Bitter Burn (Lyonesse, #3)

by Sierra Simone

I’ve never stopped wanting him. I’ve never stopped loving him; even hating him is not without its own erotic thrill.

“You can be a shattered reliquary or an empty tabernacle, and you will be no less mine, but you must tell me. I can’t—I have used you enough, and I will use you still even more. I can’t leave you hollowed out after.”

“You’re different than good,” he says. “You’re like the angels in the Bible, absolutely terrifying and yet completely holy too.”

If I ever thought I could rescue the damsel, I know much better now. Of the three of us, I am the damsel. And if I could, I’d lock myself into the tower of my two villains and throw away the key.

“Yes, yes, because we all love each other. Or hate each other. Or whatever it is that we do.

“You hate me,” he points out. Only curious, not defensive. “I love hating you and I hate loving you. We are the first day of creation, darkness and waters, a welter and waste.” “I suppose that makes Tristan the light,” Mark says, looking past Isolde to me. “Well, don’t just observe the vagaries of marriage, sunshine. Let’s see what illumination you bring.”

“If I could contain what I feel for the two of you,” breathes Mark, “if I could even express it, if I could even shape it to myself…my God. You have unmade in months what took years to create, and fool that I am, I am letting you.”

“You have to be careful with people who think they deserve pain,” I say softly, still stroking the hair away from Isolde’s face, still looking into her aquamarine eyes. “Because sometimes they don’t think they deserve for the pain to stop. Sometimes it feels too good to want to stop. Sometimes it feels so awful that even wanting to stop feels like proof that they’re the weak and miserable creatures they thought they were. Sometimes they might think they deserve pain so unequivocally that they begin wanting to hurt themselves rather than having someone else do it.

It’s inarguable: I love watching them love each other. A small gift, and one I didn’t plan on, but I’m grateful for it anyway…even

They are so beautiful together, my two beloveds, one dark-haired, one fair, both with full mouths and doll-lashed eyes. They look so right holding each other, as if they were sculpted this way and only chiseled apart at the very last moment, and I try to take comfort in it, even as it scalds the inside of my mind with envy. But I’ve always known I wasn’t sculpted alongside anyone else, that I wasn’t made to fit against anyone else—that I don’t deserve something as gentle or noble as that. I don’t believe in fate, but this, I think, is ordained: I was meant to live alone. I’m meant to die alone.

I smack her clit once, not in admonishment but just because I like watching the pain sparkle and dance all over her skin. I like seeing that haunted look in her eyes, the one that says how did you know?

This shouldn’t feel so fucking wonderful that I want to hate myself forever.

“I know what you’re doing.” I find this idea rather amusing. Even I barely know what I’m doing, least of all when I’m with her. “Oh?”

She’s too perceptive. I’m adept at giving nothing away, but she’s getting very good at taking what isn’t being given instead.

Maybe you don’t think you’re good, but you’re able to protect good people, and if that isn’t its own kind of virtue, then I don’t know what is.”

Fuck me, why did it have to be the FBI? Isn’t it bad enough getting arrested without having to look at a suit purchased with Kohl’s Cash?

Only Isolde is built to make a choice like this, to save Tristan at the expense of saving me. And I love her so much for it that I could weep.

He finds her ferocity as endearing as he finds my obedience, I think.

“That you like it when I do bad things,” he says, twisting his wrist. She inhales. “You like when I take a knife to the world and pare it like an apple.”

“Do you want me to kill more war criminals to woo you into my bed?” he asks in a voice that’s as sincere as it is seductive. He would do it, of course. He’d kill anyone it took to keep Isolde coming back to him. Maybe he’d do it for me too, except all three of us know the truth—he doesn’t have to. He doesn’t have to do anything at all to keep me coming back.

The sun is lovely, a January memory of summer, and I am drunk on whatever neuropeptides come from having a monster aggressively pet and cuddle you.

“If your safety no longer depends on my distance, then I will be at your feet with my heart held aloft in my hands for you,” I whisper into her ear. I feel her draw in a shivering breath, and I kiss her neck. “I love you, Isolde. I would only ever stay away to keep you safe.”

It’s not healthy for us to feel and crave jealousy and possession like this, and yet…

When I’d begged him to let me help him mourn, and all along, I was the reason for mourning. He’d fucked me into the carpet knowing I’d killed his husband. He’d let Eliot’s killer dress him and wash him and kiss his feet.

“I wasn’t supposed to care about you. I wasn’t supposed to want you. I’ve been around handsome men before, Tristan—I can generally hold my own. And then you ruined it. You ruined everything by being so good and sweet, my own little Maxen Colchester but better, because you let me right into that tender heart with no fight at all. Years spent stalking the man who killed my husband, only to find that I loved him like I’d never loved anyone before. You see what a fucking mess that made, right?”

“I wanted to kill you,” he admits. “In the beginning. Isolde too. You, the person who pulled the trigger. Her, the only soft spot I could find in the man who’d made sure a trigger would be pulled.”

“I might resent them for it some days,” he finishes softly, a little bitterly, “but they are forever safe from me. And I am no longer safe from them.”

They might never forgive me, they might fear me, but I’d as soon harm them as I’d let you live. That is the difference between me and you, Most Holy Father: I’m not afraid to be known. I might steal and I might lie, and I’ll always live in the falling slant of a shadow, but it’s not because I’m frightened of the light.

Mark comes up beside me. Gorgeous Mark, with glinting hair and well-shaped lips and a bruise under a perceptive blue eye. Mark, who wanted to kill me at first. Mark, who lets me fuck the man who killed his husband.

The vagaries of jealousy are infinite, because the jealousy I feel in regard to Isabella is immature and stifling, but when I think of Tristan and Mark together, the jealousy is like a cathedral. Capacious and holy.

Mark is slouched against the railing, blood-spattered and still wearing clothes that could be described as need-to-know chic.

Evil takes a lot more emails than you think.

Loving the two of you is like tearing open my flesh, and I would pay any price to continue doing it for the rest of my life. I love you and want you to be my wife. I love Tristan and want him to belong to both of us. But because I love you, I’m telling you the rest of the truth, and it’s that I’m sorry for what I’ve done. This is the plain black ink of my apology.”

“I thought of every way I could flay him raw in the short window of time we had and all the ways I could keep him alive long enough to pluck out his right eye and cut off his right hand. I wondered if I could get creative and extremely literal with thirty pieces of silver.”

“Will you be okay?” I huff a laugh. It’s short and strangled. “Does it matter? This was always the plan. Them together, me alone, whether I was still alive or not.”

If I could bury myself alive with my bare hands, I would, but what would it fucking matter when I already have? I buried myself with my own fury, my own stubborn pain, and I might have carved a cancer from the world, I might have made it a safer and better place with Cashel’s death, but I cut myself apart to do it. I cut other people apart. I took a saw to any chance of happiness and didn’t stop even when I got to gristle and bone.

Let them see that I did exactly what I set out to do and immolated myself in the process, that I used myself for kindling, my future as accelerant.

I should feel ridiculous, like a painting of a dying king propped against a tree while his retainers comfort him,

“Not enough spreader bars at the White House,” whispers Embry.

After another week of this, a visitor comes to New Camelot. He has the kind of ivory skin that probably burnishes into gold in the summer, hair like afternoon sunshine, and dark eyes that burn with some kind of secret intensity. A white clerical collar dazzles from the notch of his black shirt. He’s a priest.

He makes a face of mock dismay, and I suddenly realize how young he is, how strikingly and humanly handsome. He is so incandescently inspired by God that it’s easy to forget he’s not a beautiful and terrifying angel come to earth.

“You know, when I told you that good rulers were merciful, I never meant that mercy only flowed one way. You deserve mercy too.”

“Consider that I’m right. Consider that you’ll never be able to temper power with mercy if you don’t know how it feels to receive it. If you don’t humble yourself enough to receive it.”

I can see some of Isolde in Adam, actually, in that inborn need for things that someone in a harness could have given him on a Friday night for free, followed by a kiss and a snack besides.

The Church—like the Army, like so many things—is just another toxic Dom when you get down to it.

Through her tears, she laughs, that rare laugh that should be kept in a tabernacle and venerated on feast days.

I hope if they ever stand above my grave, they know that I died in love with them, happy for them, relieved. More than anything, I hope they know I died wishing that I could kiss them back.

I watch them a moment fondly, covetously, jealous of them individually and then jealous of them together—not in an envious way but like a jealous god. I want to hoard them to myself; I want the earth to shake when anyone dares to approach what’s mine.

Isolde and I held a vote, and it was democratically agreed that Tristan was only allowed to cut his hair twice a year at most. Tristan, a believer in democracy, has bowed to the will of the people, and right now his hair is long enough to curl around his ears and neck again. Perfection.

“My cruel bride, my fiendish queen,” I purr, nuzzling her. “So mean to such pretty boys.” I’m still rocking into her, and she’s rocking into him, and she turns her head to kiss me like I’ve just flattered her. Which I have.