Yes, I was marrying Mark for the uncle and Church I loved, but no one could make me want to. That I would keep for myself.

A doorman greeted me and escorted me to the elevator that would take me to the restaurant, and I stepped inside. My father had said that Mark wanted to discuss certain things separately with me—what, I wasn’t sure, given that so much had already been resolved. The wedding wouldn’t take place until I graduated from Columbia, so I had at least four years to brace myself. There would be a prenup, ironclad, to protect the Laurence fortune and Mark’s own assets. We would split our time between his house in DC and his other properties in Manhattan, Maine, and England. He would not interfere with my having a career.

We would have a Catholic wedding.

To my mind, there was little else to discuss. Ideally we wouldn’t need to see each other until the wedding ceremony itself. Four years from now…

So much could happen in four years.

The elevator lifted, lifting my stomach, and then came to a crisp stop. I gave myself one instant to rub my fingers against my palms, one instant to take a deep inhale, and then by the time the elevator doors opened, I knew I appeared contained and cool. Unfazed by meeting with my fourteen-years-older fiancé.

A ma?tre d’ greeted me as I stepped out of the elevator.

“Miss Laurence,” he said with a small bow. “Your party is waiting for you. Right this way.”

I followed him, although there would have been no need. Even though it was a Friday evening, the restaurant was completely and utterly empty, save for one guest, seated at a table by the window.

Beyond him was the blue and pink gloaming of Manhattan twilight, interrupted with dark spires and glowing windows. I could see his profile against it, a strong nose and sculpted lips, hair styled back away from his face. It was cut shorter on the sides, disguising nothing of those brutally high cheekbones and that carved jaw. He wore a suit like most people wore nothing, like it was the most natural thing in the world to be in wool so finely tailored that it hugged his shoulder and arm as he lifted a glass of something clear to his lips and drank.

I would not swallow. I would not pay attention to the pulse beating in my neck. But I could admit privately that I had forgotten how handsome he was, had forgotten the way he filled a space just by being in it. And when he turned those dark eyes on me, I also had to admit something worse.

His attention affected me.

Deeply.

No one had ever looked at me like Mark Trevena had the night of the party, like he was right now. Like he wanted to cut me open and taste the blood that came out, and then make me taste it too.

Like it wouldn’t be enough to see my secrets…he would want to consume them.

It was cold and horrible—horrible because every time he looked at me, I felt the opposite of cold. I felt something that could almost be called anger, but it wasn’t like any anger I’d ever felt before.

Mark stood with a dip of his head and then pulled out my chair before the ma?tre d’ could do it for me. He waited for me to sit before pushing my chair in and then taking his own seat and reaching for his glass. Everything was done with impeccable manners, hypnotic grace. I thought again of him in the dojo that day, holding the knife, walking so smoothly, so casually…right until he’d pounced.

It struck me that this might be the same. There weren’t knives, no one would be pinned literally to the floor, but why would he need to resort to such obvious measures when he already had me cornered so effectively?

Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle, I prayed silently as I set my clutch next to me on the seat and met Mark’s cool, appraising gaze. Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil.

“Thank you for meeting me,” Mark said after a moment. His voice was as cool as his gaze. “I wasn’t sure if you would come.”

I hadn’t been sure if I would come either, but I supposed I wasn’t wired for half sacrifices. If I was going to do this, then I needed to do it. Truly and wholly, sparing nothing. Offering everything up to God.

“It seemed smart,” I replied. “It will be good for us to establish rapport over the next four years.”

“Rapport,” said Mark. “Yes, I agree.”

I looked around at the sea of empty tables, lit by gentle ambient light and the lights of the city beyond. “It’s quiet for a Friday night.”

“Yes, I made sure it would be,” Mark said, and then, “Ah, thank you,” as the waiter presented us with heavy, leather-mounted menus.

Made sure?

I stared at him over my menu. “You reserved the entire restaurant?” I was no stranger to money, but Laurences weren’t flashy with their wealth. Bankers needed to appear trustworthy and careful above all else. Better to buy property, to expand into CDs or bonds, than to use wealth in some gauche display.

Although I wasn’t sure I could use the word gauche for Mark. He didn’t seem smug or sleazy as he met my eyes with his brows lifted. He seemed as aloof as ever, like he didn’t care if I was impressed or disgusted by such a waste of money.

“We have things to discuss that I preferred not to have an audience for,” he said, and then glanced down at his menu. “This seemed like the most elegant solution.”

I didn’t know if I could agree with that, but perhaps the alternatives weren’t any better. It wasn’t as if I would have felt comfortable going to wherever he lived. And perhaps he felt the same way about being in my father’s house.

At least this was neutral ground.

We each ordered—me the lobster and him the wagyu beef—the waiter took our menus, and then we were left completely alone.

He didn’t speak first, and I decided to take the field, like a white pawn in a chess game. “My father said you had things you wanted to negotiate tonight.”

“Yes,” he said, and then his eyes moved over my face. His expression flickered with displeasure, his lips twisting together. “What’s that?”

“What?”

He reached across the table and brushed his fingertips against the hairline near my temple. I flinched; firstly, because he’d touched me, and secondly, because there was a deep bruise there.

“Oh,” I said, lightly rubbing a knuckle against the spot. “Sister Mary Alice hit me in the head with a bo staff.”

“I hope you appreciate how unique that sentence is.”

I lifted a shoulder.

My reaction seemed to amuse him, because the corner of his mouth pressed in before he folded his long-fingered hands on the table and leveled a stare at me. “I’d like for us to speak transparently tonight. You know what I do,” he said without further preamble. “You know about the club.”

I hadn’t expected him to be so direct about it, although I wasn’t sure why I’d thought that, only that it had seemed too tawdry to address in public. Or at all.

“Yes,” I said after a beat. “I know about it.”

“What do you know?” asked Mark.

“That it’s a club for sex.” I knew my voice betrayed nothing, which was a relief, because I still felt everything about it. Everything about marrying into it.

“Yes. Among other things,” he responded, and it dawned on me, very slowly, what should have been obvious from the beginning. Mark didn’t merely demand information as an admittance fee; the club was a source of information all on its own. It must have been like the Vatican in that way—you gathered enough powerful people in one place, a place where they felt private and privileged, and the information flowed with no outside incentive. Even just watching his guests interact would be valuable…and if Mortimer had been interested in who pulled whom aside for a chat in a ballroom corner, how much more would he want to know who spent time together at a sex club?

“…to the central issue, which is that I’m very involved with the running of my club, and I’m very visible there,” Mark was saying. I forced my attention back to his cool, polite voice. “Unfortunately, I don’t think anyone will believe that I would marry someone who wasn’t also part of my world.”

My stomach lifted once, and then dropped. I didn’t want to be right about where this was going.

“I understand you’ve agreed to this marriage because it will help your father’s bank.” Mark’s voice was devoid of any judgement; if he thought that was a callow or greedy reason, he didn’t show it. I was relieved he was unaware of my uncle’s role in my life, and of his requests. It was infinitely safer and easier if Mark believed helping my father’s company was the only reason I was doing this.

It made me wonder about his reasons. Why marry someone so young, so outside his world? Why marry someone he didn’t know? Surely his sex club was filled with more appetizing prospects than me.

“Why did you agree?” I asked him. “What was in it for you?”

Mark’s expression remained a cipher, but his finger trailed along the rim of his glass. The ice in his drink had long ago melted, and I wondered what was inside. Gin? Vodka?

“Information can flow both ways,” he answered finally. “Laurence Bank has some very powerful clients. Both clients that it shares with me, and clients that are of interest to my clients. Access to what your father knows about these people would be extremely beneficial to me.”

So it boiled down to the same thing for Mark and my father and Mortimer too. I was a means to an end, and that end was the mysterious, all-important information. Mortimer wanted it for the Church, my father for money.

I didn’t know why Mark wanted it. Perhaps only to broker it, to profit from it. To consolidate his obscure throne back in DC.

Information.

I should have been relieved that was all Mark wanted. I wondered why I was abruptly upset instead. I rolled my lips together and looked down at the table. Mark’s hand on his glass was at the very corner of my vision, and I watched as his finger stopped moving along the edge. As it lifted, and then he rubbed his thumb over the knuckle once before resting his hand on the table.

“That’s not the entire truth,” he said. There was something a little rougher in his voice now, like he was admitting something he wasn’t sure he should. “It’s part of the truth, certainly, but not the whole.”

I lifted my eyes from his hand to his face. “What is the whole?”

A beat passed. To anyone else, it would have been nothing more than a second. But to two people like us, used to slicing and stabbing and all the other things that could happen in the blink of an eye, the beat felt like an hour. Like a year.

“I asked for you,” he said.

My heart jerked in my chest. My face burned.

“You asked for me? Why?” The words were faint on my lips.

He regarded me. “Because I wanted you,” he said, like it was that simple.

I didn’t know what to say to that. I didn’t even know what to think…except that I had been foolish to be disappointed by Mark only wanting access to information from our marriage.

This was worse. This was much worse.

“But I’m aware that to you, this arrangement is transactional,” Mark went on before I could gather my thoughts, “and so: tonight’s dinner. Because there is a needle we must thread between you and me, if we want our relationship to appear genuine.”

The waiter arrived with our food just then, and another glass of something clear on ice for Mark.

Genuine. I thought about the word as the waiter explained our plates to us, as I stared at my poached lobster with grape and fennel salad. I could tell Mark that our relationship appearing genuine meant very little to me. What did I care if other people knew our relationship was fake? And really, what did he care?

But no. I immediately saw the problem here; I saw why it mattered. The more natural our relationship appeared, the more leverage we both had for gathering information. The more I could ingratiate myself into Mark’s world and gather crumbs for my uncle.

We needed to play the part.

“I run my club carefully,” said Mark after the waiter left. “I run it so that both my authority and my reputation are unquestioned. Part of this is creating an armor of loyalty among those closest to me. If there is a perceived gap between me and my wife, then you could see how this armor would appear fissured. Ripe for exploiting.”

I took up my knife and fork and began eating. “Does the owner of a sex club have that many enemies?”

A flicker around the edges of his mouth. “You’d be surprised.”

The lobster was delicious, the salad bright on my tongue. Mark cut into his beef with the precision of a surgeon and the unconscious habit of a butcher. I watched as the blood-red meat made it to his lips. When he chewed, that startlingly perfect jaw flexed.

“So there shouldn’t be any perceived gap between us,” I said, ducking my eyes down to my plate before he could catch me staring at him as he ate.

“Yes, and here we come to the heart of the matter. Are you familiar with kink at all?”

There was something buzzing under my skin. A warning maybe. An ancient instinct that told me that a storm was coming, that a wolf was in the woods.

I could feel Mark’s gaze on my face, and I fought the urge to look up at him. I studiously cut another piece of lobster and put it in my mouth.

When it became clear that he was not going to allow silence to be its own answer, I set down my fork and swallowed my food. After a drink of water, I said, more self-consciously than I wanted, “It’s like…BDSM.”

“Yes,” he said, although the word was weighted with hesitation. Like there was more he wanted to add but was holding back for now. “For our purposes tonight, that’s close enough.”

The diligent student in me, eternally craving recognition and praise, cast around for more that I could say. Because I wasn’t completely ignorant of BDSM—or kink, as Mark called it. There were movies, jokes. What Bryn had said during our run.

“And there are people dressing up,” I said, making sure to paraphrase her comment about puppies more nicely. “And playing pretend.”

“Roleplaying is certainly on the menu for those who want it.”

“Is it…” I hesitated. “Is it on your menu?”

There was a graceful lift of his shoulder. “Let’s say it’s an aperitif worth having occasionally. Kink is expansive; it is so much more than any one thing. But if you’re asking about my tastes, then I can tell you that they typically distill into two things—power and sensation. One I like to have. The other I like to give.”

I thought about this. “So when you say that there shouldn’t be a gap between us…”

“If people are to believe that I’ve claimed you as my bride, then they will need to believe that you are currently my submissive.”

Submissive?

My reaction to the word must have shown on my face, because one of his eyebrows quirked. “It is more complicated than what I believe you are thinking right now, but the most important piece of this is that I do not expect you to be my submissive in truth.”

“You don’t?”

“I like my play partners willing,” Mark said. “A future bride I would want infinitely more so.”

“I see,” I said calmly, as if my heart weren’t hammering against my ribs. “So what are you proposing then? To present this illusion?”

“That you pretend to be my submissive leading up to the wedding,” he explained, as if it should have been obvious. “I think we can be strategic with how often we display our relationship at Lyonesse. If we choose our opportunities wisely, we can be very sparing indeed, especially with you attending Columbia.”

There went my hopes of not seeing him until the wedding. Despair yanked at my stomach.

My cage was closing too fast.

“How would I pretend to be your submissive?” How could one pretend such a thing? “I don’t even really know what one is.”

“A submissive is a person who likes to be on the receiving end of things like power and sensation, nothing more.” He paused, as if deciding what to say next. “I like pleasure and pain, Isolde. It’s easy enough to make a facsimile of both.”

I tried to settle my pulse. I didn’t even know why it was racing now. Mark didn’t expect anything real from me…surely that was a relief. Surely I was satisfied by that. “Truly?”

“Much like sparring is to a real fight, we can present a convincing performance with a minimum of contact. Regretfully, however, I must tell you that there will almost certainly have to be some contact.”

My fiancé didn’t look regretful, though. His posture had straightened infinitesimally, and his eyes were even darker now, darker than they’d been all night.

I asked for you.

I wanted you.

“So you will pretend to give me pain?” I asked quietly.

“And pleasure.”

“And pleasure?”

His fingers curled around his glass, almost unconsciously, but he didn’t take a drink. “Some of it will have to be real, you understand. Performing submission will be very close to actually doing it. We will have to take the same precautions. You will have to learn the same rules.”

I looked out at the city. There was still an endless buzzing under my skin. “Will we have sex?”

“Do you want to?”

I gave him a sharp look. “I wanted to be a nun before this.”

Mark returned my gaze with his own cool one, as if to tell me that he found this to be an incomplete answer.

I opened my mouth to tell him that it wasn’t incomplete at all, that of course I didn’t want to have sex. But the words wouldn’t come.

I realized, with slow-dawning horror, that saying them would feel like lying.

“You do not have to have sex with me, Isolde, but I will say this—I am possessive by nature. Once we are married, I’m not interested in you having sex with anyone else, even if we aren’t fucking. In addition to my…nature, it would not help our carefully crafted appearance of unity if an affair of yours became known.”

As if I would tarnish such a hard-bought offering to God with a sin as cheap as adultery. “That won’t be a problem.” It was my turn to lift a brow. “Will it be a problem for you?”

Mark smiled. The first smile of the night.

It was terrifying.

“After we wed, I will be as faithful as you are,” Mark said. “How does that sound?”

I couldn’t tell if he was being transparent or something worse. “It sounds acceptable to me,” I said guardedly.

The smile deepened the barest amount, before he turned serious again. “Issues of fidelity aside, we’ll need to expand your idea of sex. It’s far more than just penetration, and it’s also a signature of my play. The people at my club know this about me.” He spread his hands on the table, as if to say, this is out of my control. “Our play might be pretend at its core, but its appearance will need to be sexual to be believable to the people watching.”

Yes, of course, people watching. That was what this entire conversation had been about. People would watch me and Mark together; they would watch me pretending to submit. It almost made me light-headed to think about, but in a way that reminded me of the first few seconds before a sparring match at a tournament. It was uncomfortably close to excitement.

“The sexual parts…will they be like sparring too? As pretend as we can make them?”

“As much as possible.” Mark turned his head to gaze out at the city, revealing the brutal beauty of his profile. His full mouth curved in another smile. “Unless you ask me otherwise in the moment, however.”

Which would never happen.

I followed his gaze out the window, seeing what he was seeing. A canyon of glass and steel and concrete, and beyond it, the darkness of water.

This is the bed you chose. The bed you agreed to climb into.

I could say no. I could refuse this and tell Mark he needed to find some other way to make us appear like a united front to his world.

Or I could stand up, go home, and tell my father that this whole farce of a marriage was off.

But I wasn’t the girl who shied away. Not from punches, not from pushups, not from wringing hour after hour of training from my body. I wasn’t the girl who ran away from what was difficult or even impossible.

If this was what was being asked of me, then I would excel at it. And perhaps I would win Mark’s loyalty as well. Perhaps it would be as easy as a few quasi-sexual performances to get everything Mortimer wanted from Mark.

And the sooner Mortimer had what he wanted, the sooner I could end this marriage altogether.

Yes, this was the shortest, sharpest course of action.

“I’ll do it,” I said to the dark window.

“Wonderful,” said my fiancé. “We’ll start rehearsing tomorrow.”

Rehearsing.

It made sense. I could hardly show up to Mark’s club and expect to perform my new role flawlessly on the first try. Like learning how to use a knife or reciting a new prayer, mastery only came through practice, praxis.

So yes, rehearsing was necessary, yes, I’d do it, but there was a slender coil of horror in my chest as I nodded. Not the least because I’d hoped to be untouched by this arrangement until my wedding day…but also, there was a danger here. And rehearsing with Mark felt like inviting that danger to scent my naked and exposed throat.

“In the meantime…”

He took my left hand where it rested on the table and wrapped his fingers around it. The contact nearly made me jump; his hand was huge and warm and the strength restrained in it was unnerving. I still noticed when his other hand produced a ring, which flashed and gleamed as he slid it onto my finger.

“As long as we are playing the part,” he murmured, moving the ring gently past my knuckles and to the base of my finger. When he finished, I held it up to stare at it. A cluster of rubies dotted the middle like ripe fruit, and the band was made of twisting gold, wrought like vines and leaves.

“Honeysuckle,” Mark said softly. “My grandmother told me once that it was the symbol of a good marriage.”

I stared at it, at the rubies that were dark in the low light of the restaurant, at the twisted vines. It was the most unusual ring I’d ever seen.

It was also the most beautiful.

“Thank you,” I whispered. I didn’t know what else to say, because it was slamming into me just then, in a way that all the plans and negotiations could never have done before.

I had a ring on my finger.

I was getting married.

“Tomorrow,” Mark said, his voice twisted with promise. “We will begin.”