Chapter 14

fourteen

Two weeksafter we get back from Singapore, I’m in the daily security meeting listening to Nat and Goran bicker about hosting a prince from Spain and what additional security precautions they need to take. I’ve been listening to this same fight for a week now, so I’m about to pack up and go upstairs when my daily email from Sedge hits my inbox. I open up the most updated schedule for Mark and then frown at the screen.

In a little over a month, there are three weeks shaded in, with the word Ireland noted above. There are literally no details attached other than the words Philtre D’Amour.

“Philtre D’Amour,” I murmur out loud to myself.

“It’s the yacht,” says Goran, and I look up at him, surprised.

“Mark has a yacht?”

“I feel like even the word yacht is a little mild,” Nat adds.

“What would be the right word, then?” needles Goran, who still seems to be grumpy over the prince’s security issues.

“Ridiculous,” mutters Nat, and then Goran’s face splits into a delighted grin.

“Okay, you’re right. That thing is ridiculous.”

Sedge would be the one handling the details, the equipping and porting and boarding, and so I’ll need to talk to him to figure out next steps for a security plan. “I wonder why Ireland of all places,” I say, folding my laptop shut and standing.

“Isn’t she Irish?” Goran asks, just as Nat says, “Her mother’s from Ireland.”

“Who has an Irish mother?” I ask.

They both look at me, two sets of blinking brown eyes. “Isolde,” Goran says, like he’s telling me the sky is blue.

“Ah,” I say. That clarifies nothing for me.

Nat’s phone pings, and she eyes the screen like it’s about to bite her. “That’s the prince’s team about their precious cargo. I swear if they have another fit about—”

That’s my cue to leave, and leave I do, going to find Sedge before joining Mark upstairs. I find Sedge in his office on the floor below Mark’s, dressed in trousers and a button-down shirt layered under a cardigan with birds on it. His colorless, barely gray eyes flick up to me as I enter. “Hello,” he says in that soft, wary way of his. I’ve learned that most of the employees on this floor fall into the same kinky categories as the members here. Dinah and Andrea are Dommes, Sedge is a submissive. Ms. Lim is a switch, which I can only measure by when she wears a collar and when she wears keys—and in the variances of her fuck around and findout energy as she’s dealing with guests.

“Hello,” I greet politely. “Do you have any more information about this trip to Ireland next month? Goran said that Mark wants to take a yacht?”

Sedge’s full mouth turns down. He is very pretty when he pouts. “I know as much as you do. He won’t even give me a proper set of dates for the trip, much less its purpose or if he’s taking any meetings there. All I know is that he plans to fly there and sail back, but since he won’t give me the dates, I can’t even book the flight.”

If Sedge is having trouble getting answers out of Mark, I know I’ll fail for sure. I’ve learned that Mark seems to have no greater pleasure than giving me needlessly cryptic responses to ordinary questions—or worse, turning the questions back around on me.

But I’ll still have to try; I can’t allow him to take an international trip with zero precautions.

“Thank you,” I tell Sedge now, and I make to leave.

Sedge lifts a hand, and says, “Tristan?”

I stop. “Yes?”

He tucks a lock of chin-length hair behind his ear. “You’re going to Cornwall in a few days.”

I nod. The trip was on the books before I came on, and we’re staying at a property Mark owns, so the passive security there is already very robust. No meetings, no excursions. If I didn’t know any better, I’d call the days in Cornwall a vacation, but I do know better.

Mark Trevena doesn’t seem the vacation type.

“I’ve never—well, I’ve only been here a year and half, but I’ve never traveled with him. So this was secondhand from Strassburg. But Mark takes this trip every year at the same time, and Strassburg told me once that Mark likes to be left alone for it. In fact, he usually sent Strassburg away to stay at an inn nearby.” Sedge looks awkward, like he thinks he’s betraying Mark’s loyalty somehow. “I just didn’t want you to be caught unawares.”

“Thank you,” I say, not sure what to make of this warning. It stings preemptively, because if he didn’t even want Strassburg with him—Strassburg whom he fucked, whom he dominated—then I can’t imagine he’ll want me there either.

And I shouldn’t care. I shouldn’t care.

Maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow a different person, unobsessed, and I won’t mind at all.

* * *

Mark says verylittle on the flight to London, and then on the second flight to Newquay. When we pick up the rental car at the airport, Mark slips a small device out of his shoulder bag and attaches it magnetically to the bottom of the car.

I stare at it and then stare at him.

“No one but Sedge, Strassburg, and the caretaker knows where this place is. And now you,” says Mark. His voice is subdued. “I prefer to keep it that way.”

“Does it block the car’s location?” I ask, getting inside. It’s a nondescript car, a small gray sedan a few years old, not the sleek sports car I still imagine when I think of Mark driving somewhere.

Except this makes more sense, actually, like the Camry a couple weeks ago—it would be a terrible CIA operator who flashed around in a memorable car, visible and interesting.

“Something like that,” Mark says, and then his expression is almost conspiratorial when he adds, “Melody got it for me. Don’t tell anyone.”

The drive to the property takes over an hour as we move away from the coast and into the heart of Cornwall. Mark drives, his large hands on the steering wheel and the gear shifter, making the unremarkable sedan hum to life under his capable, subtle touch.

I think I’m jealous of a car.

We pass through valleys, through moors and the occasional village, until trees begin to fringe the side of the narrow road, thicker and thicker still, until we dip into a valley deeper than the others, deep enough that it still feels like spring has only just started here while the rest of the peninsula is in full, heady bloom.

The road narrows even more as we pass through two brick posts, each topped with a roaring lion, which are weathered into lichen-spotted suggestions of themselves. The trees are thick enough now that they meet over the road, joining together in a tangle of dark branches and new leaves. And then the road twists and the trees break abruptly to reveal a stone house of two stories, two chimneys, and plenty of glittering windows. There’s a conservatory at one end, a stretch of overgrown garden, and a small chapel that looks older than everything else.

Magnolia trees in full bloom dot the grounds, the breeze sending white and pink petals fluttering to the grass. Gardenia bushes with fat, white flowers spread beneath the front windows, and anxious birds flap between them and the narrow graveyard next to the chapel. “Morois House,” Mark announces as he stops the car in front of the black-lacquered door.

It’s the last thing he says to me for two days.

* * *

Through whatever cardiganmagic Sedge wields, he has Morois House ready for us when we walk inside. Every room smells fresh and is free of dust, the kitchen is stocked with enough food to feed a platoon for a month, and when I find the small closet housing the thin but sufficient network of security cameras, everything is in perfect working order.

Mark doesn’t even bother dropping his bags. He swipes an unopened bottle of scotch from a long buffet table in the kitchen and then stalks straight into a book-lined room I assume is the library, bringing his things with him.

He shuts the door before I can follow him in.

At least I have the dubious comfort of knowing that it isn’t anything I’ve done, but it is still strange that first night, making sandwiches for dinner alone, my knocks to the library door going unanswered.

The next day I wake to find the library door still shut, and with nothing really bodyguard-like to do, I decide to explore the wooded area around the house and get a sense of the grounds.

I follow the overgrown footpaths up to the edges of the valley and find I can’t see any other houses or buildings at all. There’s only the road, barely visible under its lattice of branches, and very far off, I can see a brown smudge of forbidding moor on the horizon. In the upper reaches of the valley, bluebells are starting to press up between the trees, and they’re also growing along the edges of the graveyard behind the chapel, magnolia petals caught in the tangles of their long leaves.

The gravestones are too worn and moss-covered to read, but inside the unlocked wooden door of the chapel, I see a small plaque: In memory of Albert Trevena, who fell at the Somme, 1916.

So this is a family property, some kind of ancestral Trevena house. I read the other plaques on the wall—other Trevenas, with a handful of Tyacks and Teagues mixed in, and then note that the altar and font—while empty of religious appurtenances and water—are dustless and gleaming.

Back inside the house, I find the library door still shut, and so I start exploring the space beyond my bedroom and the kitchen.

I expect more clutter and antiques from a house passed down through generations, but the place is as impersonal and spare as a rental, although still comfortable. I find two more guest rooms, and then a larger room I presume to be Mark’s when he’s not cuddling a bottle of scotch in the library. A dark coverlet covers the bed, with only one pillow. It hasn’t been slept in. I notice discreetly recessed rings embedded into the dark wood of the bed’s posts.

Definitely his room, then.

I know I shouldn’t snoop, it’s not polite, it’s not at all my job to scout the territory inside, but it’s like a burning in my blood. To know him. To touch the things he’s touched.

I’m over to the dresser before I can stop myself, peeking in the drawers.

They’re empty, except for the bottom one, which has a sweater folded neatly inside, next to a dried rose. The rose is old and brittle enough to have left a dredge of brick-colored dust underneath it. The sweater is sealed in a clear bag, the kind of bag you put winter things in to protect them from pests.

Or to preserve a lingering scent.

I’m intruding. I was expecting to see pajama pants that I could imagine hanging from his hips or rolls of rope I could imagine wrapped around my wrists. Not?.?.?.?not whatever this is.

I shut the drawer carefully and am about to leave when I see the bedside table has a drawer too. Sticky with shame but too curious to stop, I open it.

From the dangerous king of kink, I expected all sorts of perversions near at hand to his bedside: lube, toys, condoms in bulk. But it’s just the remote for the TV and a picture frame, laid on its face.

I pick it up to see a handsome man with light brown hair, blue eyes, and a heart-pangingly gorgeous smile. He’s looking away from the camera, his thick eyebrows down in an expression of unmitigated mischief, a giant silver watch on his wrist.

I study it a moment. It’s partly out of focus, but I’m almost certain it’s the same wristwatch Mark wears every day now.

There’s no date on the picture, but judging from his clothes, this picture is less than a decade old. With the thin lines around his smiling eyes, I guess that he was in his thirties when the picture was taken. Close to Mark’s age.

I put it together with the lonely sweater and rose, with Mark’s one-man scotch festival in the library. This man was someone to Mark, someone he loved, and he isn’t around anymore.

He either left Mark—or he died.