Chapter 23

twenty-three

I’ve spokenwith the police three times, and the FBI four times, and yet I still spend my afternoon in a glass meeting room with two FBI agents, this time going over the security footage from the attack with them, corroborating the video with any details I can recall. Which is nothing that I haven’t already said, written, and signed several times over, but I guess the army has given me a deep well of patience for redundancy because it feels very normal to be explaining something for the eighth time, with lots of no, sirs and no, ma’ams indicating that no, I have not spontaneously recalled the attackers reciting their last-known addresses or aliases as they died.

Mark seems to take their lack of leads as a given whenever it comes up. FBI, he’ll say in a voice dripping with scorn. They can’t even investigate their way into a suit that fits.

And indeed, even though we all agree Drobny must be involved, no one can find him or even where he went after he was in DC this last week. He’s gone, and the best we can do is hope that Mark’s web of information and connections will eventually do what the FBI’s can’t and help us locate the bastard.

After I’m done with the interview, I’m meant to go up to Mark’s office, but I stop by Sedge’s office first, taking a moment by the door to shelve my pride.

There is a private humiliation in having to ask Sedge about Mark, about his life, and there is the not-so-private impression that it will surely make. Sedge will know I don’t know. He’ll know that I care.

But the curiosity is like needles under my skin, pricking at my palms and at the nape of my neck. An instinct, the same one that made me aim for a wristwatch glinting in a dark alley, the same one that led me into caves and seemingly empty houses in Carpathia. An instinct saying there’s something here, there’s something here.

Or maybe it’s just the old curse, my obsessive nature. I have to know this.

Sedge looks up at me as I enter, and something moves in his pale gaze, something that makes me wonder if he feels about me the same way I feel about him, but it’s gone in an instant, replaced by his usual soft wariness.

“How can I help you, Mr. Thomas?”

I am so, so aware of how awkward and unprofessional and exposing this is, but it’s too late for anything else. I can see the wedding bands so clearly in my mind’s eye now, the way one had been half resting on the other, the light catching the black stones of the smaller ring. I just?.?.?.

I have to know.

“Has Mr. Trevena ever been married?” I ask, sitting down on the low, armless chair in front of Sedge’s desk. “Like before he founded Lyonesse, maybe?”

Sedge regards me. I can see him weighing my reasons for asking. Finally, he answers, “No. Mark Trevena’s never been married.”

I think of the rings. “Are you sure?”

“If I wasn’t before,” Sedge says, and I could swear there is a pinch of dryness to his normally inflectionless tone now, “I would have been by the fifth time I had to reassure Mark’s priest of that very thing so we could get on with the wedding planning.”

He says the words like they all belong together, but they don’t.

They don’t make any sense. “Wedding planning,” I repeat. Not as a question but as an attempt to make the phrase legible.

“Yes,” Sedge says, eyeing me. “For the wedding. Weddings need planned. Thus the wedding planning.”

“There’s going to be a wedding.”

Sedge’s brows have lifted the smallest amount, and he blinks slowly. “Mark’s wedding? In two months?” His expression plainly says, uh, look alive.

“I didn’t—he didn’t—” The needles of curiosity are knives now. I’m being cut open by them. “How can he be getting married?”

“Well, I wasn’t there for it, but I presume that he proposed to Isolde and she accepted. That’s usually how it goes.”

Isolde.

I’ve heard that name before.

Isn’t she Irish?

That was her mother.

Other snippets of memory begin surfacing—Goran complaining about a wedding planner, asking me what Mark and I planned to do after .?.?.

I thought I was going to find out that Mark had been married once and that there had been a tragedy, and the tragedy now lives inside various drawers, in rings and pictures and roses—but no, the tragedy hasn’t happened yet; it’s going to happen. In two months.

Isolde.

The tragedy has a name and it’s Isolde.

I stammer out a combined I’m sorry for bothering you and thank you, and somehow push my way to my feet and out of the office.

I don’t know how I make it upstairs to Mark’s floor. The knives are cutting and cutting, and I’m in love with someone and he’s going to marry someone else and he didn’t tell me. I wasn’t even worth the trouble of disillusioning.

He hadn’t even taken the time to break my heart himself.

He’s not in his office when I get there, and for a minute, I consider leaving.

Just. Leaving.

Going down to my apartment, or even better, leaving Lyonesse altogether. Going for a drive, going to the farmhouse.

Quitting this job where I surrender my soul hour after hour to a man who couldn’t bother to mention that he was engaged. To a woman, which I shouldn’t care about because I like women too, but I do care.

But I don’t leave. Maybe because I spent eight years in a job I couldn’t quit until I was allowed, or maybe it’s because I can’t seem to stop flinging myself into misery, I don’t know. But instead I walk through the office to the hallway leading to Mark’s apartment.

Which is when I hear the swearing.

It’s not Mark swearing when I step inside, but Dr. Sutcliff, who is standing in front of a seated Mark, his cheeks a dark scarlet and a bloody hunk of gauze in his hand.

“—if you just would have listened, just goddamned listened for once—most people would give anything to be told to stay in fucking bed—and I don’t even know how the fuck you managed this, you worthless shit-for-brains—”

I pull up short, shocked out of my fugue by this rant from the doctor, who I’d assumed was more of the silently judge you from across a Men’s Wearhouse rack type.

“Ah, Tristan,” says Mark, noticing me. “I seem to have run into some trouble with my shoulder.”

And yes, he has. As I come closer, I can see that somehow the stitches have pulled and several of them have ripped. The skin is a torn and ragged mess, like a gaping maw below his clavicle, and streaks of dried crimson track down his pectoral muscle to his stomach.

Fear and worry join the anger and heartbreak, and there’s a cold, choppy storm in my chest of emotions I can’t possibly separate. “I was only gone for two hours,” I say. “How?”

“I thought I’d carry one of the damaged chairs out from the hall to the lobby,” Mark says like it’s no big deal, like he’s explaining how he got a splinter. “It was heavier than I thought, and it just happened.”

“It just happened?” Dr. Sutcliff demands, setting his bag onto the table with a pissy thunk. “You are so fucking lucky I’m free today, or I would have just let you suffer. I would have told you to go to the goddamn hospital, I don’t care who wants you dead because I don’t have time to be redoing my work every time you think about playing HGTV in your goddamn pervert clubhouse—”

The doctor’s invective continues as he rips open sterile packages of needles and filament and as he starts removing the old stitches to make way for the new ones. He only pauses once—when he’s pouring the alcohol over the torn skin and Mark sucks air through his teeth—and it’s only to give Mark a vindicated glare.

And then he’s off again, muttering and grumbling as he grabs his curved needle and needle holder, and Mark settles on the table in front of him.

“You’re going to have an ugly fucking scar,” Dr. Sutcliff says. “And I don’t want to hear any bitching about it because I already tried to give you a nice scar, and this is what you get for not listening.”

“Do the mafiosos and Russian vory give you this much trouble, Sutcliff?”

“Never,” Sutcliff answers crisply, stabbing the needle unceremoniously into Mark’s skin. Mark blinks up at the ceiling, giving no outward sign that he feels anything. “You know why? Because they have some respect for my profession. You don’t respect anything that can’t be turned into a game at your little club.”

“Medical kink is very popular,” says Mark, sounding offended for the first time. “I own a lot of speculums.”

“You,” the doctor tells me, ignoring him. “Go get a glass of ice water, a wet washcloth, and a towel. He’ll need to get cleaned up after I’m done.”

I obey, and I linger for a moment in front of Mark’s bathroom mirror, washcloth and towel in hand, my eyes on the drawer between sinks.

Despite the bloody scene just outside, my mind stalls, slicing at itself in midst of the domestic reality of Mark getting married.

My toothbrush is in here, my deodorant.

Will he ask me to take them back to my apartment? Will they get shoved to the back of the drawer to make room for Isolde’s toothbrush? Isolde’s deodorant?

Will Mark still want me to—

No. No, even he can’t be that sadistic. To expect me to give him my mouth or my body, to be available for his needs, when he’ll be married to someone else. Even if he is polyamorous and even if his wife is okay with it, I don’t think I could ever?.?.?.?share—

The jealousy would eat me alive. It’s already eating me alive.

And imagining him bending me over and wedging his cock inside me for a fast fuck while his wife is just a room away?.?.?.

My cock gives a quick, urgent stir, like it’s trying to hoist a flag to get my attention, and I spin away from the bathroom counter and stalk out into the hallway, trying to outpace my body’s reaction to the scenario. Even if I were desperate enough to let Mark use me after his deception, I could never be a party to infidelity.

I go out to the large space that contains the kitchen, dining room, and living room, and see that Dr. Sutcliff has finished the stitches and is sealing a fresh, clear bandage over the wound. He pulls out a syringe, vial, and alcohol swab and starts prepping Mark’s elbow. I notice that the IV catheter on the back of Mark’s hand is gone now, a small bandage in its place.

“You’ll need IV antibiotics for the next few days, and since you’re so keen to be done with IV bags, I’ll come by myself and give you the shots. Not like I don’t have better things to do, but patient knows best, right? Make a fist.” He pulls the medicine from the vial, presses the plunger to remove the excess air, and then slips the needle into Mark’s elbow. He pushes the medicine in slowly, looking at his watch as he does. “You also need to rest, and I swear to Jesus, Mary, and Joseph that if you tear a second set of stitches, I’m duct-taping you closed next time.”

Mark relaxes his hand, and I hate how my eyes automatically track the movement, the strong fingers, the taut muscles lengthening under the inked skin of his forearm.

“How long do I need to rest?” Mark asks. “I occasionally have other things to do aside from having a shoulder, you know.”

Dr. Sutcliff doesn’t lift his gaze from his watch, his other hand still slowly pressing the medicine into Mark’s arm. “I’d tell you two weeks, but I know you won’t listen. Give me a week. Just give me a week to make sure we’re not going to get an infection that wants to spread to your heart and kill you. Okay?”

A put-upon sigh. “Fine.”

Dr. Sutcliff finishes with the syringe, presses a square of gauze to the punctured skin, and then nods to Mark to press his own fingers over the gauze instead.

“So?.?.?.?hypothetically, a three-week yacht trip across the Atlantic,” Mark says casually, coming to sit upright on the table. “Starting this weekend. You’d say no to that?”

Three-week yacht trip?.?.?.

It comes clear as a bell. The mysterious trip to Ireland, the Philtre D’Amour. The person with the Irish mother.

Isolde.

“If you are stuck on a boat and that wound gets infected, you will deserve fucking septicemia,” Dr. Sutcliff says with the weight of someone laying a curse on a victim. “Stay. Here. And. Rest.”

He turns to me and adds, “Make him drink that entire glass of water,” and then leaves without so much as a goodbye.

“He’s very surly for how much I pay him,” Mark observes as the door to his apartment closes.

I step forward and set the towel and the washcloth on the table, hand him the glass of water, and then I take a step backward, away from him. Because he’s shirtless, and the slanting afternoon sun is finding the white-gold streaks in his hair, and the dried blood streaking his chest somehow makes him look better, not worse, and I don’t trust myself, I just don’t. Not around him.

Mark lifts his eyebrows at me. “Got somewhere to be?”

Anywhere. Anywhere that isn’t the place you’ll be bringing a bride.

“No, sir.”

He doesn’t drink the water, not yet. He’s still regarding me. “Clean me, then.”

“You’re supposed to drink your water. Sir.”

His mouth tilts a little. “I forgot that I have a Dom now too. Very well.” He sets the glass to his lips and, without breaking eye contact with me, drinks.

I heroically manage not to watch his throat move as he swallows.

“Now,” he says after he finishes and sets down the glass. He takes hold of the damp washcloth and holds it out to me. “Clean me.”

I take the washcloth, our fingertips brushing as I do, and hot sparks prickle along my knuckles and palm. They sweep up my arm and settle in my chest, and everything is warm and everything is cold and everything hurts and also I feel nothing at all.

I need to tell him that I know. I need to ask him why he lied.

I need to—I need to end things between us.

Things.

Just fucking. Just kink. It shouldn’t feel like I’m preparing to dig out my wet, slippery lungs with my bare hands and throw them in the trash.

I wish it were only the habit of obedience that has me stepping between his legs and pressing the washcloth to his skin, and I wish it didn’t thrill me to see the goose bumps pebbling his chest as I work.

He doesn’t speak as I clean him, but his eyes are his possessive eyes, his Morois House eyes, watching me with dark, avid fascination. I flush.

I hate that everything feels right when he’s watching me like this. I hate that I crave what comes next: his hand on my neck or the sound of a zipper. The slick search of his fingers inside me.

Tell him. Tell him.

I open my mouth, meaning to start with something eloquent, something that puts the last thirty minutes of shock and misery into an excoriating declaration of exactly how fucked up he is, but nothing at all like that comes out.

“Ireland,” I say, my voice toneless. My hand keeps moving across his chest, scrubbing carefully at the dried blood. “You were going to Ireland.”

Mark’s gaze shifts, and there’s a different kind of watchfulness to his stare now. “Yes.”

“Was it something to do with your bride? Isolde?”

His hand comes up and captures my wrist. To hold me still, I think, so his eyes can search mine.

After a long minute, he asks softly, “You didn’t know?”

“Why would I have known?” I ask bitterly.

“It’s not a secret, Tristan. Our engagement was announced in five different newspapers. Her uncle is a Catholic cardinal and will be in attendance. Her father, Geoffrey Laurence, is one of the most influential men in international banking.”

Geoffrey Laurence. I remember him—compact and well-dressed with silvering hair. Mark had been in a strange, restless mood after lunch with him. And that night, he’d kissed me on the rooftop.

At least one of us should get what they’d hoped for.

“It’s been in the works for four years,” Mark continues. He’s still holding my wrist, still watching me. “It’s always been the plan.”

“And fucking me? Was that part of the plan?” And then I stop and give a humorless laugh, remembering his words in Singapore. “No, of course not. I was going to complicate things. But what—you just couldn’t help yourself anyway? You wanted me badly enough that it was worth cheating on your fiancée? Risking an engagement that’s been announced in five different newspapers?”

His face grows cool. “Something like that.”

It occurs to me that someone walking into the room would see two regular lovers right now. Him on the table, me standing between his legs. My hand on his chest with our eyes locked.

But of course that’s not the whole story. There’s a bloody rag between my hand and his skin; he’s holding my wrist tightly enough that I’d need to safeword in order to get away.

And it’s not just the two of us—we’re not alone. Isolde is a veil between us, a shadow.

“Is she like me?” I ask, and the words are as ragged as the wound on Mark’s shoulder. “Will she kneel for you? Let you do whatever you want to her like I do?”

I don’t know what I want the answer to be. Is it better or worse if she’s not a submissive?

Mark doesn’t answer for a moment. “She submits when it suits her,” he says, which is more confusing than no answer at all.

“Is she polyamorous?” I ask. “Will the marriage be open?”

“That’s up to her,” he says mildly, and I could kill him right now, I really could.

“So you don’t even know if she would be okay with it, and you still had sex with me?”

“What we do is a lot more than having sex and I think you know it.” He lets go of my hand, but not to free me. He grabs my tie instead, standing up and looking down at me as I’m held in place by the silk around my neck.

He’s only an inch taller, but I feel that inch like a mile. “What we did,” I correct him. My voice is quiet now. “I’m done now. I can’t be—it would be cheating.”

He doesn’t like this. I can feel his fingers spasm around my tie, and his mouth is white around the corners.

But he says, “As you like.”

Like it’s all down to me. Like I’m being the unreasonable one.

“Let go of my tie. Sir.”

A muscle moves in his jaw, but nothing else changes. Until—abruptly—he lets go of me and turns away. The bloody washcloth falls to the floor between us, and I bend to pick it up.

“Will you keep working for me, Tristan?” he asks. He’s looking out the window now instead of looking at me. “Being my bodyguard?”

“I—”

There’s the shelf of World War I poetry he has me read aloud to him on Sunday afternoons. There’s the door to his bedroom, the light dancing around the floor from the pool above it.

There’s the door to the guest bedroom, a room that Isolde might claim for use of its closet.

There’s the kitchen where he’s cooked for me; there’s the kitchen island where just last week I was naked and trussed up, rope wrapped around my testicles while he jerked my dick until every inch was blood-dark and as tight and smooth as stretched satin. I screamed when I came and then Mark had fed my own orgasm back to me, running his fingers over my stomach and then making me lick them clean.

I turn back to him, and he’s still looking out the window, afternoon sunlight catching on the gold of his eyelashes.

With dismay, I realize that I’m still his. I’m still cursed.

The idea of leaving him is impossible.

But so is staying, so is watching him marry someone else.

“Yes,” I finally admit. The word is edged with pain. “Yes. I’ll be your bodyguard still.”

Mark’s shoulders relax, his mouth too, and I realize he was worried about my answer. Afraid to hear it. It sends a small curl of pleasure amongst the agony behind my sternum.

He doesn’t want me to quit. It could be because I’m good at my job, or because he doesn’t want to train someone else, or because he’s hoping he can lure me into being his bodyguard-with-benefits again, but I don’t care. He doesn’t want me to leave, and oh God, I’m fucked up because that feels almost like love to me.

“Good,” he says, and his voice is low and deep, and I think of him burning me with wax until I came. “I need you to do something for me.”

“Whatever you require, sir,” I say, hoping it sounds professional and not pathetic. Not like I’ll still do anything for him because I’m in love with him, because I’ve made him into a graven image, my own personal god, and it doesn’t matter how capricious or cruel he is, I’ll still worship him.

He turns and settles so that he’s half sitting, half standing against the edge of the table. He carefully moves his shoulder forward, testing how much it hurts. Given the way he pales, I assume it hurts quite a bit. “I need you to go to Ireland and bring Isolde home to me,” he says.

I step back like he’s just swung at me.

Like I’ve been shot at.

I stare at him, my eyes wide and my breath coming faster. “No.”

“No?”

“I can’t go get your bride for you. Don’t ask me to do that.” Don’t ask me to be complicit in my own heartbreak.

Mark settles a little more on the edge of the table, wincing at whatever the change in posture does to his shoulder. “It would be an extremely pleasant errand, I assure you. I had planned on flying there, fetching her, and then sailing back on the Philtre D’Amour. Three weeks of the best meals and sunsets in the world, just the two of us and a handful of unobtrusive crew members. Unfortunately, Dr. Sutcliff has now extinguished my dreams of ocean-based courtship.”

“I won’t do it. Have her fly here instead. Or find someone else.”

“I’ve gone to considerable trouble and expense to create this vacation, and Isolde deserves a respite before we’re plunged into the politics and headaches of getting married. And the closer we get to the wedding, the more danger she could be in, especially considering Drobny and the events of last week.”

“All the more reason I should be here with you,” I say in frustration. “You need me here to keep you safe.”

“I have the whole team here, and she has no one right now. There’s no one I trust more than you.” He looks down at his hands, and then he looks back up to me. “She is important to me. I don’t know that I can state it any more clearly than that. She is quite possibly the most important thing in the world to me right now.”

It hurts. I close my eyes and think of how much I would give to be the most important thing in the world to Mark, even after what I learned today. Even knowing he was blithely fucking me while someone else wore his ring.

I hear him come closer.

“I understand you wish you’d known about the engagement.”

“Don’t make me sound needy. It’s a normal thing to know about someone you’re having sex with,” I say miserably. I don’t open my eyes yet.

I can’t—I can’t look at him.

“Tristan.” I feel his hand on my arm, and then my chest, and then around the back of my neck. I crumple, and my face goes into his throat, and he smells like blood and rubbing alcohol and the smallest hint of rain underneath it all. He’s so warm and his collarbone against my jaw is strong and smooth.

“Tristan, I’m sorry. Can you forgive me? I’m not?.?.?.?I’m not accustomed to explaining myself, and especially not to someone who’s new to Lyonesse?.?.?.?” He sighs. It tickles warmly over my ear and jaw. “I’m sorry,” he says again.

I can hardly explain that the reason I’m hurt has just as much to do with being in love with him as it does with my principles. I’ve managed to hide my infatuation with him, my wayward heart, this long, and thank God, because I think if he knew how much this was destroying me right now, I would die. And if he pitied me for it, then?.?.?.

I don’t know. I’d die and resurrect myself just so I could die even more horribly a second time.

“You’re only apologizing because there’s something you want,” I mumble into his neck.

I feel Mark smile a little. “Well, obviously.”

“I think it’s cruel of you to ask me to bring her to you.”

There. That’s the closest I can allow myself to confessing the truth of the matter. That asking a lover to escort the bride to the groom is viciously unfair, salt in the wound. That every mile I sail closer to America with her will feel like another mile of barbed wire cinched around my chest.

But I know I’m about to cave. I can feel it. He’s so close and my lips are resting against his pulse and his hand on my neck is firm and unyielding, and I can’t help that I’ve already surrendered my soul to him. That I would do it again in a heartbeat.

He’s just like that somehow.

“It can’t be the cruelest thing I’ve asked of you,” he murmurs. “Out of teeth and burning wax and binder clips, surely this doesn’t even rank in the top three.”

He’s hard against my hip, I realize. Because I’m close or because he’s remembering being cruel to me, I can’t be sure. Either way, it makes me shiver.

“It’s the worst and you know it.”

“Hmm. You could use your safeword, you know.”

I pull back and look at him. He looks back at me, his hand still cupping my neck.

“That’s for kink,” I say uncertainly.

“And kink is all the time for me,” he responds. “Because you are mine all the time.”

His words sink into my mind without so much as a splash, racing right down to the bottom, right to the very seat of my soul.

“Don’t say that,” I whisper. “Not now.”

I search his face, wondering—scolding myself for wondering—but could he?.?.?.?care for me? I’d assumed for him that our arrangement was physical, that I was nothing more than a pet. An affectionately treated pet maybe, but not beloved. Not someone to invest a future in.

You are mine all the time.

“Okay,” he says. “I won’t say it.”

But his eyes blaze.

“I mean it,” I say weakly. “I’m not?.?.?.?yours.” I am. “We’re not anything now.” We are.

“You are in control, Tristan,” Mark says. “Always. If you change your mind, then rest assured that mine remains unchanged. I want you. Being a groom doesn’t change that.”

“It should,” I mutter.

Mark shrugs. “I’m an uncommon groom. And Isolde is an uncommon bride. This is Lyonesse after all.”

I shake my head. I’ve only been at Lyonesse for a few months, and even I know that kink and polyamory only work with honesty. Whatever was happening between Mark and me was about something else. But I don’t know what, and when I look at Mark, I can’t find the answer in his eyes. Only something that looks like?.?.?.?regret, maybe. Pain.

Like he’s about to lose me for real, and I have to close my eyes again.

“Okay,” I say, wishing my stupid, weak heart were anything but what it were. “I’ll go to Ireland for you.”