Salt in the Wound E-Book

Sierra Simone

• Herausgeber: Sierra Simone
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Serie: Lyonesse
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 242

Beschreibung

The first time I meet the devil, he knows my name.

The second time I meet him, the truth becomes clear: Mark Trevena is to be my husband.

No matter that we don't know each other.  No matter that he's older than me; shameless and sinful; the owner of a secret club where the powerful come to play.  My father has spoken, and I'll be the devil's bride the minute I graduate from college.

Except my future husband has one condition for this arranged marriage: we have to pretend it’s real. 

He’ll teach me, he says.  How to pretend to be his in pain and pleasure both.  How to pretend to arch and writhe under his touch.  But his lessons are teaching me something else entirely…

…that Mark Trevena wants me in a way that's not pretend at all. 

And no matter how I might fight it, the devil will have his due.

Leseprobe

salt in the wound

SIERRA SIMONE

Copyright © 2023 by Sierra Simone

Cover Image by Michelle Lancaster (@lanefotograf)

Cover Design by Hang Le

Editing by Erica Russikoff of Erica Edits; Letty Mundt

Proofreading by Michele Ficht

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

contents

Content Warning

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

The kiss is coming…

A quick note

Also by Sierra Simone

About the Author

content warning

This story contains mentions of self-harm in a religious context1 and its relation to kink.

1The practice of corporal penance.

Blessed be the Lord, my rock,

who trains my hands for battle,

my fingers for war…

PSALM 144:1

one

I was seventeen when I met the devil.

Sister Mary Alice had just given us our first knives—training knives, made of black rubber which bent if you pressed too hard—and Bryn and I were sparring. Not that it could be called that, even charitably, because we were too nervous to actually strike at each other. The knives might have been made of rubber, but the idea of the knives was real enough to make us shy.

Bryn and I had been training in the sisters’ dojo since we were twelve. Six days a week I was on its old red carpet or its beaten blue mats, sweating, pushing, kicking, punching. There was sparring, self-defense, katas. Rattan canes and wooden swords when we’d turned fifteen, and bo staffs later on. We weren’t afraid of hitting each other, and we weren’t afraid of getting hit.

But there was something about the knives.

The bell above the door rang. Bryn and I had grown up hearing that bell and so we didn’t bother looking. No one ever came to this place who didn’t mean to come to this place. The entrance to the sisters’ dojo was two stories below, a black door squashed between a parking garage and a thrift store. It didn’t even have a sign above it, only the number of a Bible verse painted in faint green letters.

Psalm 144:1. Which if you flipped to in the Bible, would read:

Blessed be the Lord, my rock,

who trains my hands for battle,

my fingers for war.

The sisters’ school didn’t have a name that I knew of, they had never even attempted a website, and their phone was an ancient thing made of yellowed plastic that I only saw answered once. People came through the door because they were delivering something or because they were supposed to be here, and that was it.

So it wasn’t until Bryn got past her nerves and finally made her first strike that I saw him.

Tall and broad-shouldered. A suit too nice for this place. Too nice for a lot of places, actually.

And he was watching us.

I turned back to Bryn, and she lifted a shoulder before settling into a sparring stance. She didn’t know who he was either.

Awareness prickled along the back of my neck as I tried to focus on the sparring, on the tip of Bryn’s fake knife.

What is it about being watched that makes us want to impress the watcher? I didn’t know him; I didn’t need to prove anything to him. And yet when Bryn managed to wedge her knife against my armpit, I was embarrassed. Tried even harder, only for her to catch me a third time with her blade.

A throat cleared.

I turned to see the man standing several paces away, his jacket off and his feet bare on the old red carpet. He was rolling up his sleeves to expose sun-bronzed forearms, his fingers working the fabric in quick, deft rolls. A wristwatch glinted, expensive but not ostentatious, which probably meant it was even more expensive than it looked.

“May I?” he asked, extending his hand, palm up, to Bryn. His voice was deep and rough and cold. Ice wouldn’t melt in that voice. But it was mannerly, polite.

Some devils hide, you see. Right in plain sight.

I watched then as Bryn placed her knife on his palm. We were used to being shown what we were doing wrong—any martial arts teacher did that—but our teachers were Catholic, so we were doubly blessed in that regard. We were trained to be excellent students. Trained never to miss a chance to learn.

But still. He was a stranger in a place that never had strangers. I might have refused on those grounds alone. Yet I faced him and bowed, just as he did to me. I shifted my weight until I was light on my feet and supple as a willow branch in the wind. And I watched as he didn’t shift at all.

I was so very aware of everything as I stepped to the side. Of the sweat between my palm and the rubber hilt of the knife, of where my gi jacket gaped open to expose my throat and collarbone. Of the heavy blond ponytail brushing against the back of my gi as I moved, a slow drag across the cotton. I allowed my awareness to expand to him, to his easy, upright posture, to the way he held his knife backwards, the blade coming from the outside of his fist rather than the inside. I’d only ever seen people hold a knife like that in movies.

I remember that I thought he was almost handsome that day. He had a strong nose, with a flare at the bridge which told me it had been broken before. He had a jaw straight out of my AP geometry textbook, shadowed with rough stubble. A high forehead with a thin scar furrowing into his dark blond hair, straight, thick brows, and dark blue eyes.

A mouth with a precisely formed upper lip and a curved lower one, which somehow gave the impression of softness and firmness at once.

I know now he was only in his early thirties, but at the time, he was in the same category as all adults to me—teachers, doctors, presidents, uncles, nuns, whatever.

There was only young and old. I was young. He was not.

But despite that, he moved easier than anyone I’d ever seen, including my teachers. As I stepped lightly in the almost-dance of sparring, he walked normally, his shoulders relaxed and his hands at his sides. To the uninitiated, it might look like he was asking for an attack by not having his guards up, by not having his knife out. Even then, I knew better. He never crossed a foot in front of the other as he walked; the looseness of his shoulders and arms meant he could snap into motion at any moment. He was baiting me, maybe. Or simply waiting for me to move.

Fine then. I could move. I’d been doing this almost my entire life, was the best at my school, and I wasn’t wearing impeccably tailored trousers like he was—

Before my knife hand had even made it an inch, I was blocked, seized, spun. By the time I registered what was happening, my back was to his chest and his knife was to my throat.

His chest was warm even through my gi jacket and the tank top I wore underneath. His arms around me were an iron cage, and the rubber knife to my throat pressed just hard enough to make me lift my chin. I didn’t smell cologne or any other kind of expensive scent, which seemed unusual for someone who would go to the trouble to wear such a nice suit; instead, I only smelled fresh and clean air, soap, perhaps, and something else underneath it. The way the air smells after rain, maybe.

He only held me there an instant, long enough to make his point, short enough to be sportsmanlike.

Still. I had no intention of repeating that particular humiliation.

But when I turned to tell him so, I saw Sister Mary Alice and Sister Grace watching me from the dojo’s front desk, their arms crossed. Sister Mary Alice lifted a pale, calloused hand from where it had been tucked into her elbow.

The message was clear. I was to continue.

I kept my breathing even and focused on settling my energy back into my belly.

“How long have you had that knife?” he asked as we bowed and started again. Like the last time, he merely walked while I danced around him—but now I knew the speed and strength that little deception of his hid.

“An hour,” I told him.

“They only showed you standard grip, I presume?”

“They didn’t show me anything. They wanted us to get a feel for them before we started formal lessons.”

He nodded again, and then tucked his tie into his shirt with his free hand. With a flick of his fingers, he was holding the knife like me. “This is standard grip,” he said. “Sometimes called a hammer grip. You can move your thumb to a saber grip, like so, but that’s still really just standard grip when you consider the direction of the blade.”

I braced my thumb on the edge of the hilt like he did, and then slid it back. “Okay,” I said quietly. I wasn’t sure why he was teaching me this, or why we were even sparring in the first place, but I was hungry to learn, desperate to push myself. 

“This,” the stranger said, flipping the knife and then catching it expertly with the blade pointing down, “is reverse grip.”

“Like a serial killer,” Bryn chirped from over by the mirrors.

A corner of the stranger’s mouth pressed in, faintly. “Yes. And now it’s easier to use my fist as a fist if I need to. Now I have more leverage for slicing, and more force for stabbing.”

I followed his lead and changed my own grip to reverse. It felt strange—it wasn’t the way you’d first think to hold a knife—but it felt powerful too. I could feel how much faster I could cut, how much harder I could stab.

“Good,” he said, and when he said good in that rough, cold voice, something flickered in my chest, in my thoughts, gone before I could really perceive it. “Now, do you see the difference?”

“Standard is blade up,” I answered, “and reverse is blade down.”

A shake of his head. “Standard,” he said slowly, “is for a fair fight. But reverse?” Once again, he moved faster than I could stop him. This time I landed on my back, with him on top of me. The tip of his rubber blade was lodged against my windpipe. “Reverse is for when you mean it,” he finished.

I blinked up at him, too stunned for the humiliation to sink in, although it would dig its teeth into me later. In a fast, graceful movement, he was standing, and then he grabbed my forearm and pulled me to my feet.

He dropped my arm as soon as I had my balance and then crossed the space to return the knife to Bryn. She and I watched as he strode over to the area by the door and put on his socks and shoes with elegant, efficient movements. Sister Mary Alice and Sister Grace were gone.

“Well, Isolde,” the stranger said as he stood up. His sleeves were still rolled up and his jacket was slung over his forearm. “It was lovely meeting you.”

He left, the bell on the door ringing long after it had shut.

I turned to face Bryn, who was still staring at the door he’d walked through. When she swiveled her head to look at me, there was a question written all over her tan, heart-shaped face.

“How did he know your name?” she asked.

two

The first time I sensed things weren’t entirely as they seemed was three months after I met the stranger in the dojo. It was my senior year of high school, and my father—who split his time between London and New York—had brought me to our Kensington terrace for my winter break. Professionally designed Christmas decorations filled the corners and twined up stair railings. The tall Georgian rooms were filled with fresh evergreens and bowls of baubles and twinkling candles lit by staff. Piles of presents, neatly wrapped, beckoned from under the tree. My father hadn’t bought any of them for me. I doubted he even knew what they were. Something as unimportant as presents was undoubtedly delegated to the same person who sent me birthday cards when he was out of town, and who arranged for the driver to pick me up from school.

We ate a late Christmas Eve dinner in the too-grand dining room, candlelight glinting off the hand-painted china. It was just the two of us; my mother was long dead by then. There’d only been two of us at Christmas dinner for the past five years, and yet that empty spot at the table was still so full of my mother’s absence that it ached like a tooth.

“Your school report was quite good,” my father said. Despite being uninterested in the minutiae of parenting a teenager, Geoffrey Laurence took a keen interest in me. He expected the best from me, which I was grateful for. Even if sometimes I wasn’t exactly sure what he wanted beyond good grades and impeccable manners.

But surely he wanted what I also wanted; he’d never said otherwise. He’d allowed me to spend as much time as I wanted at the dojo, he’d never contradicted me when I spoke of my plans for the future. He’d never seemed jealous that I’d idolized my maternal uncle, a cardinal in the Catholic Church, more than I had him, Geoffrey Laurence, king of bankers.

“Thank you,” I answered politely.

My father took a bite of goose, chewed, cut off another bite. “And you are still committed to Columbia?” He didn’t look at me as he spoke.

“Yes,” I said, “but—”

I didn’t have a chance to raise the issue of my major, because just then a tall man strode into the room, the scarlet-trimmed hem of his simar fluttering around gleaming shoes. His cheeks above his neatly shorn beard were freckled, ruddy, dotted with pockmarks, and when he smiled at me, the smile revealed a gap between his front teeth. Flurries dusted the black cape hanging over his shoulders.

He held out his arms in welcome, and getting up to answer the invitation for a hug was as natural as breathing. My uncle Mortimer was as warm as my father was cold, and the only adult in my life who truly understood what I wanted after school.

“I didn’t know you were coming,” I said into Mortimer’s chest. The chain of his gold pectoral cross pressed into my cheek before I pulled away to beam at him. “I thought you’d be in Rome.”

“I had business in London tonight,” he said, giving my shoulder a fond pat. The Irish in his voice had been sanded down by years of living at the Holy See, but the lilt was still there. It reminded me of my mother’s voice. “But it’s concluded now. So I thought I’d come check on my favorite niece.”

“Your only niece,” I reminded him as I went back to my place at the table. Mortimer sat without an invitation from my father and gave the both of us another wide smile, the gap in his teeth flashing.

“I hope I’m not intruding,” he said.

“Of course you aren’t intruding—”

“Isolde,” my father interrupted sharply. “Go to your room.”

I froze, my fingers stalled in the act of reaching for my fork. “I’m sorry?”

Geoffrey Laurence turned his dark eyes on me. His already thin mouth was pressed even thinner, the lines bracketing his mouth severe. “I need to speak to your uncle. Please leave us.”

I looked over to my uncle, whose wide smile was still on his face. “Don’t worry, Isolde. It won’t take but a minute.”

I nodded and stood, leaving my napkin on the chair and walking out of the dining room and up the stairs to my own room. Where I promptly slipped off my shoes and then crept back to the stairs, careful to descend along the sturdy, quiet edges, rolling my bare foot from ball to toes with each silent step until I was at the bottom and within earshot of the dining room.

“It’s as good as done,” my father was saying. His English voice was as crisp and cool as money, a banker’s voice. “And it serves us both, as you well know.”

“Perhaps.”

I knew Mortimer’s cryptic response would infuriate my father, because it would be coupled with Mortimer’s famous arched eyebrow, that gap-toothed smile. My uncle handled things for the Vatican, and there were many reasons why he was indispensable to the Vatican, but one very important reason was his inscrutability. He gave nothing away that he didn’t want to.

“I know what you’re thinking,” my father said, and I’d been right, I could hear the defensiveness in his words.

My uncle’s voice was a raspy one, a voice that always had a sense of wheezing to it, and so when he pitched his voice low and quiet, like he did just then, I couldn’t make him out from my position on the stairs. That voice was part of what made him so good at Vatican diplomacy, he’d once told me. He could be extremely difficult to eavesdrop on when he wanted to be.

But I could make out the last bit of what he said.

“…would be a waste, Geoffrey.”

“For you, maybe,” replied my father.

Once again, my uncle was difficult to make out. But I thought I heard the word weapon, which couldn’t be right.

“I don’t want to be at odds with you on this, so I hope you’ll reconsider,” my father answered tightly. China clinked and a chair scraped—someone was standing abruptly. Perhaps readying to leave the room.

With a light movement, I leapt back up the stairs, just as quietly as I’d come down. I was fast, and a few minutes later, when my uncle knocked on my door, I was at my desk reading in a settled position, not a hair out of place.

“Come in,” I called, and he let himself in, a pillar of clerical black in my spare, cream-colored room.

“Very good,” he said as he sat down in a small armchair near my bookshelves. “I didn’t hear you at all.”

I dipped my chin in acknowledgment. It had been him who’d taught me how to creep, eavesdrop, how to listen unperceived. As a child, he would send me around parties and events, and I’d be his ears for him. His ears on a quiet little girl no one thought to curb their words around.

Have any crumbs for me, little mouse? he used to ask, and I would give him any crumbs he wished for, my smiling uncle who carried me on his shoulders and taught me how to pray so that God would listen. As I got older, the crumbs became larger, gathering them more dangerous. And so he’d schooled me over the years, and it had become second nature to gather the information he wanted, to sneak into places I wasn’t meant to be, and to hide in plain sight in the places I was supposed to be.

“What were you talking about?” Mortimer was the one person other than Bryn and my confessor that I was entirely candid with, and he’d encouraged my curiosity from the moment I could talk. When other adults ignored my questions or batted them away with canned answers, Mortimer listened to them, took them seriously. And whenever I asked something that he wouldn’t—or couldn’t—answer, he apologized sincerely.

In a perfect world, we know all things, Isolde. Alas that this isn’t a perfect world—yet.

From the way he smiled at my question, I knew I wasn’t getting an answer tonight.

“I wish I could tell you, but your father has asked me not to.”

Alarm, cold and tight, pulled at my stomach for a moment. I ignored it. “So it’s about me.”

Mortimer nodded. “I’m afraid so.”

“Is it about my future? About my vocation?”

Mortimer didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”

I looked down at the book in my hands, St. Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises. “I’m not changing my plans. I want to take vows. I want to work for God. I want to work for the Church.”

“My child, so you shall,” my uncle said kindly. “You were marked for God from the moment you were born, and marked for increasing His glory here on Earth. You have exactly the gifts the Church needs.”

“Father doesn’t understand that,” I said. I closed the book, smoothing the battered cover and setting it on my desk. “He wants me for the glory of the Laurence family.”

It had been an ongoing argument since I’d told him the day after my mother’s funeral that I wanted to become a nun. He wanted me to join the ranks of Laurence Bank, the financial empire his great-great-grandfather had founded in 1901, and the idea that his only child would throw her future away on intentional poverty had infuriated him. I’d informed him he could always have more children.

The conversation hadn’t much improved from there.

“I imagine the compromise you’ve struck still holds,” Mortimer assured me. “You’ll go to university before you do anything else, and so you have time. We have time.”

If only my father didn’t also want me to major in something I didn’t care about in the meantime. He was hoping an education in finance would help me see the value in Laurence Bank.

“I know what I’m meant to do,” I said. “I’m meant to be God’s hands.”

“And so you shall be,” Mortimer said. “I will never steer you away from what God needs you to do.”

I hadn’t raised the next subject for the last few months, but Mortimer’s assurances made me hopeful. And, I supposed, it would be a nice Christmas present, if an unusual one.

“Have you…” I forced the words out, even though speaking one of my deepest spiritual needs aloud was like spreading my ribs apart and allowing someone to look at the bloody machinery underneath. I hated vulnerability, even with the one adult I trusted above all others.

Mortimer took pity on me. “I know what you’re asking, Isolde, and yes, I have given it more thought. And my answer hasn’t changed. Corporal penance is something that’s rarely permissible in the eyes of the Church.”

I wanted to push my ribs back together, I wanted to sew myself back up and pretend I hadn’t bled in front of this man I idolized so much, but I couldn’t help myself. “I wouldn’t be irresponsible with it, I promise. I would do it under the direction of my confessor. I would only use it as needed—”

“The gift God is giving you now,” my uncle suggested softly, “is one of deprivation. You must offer up that lack, that yearning, to him. You must live without this thing you crave to better serve him. There is no more valuable suffering or penance than that.”

I swallowed. “But—”

“Isolde, you wish to be God’s hands here on Earth. That requires sacrifice. You cannot creep through rooms with a cinched thigh, you cannot listen for me unnoticed at your father’s galas and parties if everyone is noticing the flagellation marks on your shoulders. If you are to be God’s creature as I have molded you to be, your body must be whole and strong and unmarked. You must not fast from nourishment, because it will make you weaker. You must not keep yourself awake, because it will make you slower.” He reached for my hand and squeezed it. “I would not score a blade or throw it carelessly into a fire. Neither will I allow you to damage yourself when you are already consecrated to the cause.”

three

The rest of the year passed quickly.

I went back to Manhattan and my Upper East Side prep school. I turned eighteen. I lived my days as if I were already under vows.

I prayed; I studied the Bible; I studied Greek and Latin and Hebrew. And I trained. I woke early to run, to lift, to move through my katas. After school, I sparred and punched and kicked. I used the knife until it became an extension of my own hand.

I thought often of that suited stranger and how easily he moved, how easily he’d held the knife. I aspired to that ease, and I told myself that was why I thought of him so much. And if the evocative smell of him and those midnight eyes lingered in my mind, it was only because I was preoccupied with his competence and skill.

Mercifully, my father refrained from any more complaints about my future plans, and the university truce between us held. I would still go to Columbia, and there was no mention of whatever it was he’d discussed with my uncle over Christmas.

At night, I dreamed of pain, of suffering, and when I woke up, I was unsettled and strange-feeling. I should not lust. I did not lust. And yet when I dreamed, I woke up panting and wet between the legs. It shamed me, because my craving for corporal penance was pure and good, I knew it, I knew it beyond a doubt when I was awake. But when I was asleep, my cravings for pain became dark and strange to me. As if my body were no longer under my control.

Bryn and I graduated from high school, and as always, I dedicated the summer after to training, giving little thought to Columbia and the change that lay ahead. School was nothing but a concession for me, a necessary pretense until I could convince my father that my future lay with the Church and my uncle, and so it merited little of my attention.

What could be more important than a life dedicated to God?

* * *

It was a warm July evening when I met my devil again.

We were on a rooftop in Manhattan, the verdant scar of Central Park to one side, a nest of skyscrapers everywhere else. I was playing two parts in my black silk gown tonight: the dutiful daughter on her father’s arm, looking lovely and gracious and expensive, and more invisibly, that of my uncle’s little mouse, gathering whatever crumbs I could find. So far from Rome, so removed from the world of ecclesiastical politics, it was hard to imagine that I’d hear anything relevant to him, and yet my uncle was always interested in what I’d acquired, even if it was only the party talk of bankers and businessmen.

It’s like panning for gold, he’d told me more than once before. Sometimes you have to sift through a whole river of silt.

At some point, my father and I danced, much to the delight of the crowd. We played the role well, of doting father and loving daughter, of a family buffeted by grief but still holding steadfast to one another, and it only added to the venerable reputation of Laurence Bank. Other banks were conglomerates, were faceless entities with no soul, but here was Geoffrey Laurence, handsome and silvered at the temples looking fondly at his daughter; here was Geoffrey Laurence putting his only child first, above all else. A Laurence would be loyal, steady, about values and tradition. You could trust a Laurence with your money, our little performance said. You could trust a Laurence with your life.

It was, of course, only a performance. My father was warm to me when people were watching, and no other time, and I was privately repulsed by Laurence Bank.

You cannot serve both God and money, we are told. And I didn’t intend to.

When we finished dancing, I felt someone approach. I knew to turn gradually, to give the appearance of slow reflexes and even slower perception—a trick Mortimer had taught me when I was a girl.

Always give the people around you a reason to underestimate you. Do it the minute you meet them, if you can.

But even years of tutelage from Mortimer couldn’t make me school my face when I turned. It was the stranger from the dojo.

And he was holding out his hand to me.

He wore a tux tonight, a dark, dark navy, and that giant watch again. His hair was styled back, and despite the shadow on his square jaw, he looked crisp and polished. His dark blue eyes glinted in a shade lighter than the night sky as he said, “May I have this dance?”