Bitter Burn (Lyonesse, #3)

by Sierra Simone

If you were a criminal and you were approached by two preternaturally attractive blonds with flawless suits and sociopathic smiles, then you knew the twins had been sent after you.

Mark had always loved Eliot more than Eliot had loved him, and when Melody told Mark so, he’d only murmured a low I know.

Trevenas outlast. Trevenas are cruel. We are salt-skinned and thorned with gorse, and we worshipped capricious gods long after the saints began crawling over our hills. We have hearts of tin and minds of slate, and we do not flinch.

There is something so piquant about a good person thinking they are bad, about a strong person thinking they are weak. It is a devil in me—a devil just like Saul himself had—that I want to encourage this. That I want to croon in Tristan’s ear that he is so bad, so very bad, that he is so weak to let me do the things he lets me do.

She is not a porcelain doll, obviously. Dolls don’t murder people.

I could have happily fought her for hours.

Isolde might have spared my life, might even have meant it when she said she loved me, but she still ran. All those confessions of love from her and Tristan, all those promises of faithfulness, and all it took was one opened safe, and they were gone. If Isolde had slit my throat, it would have hurt less.

I don’t have time to check on two people who think they’re good at hiding.

I, of course, am an artist of misery, a priest of it.

I want them. I hate them. I love them.

I could laugh if I could breathe. Mark Trevena, famously jaded, famously immoral, and he’s furious over cuddling.

I had a plan once, and it went like this: get revenge, and then probably die in the process.

And now I don’t even know what the hell to do with my plan. I was supposed to care about nothing, and now I care about two things, and it’s a little fucking irritating, if I’m honest.

That is the beauty of bravery, I suppose. It doesn’t care what we look like or the lives we should have led.

My fingers find the scar at the base of my throat. I like the way it feels. A truer sign of her devotion than a ring on her finger or a collar around her neck. A testament in the flesh to what I’ve seen in her eyes. She could have killed me—easily, with my blessing and consent—and she didn’t.

“My two toys would be happier together than they’d be with me. They’re well within their rights to hate me forever, you know.” “Just because you’ve lied to them, manipulated them, and you plan to kill Isolde’s uncle?” A knowing laugh. “Sounds like foreplay to me.”

Faith like this…it’s rare. I remember my father’s Bible, marked up just like this. I remember my hand folded in his warm, dry one as we prayed at dinner. I remember how he’d always, without fail, use the Bibles tucked in the back of the pews to follow along with the readings. Like the words were that important—they couldn’t only be heard, they had to be seen. They couldn’t only be seen, but they had to be understood, felt, ingested.

I need to touch him. I need to smell him. A single lick of the skin below his ear might be enough to save my life.

I find his desire to keep good things good and bad things bad rather sweet. I’ve always been too willing to mix the two together, to search for one inside the other, to stain innocence and exonerate guilt, and look at where it’s gotten me.

I’ll take payment for the adultery in wounded glances. I’ll eat his pouts until I’m full.

He’s a ship of muscle and loyalty with nothing but my tongue as the rudder.

It feels too much like power for power’s sake.” Oh, Tristan, I think. That’s where all power ends up if it’s left alone long enough.

Love was kneeling. Love was tears.

This requires no artifice, no care at all. It’s the whole, unvarnished truth. “I’m almost certain my husband sees a knife at his throat as a novel way to flirt.”

I love you, Isolde said with a knife pressing into my skin. I love you.

That is the nature of unhappiness. It spreads like ink in water.

It’s only that the danger isn’t in his violence but in his love. In the crushing, churning star-fusing burn of it.

“I’d like to itemize every lost hour—every excruciating moment apart—on your disloyal little bodies. I’d record my tolls and taxes with bite marks and splatters of wax.”

We are all constantly, viciously jealous of each other, and I’m jealous of a glass of gin.

I think Mark believes what he says, but I think he hates it too. I think he has to remind himself to believe it sometimes, because it hurts so much.

A cruel joke, because who could steal someone as deadly as Isolde? Who could outfox Mark Trevena?

“You’re not normal, and neither is Mark,” Anguish points out with some amusement. “Tristan might be the closest thing to normal you know, but he won’t be by the time the both of you are done with him.”

Isabella shops like the shops should have a safeword.

goodness is not a stable currency. It’s exchanged on an open market with many others. It’s negotiated, it’s bartered, it’s sold.

I’d let myself foolishly reach for what I wanted—them—even though I knew, I’ve always known, that the curtain would never drop on love, not for me.

I’ve washed her and Tristan both like this before, but I could never get sick of it. How could you get sick of looking at your entire life, bound up in shower-flushes and water-laced eyelashes, standing sweetly right in front of you?

Fuck, I’ve missed this. Just this. Touching her. Holding her. It’s how priests and monks and other holy people must feel when they’re allowed to handle their reliquaries, all those beautifully wrought vessels made to carry sparks of God. I could pray right now, this very minute, that’s how good it feels to have her in my arms.

I can’t be plainer about this than I’ve been: if I were the god of my own little world, I would have you and Tristan at my fingertips, and I would spend my days and nights afflicting you with my attention. Like a pillar of cloud and flame, I’d be with you always.

but I felt like my destiny had finally come, like I was doing what I was made for. That my country needed me and our allies needed us, and that if any virtue was synonymous with holiness in our day and age, it would be patriotism. Courage painted in bright colors—red, white, and blue.

“You think you know me so well.” I run my fingers down the valley of her spine. “Not well enough. Never well enough.”

I’ve never been one to be sentimental about something like hair—it was frequently a casualty of necessity in both the military and the agency—but I mourn his now. The way it had begun to curl against his neck and around his ears, the almost immoral sumptuousness of it. The world is such a hard and cruel place. Why must we also be denied Tristan’s hair?

I consider this, that someone could simply just die, and die for reasons that have nothing to do with arms smuggling or government interests or malevolent princes of the Church. That they could die because they were too proud to buy a pill organizer. Because they were in the Army thirty-odd years ago, and the only way you got to take a break was if you pulled out a pack of cigarettes. Smoke ’em if you got ’em.

I could stand a few more funerals personally, but it wouldn’t be polite to say so.

“Oh yes, the Hesses are very Catholic. They even have a cardinal for a family friend. He arranged some things so their son could get the posting he wanted in England, near a place called Thornchapel.”

but we are made of shadows and glass, her and me, and in our dark and broken hearts, there is a part of us that enjoys the breathless bloodshed of what we do to each other. There is a part of us that will always find the glitter of moonlight on ice lovelier than a pink sunrise and that will always hope teeth come before a kiss.

“I think you bought me that mug hoping you could sit me on the counter while you got the kettle going and then be the one to put the drink in my hands. I think you got me those blankets because you imagined me curled up next to you on the couch until I accidentally fell asleep. I think you got me those diabolically strong peppermint candies because you know I crave those little jolts of pain, and you like giving me what I crave as much as you enjoy watching the pain itself.”

But that was our lives, wasn’t it? Pleasure in darkness and dolor in the sunlight.

I can recognize that something is missing from my grief—or maybe too many things are added onto it—so it’s a grief that’s too unwieldy and too light at the same time. It’s a badly balanced stack of cardboard boxes, and it feels like even if they tumbled and fell, nothing serious would be broken.

I search for the right word to convey all that he is. Something stronger than possessive, something hungrier than ravenous. But at the same time, sex is not as precious to him as attention, as devotion, as claiming.

I don’t care that the jagged gap between them is so palpable that it might as well be outlined in yellow surveying tape; the way they look at each other says it all. They are obsessed with each other.