Salt Kiss E-Book

Sierra Simone

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

Seitenzahl: 505

Beschreibung

After being a soldier, working as a bodyguard should have been simple:keep the owner of DC’s ultra-secret club safe, don’t think about his midnight eyes or his devil’s smile, don’t surrender my body to his wicked desires.

But I underestimated Mark Trevena and the power of his dark, seductive world. I underestimated the hold he’d have on me, the way I would do anything for him at all. And so when he asks me to escort his soon-to-be bride home, I can only—miserably, broken-heartedly—say yes.

Isolde is nothing like I expect, however. Quiet and lonely and sharp. A girl who likes knives and God. A girl whose nightmares echo my own. And one night while sailing under the cold stars, we share a reckless, tear-soaked kiss.

I’m doomed. Falling in love with Mark was one thing, but his bride too? Being in love with a husband and wife at the same time?

Torture. Misery. A tragedy if tragedies came with bruises, sweat, sighs.

But it isn’t enough to merely fall into the forbidden.

Because in Mark Trevena’s world, the fall is only the beginning…

Leseprobe

salt kiss

LYONESSE

BOOK 1

SIERRA SIMONE

contents

Note on timeline

Prologue

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

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Acknowledgments

Also by Sierra Simone

About the Author

Copyright © 2023 by Sierra Simone

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.

Cover Photographer: Michelle Lancaster

Cover Model: Mitchell Wick

Cover Designer: Hang Le

Editing: Erica Russikoff of Erica Edits

Proofing: Michele Ficht

Without in any way limiting the author’s and publisher’s exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

To Christa, for helping me bloom.

note on timeline

Readers of the New Camelot series will notice there are some discrepancies in the timeline between American King and Salt Kiss. This is so I could selfishly set the Lyonesse series a little further in the future and (even more selfishly) have some fun cameos later on.

Forgive me!

When I set out for Lyonnesse,

A hundred miles away,

The rime was on the spray,

And starlight lit my lonesomeness

When I set out for Lyonnesse

A hundred miles away.

THOMAS HARDY

prologue

In Washington, DC, even the moon looked like a lie. The man stood on the balcony and stared at the red disc that seemed painted right onto the night.

His sister came and joined him at the railing. The sounds of wedding laughter and dancing filtered in from behind them. “Well?” she asked.

“My plans haven’t changed.”

She didn’t think so. She wondered how much he knew. Him, the man who knows, who’s made his business knowing. But it was her business to know too, and the fact that they were twins only made them perfectly matched for the contest. Not that they were always at odds, of course, but her brother played his own game, with his own rules, and with stakes raised higher than any sane person would accept.

She didn’t like to think of the consequences if he ended up losing. She had a wife to keep safe after all, a whip-smart chatterbox who wanted to save the planet with wind turbines and low-carbon diets. She had people at her job who counted on her. She had her own legacy to think about.

“Blanche can’t be hurt by any of it,” she said finally, turning back to gaze at the wedding through the open doors of the ballroom. Their older sister, Blanche, was dancing with her new husband, her face glowing with joy, her fingers twisted in her husband’s jacket. Although Blanche had fallen for Ricker Thomas, a hawkish brigadier general, she was as soft and gentle as they came. She was a pediatric nurse who spent her weekends socializing shelter dogs and doing thankless river cleanups, and she was the kind of doting, generous person that invariably had park benches dedicated to them after they died.

Unlike the twins, she was good, and they’d recognized this from an early age, forging an unspoken pact to keep her as free from the shit of the world as possible. It was unusual for younger siblings to protect an older, but Blanche shone like a candle in winter, and the twins would kill anyone or anything that made the flame gutter. Including each other.

“Blanche will be safe.”

She didn’t believe him, but he already knew that.

“Your plan is stupid,” she told him instead. “And if it hurts Ricker’s son, it will hurt her too.”

Her brother joined her in turning now, and she knew who he was looking for.

Tall and dark-haired. Fair skin that had been suntanned by four grueling deployments to Carpathia. He had a straight nose, high forehead, slashing brows, and a mouth that was unfairly pout shaped. Even though he was only in his late twenties, his forest-green eyes held a lifetime’s worth of sadness and anger.

Tristan Thomas. Blanche’s new stepson. No longer a soldier as of two weeks ago, but still a hero, with all sorts of shiny medals and bright ribbons pinned to the jacket of his dress blues.

She looked over at her twin, not that it mattered. His ruggedly handsome face was unreadable, as usual.

“You could find someone else,” she pointed out.

“It needs to be him,” her brother said.

She didn’t bother arguing with him. He already knew all of what she would say. “And if you succeed? If all this works and you stab Ys through the heart, what then? What happens to Tristan? Your future wife?”

Her brother, Mark Trevena—owner of DC’s wickedest kink club, and once the most feared operator in the CIA—straightened up and buttoned his tuxedo jacket. “There’s time yet to think about it. The wedding isn’t for several months.”

She narrowed her eyes. “A lot can happen between now and then.” Of anyone, Mark should have known that people weren’t pawns. Not that people weren’t meant to be used as pawns, no, no, she didn’t mean that. She was a deputy director of the CIA, had come up as an officer gathering human intelligence. People were meant to be used.

But the trouble with people was that they weren’t inert pieces willing to stay where they were put. They had their own thoughts, however paltry and cliché, and they had their own tender little hearts, and their own little loyalties and patriotisms and gods. Mark might think he could move Tristan Thomas across the board like a pout-mouthed little knight, but Tristan himself might have other plans.

This mysterious future wife of Mark’s might have other plans too.

But Mark wouldn’t move on this, and maybe she wouldn’t have either in his shoes. Tristan was very pretty. And if she’d lost what Mark had lost, she would burn the world down too.

“Just promise me you’ll be the one to answer to Blanche if you corrupt her new stepson,” she said finally.

“Why, Melody,” her twin brother said, his teeth flashing white in the dark, “I would only ever corrupt someone who wanted it.”

one

On paper, I’m already the perfect candidate for the job.

I entered West Point at age seventeen and gave the army eight years after graduating. I’ve been in diplomatic environments and war zones and my last deployment in Carpathia was spent guarding its new president and Carpathia’s beloved former First Lady Lenka Kocur from rebel attacks. There is a Distinguished Service Cross sitting in a box in my dresser next to a valor device and some metal oak leaves; all of it under a neat whorl of dress socks.

I’m trained in risk assessment, surveillance and countersurveillance, armed and unarmed combat, defensive driving, and advanced first aid.

I have no partner, no lover—just a handful of friends who no longer know how to talk to me.

I have no job. No direction. No point.

The email gave me an address, clear as day, but when I pull my father’s modest, American-made hybrid into the parking garage, I see the building I’m meant to go to is on an island in the Potomac. I park and get out of the car, buttoning my suit jacket with one hand while I get my bearings. There is a bridge—narrow, pedestrian only—arcing from the shore to a flat stretch of land. On the island is a building, five stories tall, its exterior clad in glass and its shape like something between a castle and a ship with a sharply angled roof and a prow-shaped front.

The sun glitters off the glass as I finish my survey of the parking lot—five cars, none of them nice enough to belong to my would-be employer, security cameras mounted to the light poles—and then I take the bridge over the water to where my new uncle-in-law works.

Lyonesse.

That’s what this place is called.

An island kingdom that sunk beneath the waves, according to Wikipedia. The ultra-exclusive home for the elite sinners of the world according to internet chatter. With the kind of guests Mark is rumored to entertain here, it’s no surprise this place is impressively secure.

A woman greets me from behind a low desk. I stride forward, reminding myself to smile, because for so long smiling hasn’t been part of the job. I used to smile a lot, I think, before I went over there the first time.

I can’t remember anymore.

As I walk to the desk, I clock the pertinent details of the space, the narrow doors set into the light-wood-paneled wall behind the desk—one leading to something mundane, like a coat closet, the other probably connected to a security office or something similar—and the metal stairs leading up to a glass-walled walkway. There is an elevator and some low, leather-clad benches.

The woman is wearing something almost like normal receptionist’s clothes, but there’s a latex collar wrapped just above the tie-neck of her purple blouse. My step hitches, my pulse gives a thready surge. Her throat is long and slender, and the gleaming latex is so smooth around it, and she’s wearing it so naturally, so casually. Like it’s something utterly normal.

Maybe it is here.

“I’m here for an interview,” I say, recovering. It’s not only the collar—it’s that she’s pretty, with soft hair and high cheeks and a silk blouse that would slip frictionlessly from her shoulders, and I’m still not used to anything silky or soft or tailored. I’m not used to lovely things, expensive things, indulgent things.

Carpathia was cold and muddy, our uniforms rough, everyone in helmets and MCEP glasses, our world shrunk down to dirt, plastic, and metal. When I’d walked down the aisle to join my father at the front of the sanctuary last week, I’d nearly fallen over at the scent of incense lingering in the air. At the reception, I stared at my slice of cake like I thought it was a lie, fairy food to trick the mortal boy into staying in fairyland.

I’m embarrassed at how easily my deployments broke me. Even if I’d never fired a gun, never trembled on freezing pine needles waiting for the shot that would kill me, I’d still have been broken by the sheer fucking monotony of it all. The boredom. The deprivation.

And they call me a hero.

“Of course,” the woman says, coming to her feet and leading me to the elevator in heels a mile high. I keep my eyes on those heels as we go, refusing to leer. We take the elevator up to the topmost floor, pass through a set of glass doors into what seems to be a waiting room. One wall is glass; the rest are pale wood. The floor is polished concrete. I catch reflections of myself all over, and I don’t recognize the tall, suited man as me.

“He’s ready for you.” The woman gestures toward a cracked door in one of the wooden walls. “And I’ll be in the lobby if you need anything. My name is Ms. Lim.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” I reply, and she smiles, like I’ve said something funny. Then she’s pushing her way through the glass doors, and I’m left alone to enter Mark Trevena’s office for my interview.

I smooth my jacket, take a breath. My father would hate my being here, but he’s on his honeymoon and can’t stop me. My mother would have hated it too if she were still alive—before she died, she’d been a respectable suburbanite with a city council seat and plenty of pet causes she volunteered for. No way would she have wanted her son tarnishing his heroic medals with something as tawdry as working for the owner of a kink club.

I don’t know how I feel about it either, honestly. When the email came from Mark a few days ago, inviting me to interview for the position of his new bodyguard, I nearly deleted it. I didn’t know much about him other than what my father had told me, that he was a murderer and a liar and a deviant on top of it. Not to mention that even the idea of a kink club made me feel like I couldn’t breathe.

But I didn’t delete it.

I reread it. I wandered around my father’s empty farmhouse much as I had wandered around it for the past few weeks—aimless, hungry, a shadow—and I wondered how many more aimless weeks were ahead of me. I couldn’t stand to be in the army anymore—not deployed, not behind a desk, not somewhere in between—but the shapelessness of civilian life was a slow-dawning horror. Not since before West Point had there been days upon days of nothing, with no routine, no discipline, no structure.

I needed . . . something. And something more than a job. Something more than hours of boredom followed by slack, empty nothing at the end of the day. Something more than a compressed vessel of civilian life with its small horrors and even smaller stakes. I needed something that would swallow up my time and my thoughts, keep me busy, give shape to my now shapeless life.

And everything in Mark’s email promised that.

Long hours, little autonomy. I’d be a shadow with a gun.

I decided to take the interview. I could always say no after, and I probably would. I didn’t care much for men like Mark, men who killed without facing their enemies.

Agent. Spy.

Assassin.

There were soldiers who cheered them on, soldiers who became them even, but I couldn’t respect anyone who killed without a fair fight, who deceived to get what they wanted, even if what they wanted was to serve the same country I served.

Where was the loyalty in that? How could you trust the fidelity or allegiance of someone without integrity, decency?

But also . . . what did it matter now?

I knew from my father that Mark had been out of the CIA for years; I knew from online gossip that Lyonesse was a BDSM club of sorts. He’d moved from death to sex, and Lyonesse was his. If he was going to be loyal to anything, it would be this world of his own making, and I could understand that. Maybe even trust that.

Still undecided, I walk through the door of his office, which is nestled proudly at the building’s prow. Sunlight lights the space—glass; concrete; pale, pale wood—along with two chairs and a large glass desk. The chair behind the desk is empty, the entire office is empty, and I hesitate for a moment, unsure if I should wait here or go find Ms. Lim again.

But upon a closer inspection of the room, I see a cracked door in the wall behind me and a hallway beyond. Deciding that I have little to lose by walking through it, I push it all the way open and step inside.

If I expected another, more interior office, I’m quickly enlightened—the doorways I pass seem to lead to suites of rooms. I get glimpses of wood floors and low-slung sofas, bookshelves. Maybe Mark lives here. Or wants people to think he lives here.

But it’s the door at the end of the hall that catches my attention. It’s held open without a prop, like it’s designed to stay open when needed. Stairs lead up to a glowing well of early spring sunshine. I take them and emerge onto the roof. There’s a shimmering pool at one end, and at another, there’s a large sunshade stretched over a table with two chairs. Underneath it sits Mark Trevena, my new uncle-in-law and my potential employer.

He stands up as I approach and extends a hand for me to shake.

“Tristan, good to see you again,” he greets me, his voice cool.

“Likewise, sir,” I say as I take his hand. His grip is strong enough that my nerve endings spark, and a strange heat lingers after he lets go. The breeze moves over the roof just then, and I can smell⁠—

Clean skin and⁠—

Rain, maybe. Fresh rain with thunder in the air.

The scent hits me harder even than Ms. Lim’s latex and silk, than the cake at the wedding. It’s so subtle . . . and yet . . . 

I try to shake it off as Mark gestures for me to sit and then returns to his chair with an easy, muscular grace, but it becomes harder, not easier, to keep my mind on business as I’m able to get a good look at him.

He is everything that I missed while deployed.

His suit, a casual blue, is tailored so perfectly that I can see the suggestion of powerful shoulders and biceps, the narrow taper of his waist. His tie is a silk that gleams softly, expensively, while his shirt is a creamy white that begs for someone to touch it. A large watch, the kind that would reflect light and get you killed on a mission, glints from underneath his jacket sleeve. Even the way he picks up a rocks glass of something cold and clear—it speaks of time. Luxury. Sensuous enjoyment.

And his face . . . 

I look down for a moment, at the table setting laid out and waiting for me on this rooftop, almost incredulous with myself. I’ve seen him before, at the wedding; I already knew about the dark blond hair and the jaw dusted with the same tarnished gold. The blue eyes and straight, thick brows and strong nose with a subtle bump, like it’s been broken before.

His mouth is shockingly full but also geometrically drawn. Hypnotic.

I’m grateful when someone approaches us, a slim young man in black trousers and a corset, his red hair pulled into a ponytail. He sets down salads before us both, leaves us with goblets of water, and asks if I’d like anything stronger. I refuse. Mark gestures for another of whatever he’s drinking, and the young man gives a graceful nod.

I pick up a fork on instinct—a soldier eats when he can—and pause. The salad is like nothing I’ve ever seen before, a green-and-purple-and-yellow creation designed to look like a butterfly’s wings. The dressing is painted in delicate lines to make antennae along the top. Chopped chives are scattered in arcs, as if emulating the wafts of air coming from beating wings.

There’s no need to have a salad this beautiful, this eerily lifelike, and when I look up, I have a moment when reality feels subtly unreal.

This is a job interview at a sex club, with a man known to be a killer. Everything about this should have been tawdry, cheap, and gritty. Instead, I’m sitting atop a glass bower, the low-slung view of the Capitol in front of me, the river all around, with a salad that is more finely worked than a piece of jewelry. And the man in front of me . . . 

It’s a mistake to look at him again. At the wedding, he’d been a figure in the shadows, only in the light once, to walk his older sister down the aisle to my father. I’d been my father’s best man, watching his new bride with whatever hope I was capable of mustering these days. It had been a good thing, that wedding. But I’d no longer felt good things the way I should anymore, and the moment I caught sight of Mark in his tux, his strong, tan neck above the crisp lines of his collar and bow tie, his long lashes framing eyes the color of night, I’d looked away until Blanche was in front of my father and Mark was gone.

I can’t look away now. This is an interview, and I need to focus.

I just—wish I couldn’t smell that rain scent of him. I wish the salad weren’t so beautiful. I wish my impression of this place weren’t now tied to light and water and air. It will make it harder to say no later if I want.

“I promise it’s not too pretty to eat,” says Mark.

I finally drag my eyes to his. The sunlight makes no secret of his strong features or the small things that mar them. The barely there gold stubble, the broken flare at the bridge of his nose. A thin scar disappearing into his hair.

“I didn’t realize there’d be food,” I say, trying to claw back a sense of normalcy. It’s strange that I should be unsettled by a man, a pretty salad, a far view.

It’s the years in scratchy canvas and cold mud that have ruined me.

“I thought this was an interview. Sir.”

“You can learn a lot about someone from the way they eat,” observes Mark as he lifts his own fork. With the side of a silver tine, he presses into one of the butterfly wings until there’s the crisp sound of it breaking in half. Something bright red oozes out. A sauce made with beets, I think. “Something I learned as a soldier.”

“You were a soldier?” This surprises me. My father had talked about Mark like Mark had sprung from the low-piled carpet of Langley fully formed. I know sometimes soldiers are recruited directly into the CIA’s paramilitary arm, but it hadn’t occurred to me that Mark might have been one of them once upon a time.

“I was.”

“And what were you after that?” I think I’m asking to make a point, or to separate us maybe. Make it clear that we are not the same.

Mark’s mouth moves as if he can guess what I’m thinking. It’s almost like a smile. “Something worse.”

It’s the honesty that unnerves me. And him, he unnerves me. Sitting across from him is like walking through the trees in Carpathia, my rifle at the ready.

I look down at my plate for something to do and readjust my grip on my fork. The butterfly wing crunches as I cut into it. I take a bite and bright flavor explodes on my tongue. The salad is crisp, tender, well dressed. The edible flowers mixed in are sweet.

I look up to see Mark watching me.

“I told you,” he says. He sounds satisfied.

“It’s very good,” I admit.

“Tell me about your duties in the army,” Mark says. He leans back to take a drink, his eyes never leaving my face. He’s watching me chew and swallow. I swipe a knuckle over my lower lip.

It suddenly feels like something more charged than a job interview, but I can’t say why. His face is neutral, his voice contained, polite.

But it is an interview. I have to answer, and so I do. I outline my four deployments as objectively as I can, their locations, their purposes. I don’t talk about the ARCOM from the second deployment or the Bronze Star that they’ve nominated me for from the last. Surely Mark knows all that. And anyway, it doesn’t mean I’m better at a job.

It just means I lived while others died.

Our salads are replaced with charred duck breast and pickled celeriac. Crescents of pureed parsnips and potatoes, creamy and tender. It’s the best food I’ve ever eaten, and it’s on top of a glass palace built on debauchery. Maybe anything tastes good after so many months of DFAC food or MREs in a grubby outpost, but I don’t think that’s it.

Mark sips his drink as I finish telling him about my duties and assignments. He’s on his third and is remarkably steady. I get the sense that he must drink often, and I log that away for the conditional future. If I take this job, I’ll need to know his habits, his mental state. It’s easier to keep sober men alive—something I learned the hard way while on diplomatic escort duty.

After I stop talking and put down my fork, Mark assesses me. And then he sets down his drink.

“I’ll be brief. You are the only candidate. I need a new primary bodyguard, someone who can be with me almost constantly. There will be relief shifts, of course, and time off, but not as much as would be ideal. It will necessitate travel and living proximate to me.”

The server comes and removes our plates, but instead of presenting us with dessert, he sets a slim leather folio in front of me, and then hands a thicker one to Mark. A pen comes with mine. Expensive, gleaming, nothing like the pens I carried with me on deployment, which were cheap and plastic and came in boxes of twenty.

I open the folio as Mark speaks.

“This is a nondisclosure agreement before our conversation goes any further. It’s not an agreement to anything other than your silence; you’ll see the usual niceties there.”

Niceties. It is five pages of thinly veiled legal threats. On the other hand, being in the United States military has inured me to threats. When the stakes are being court-martialed, you get good at keeping your mouth shut as a matter of course.

I uncap the pen and sign, watching the ink bleed into the paper.

“Wonderful,” says Mark. He takes the folio from me, hands it to the server without looking at him. The thicker portfolio takes its place. I open it up and then I cough.

I’m greeted with words like anal hook and cock and ball torture.

I look up to Mark, who returns my gaze with a mild one of his own.

“I see why you had me sign the NDA first.”

“Surely, you’re not shocked by what happens in a kink club,” says Mark. “But either way, it’s best you acquaint yourself with the possibilities before you take this job. Being on my security team means you’ll be inside Lyonesse and my own . . . habits. I’ll need to know what limits you have when it comes to witnessing kink. I’ll also need to know how much flexibility there is to those limits. I cannot always predict, for example, what might be happening in the private rooms when we walk down a hallway. What you might hear or see through the windows. What might be happening in the booths around the dance floor.”

“And your . . . habits? Sir?”

“You would be my personal bodyguard,” says Mark, as if the problem is obvious. “There would be no one closer to me.”

“Do you really need this?” I ask. I look around us at the rooftop, the serene blue sky, the corseted server coming toward us with plates of something colorful and sweet looking. “This place is for sex, right? Why would you be in any danger running a place for people to have sex?”

Mark’s jaw moves the tiniest bit, like he’s pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth while he thinks about answering. Then he says, “Kink and sex aren’t always the same thing, firstly. Secondly, I think you must have a very charmed view on sex if you think the mere presence of it precludes danger. And thirdly, Lyonesse is in rather a special situation. We exclusively invite the famous and the powerful to be members, and we take their membership payments only in information.”

It takes me a minute to understand. When I do, I feel something between disgust and admiration. “Payment in information. And then you use it for what? Blackmail?”

Mark lifts his drink as the server sets the desserts down. I don’t take up my spoon just yet, watching Mark swirl the ice in his glass once and then take a practiced swallow. The server leaves, and Mark swirls his glass again.

“Yes, blackmail,” he answers. “Sometimes.”

“Sometimes.”

“Blackmail is an axe. No matter how sharp the blade, you can’t expect it to work as delicately as a scalpel. There are much better uses for my information than cracking apart logs.”

“But axes and scalpels alike can make enemies, sir.”

“Just so.”

I pick up the folio. “I’ll need time to think about it.”

“You have a week,” says Mark. He hasn’t touched his dessert yet either. “I want it to be you, but I can’t wait much longer than that. To my regret.”

I nod and stand. He stands as well and shakes my hand, and once again, sparks spray up my nerve endings at his touch.

Touch-starved—that’s what the combat stress counselor said after my last mandated session. Skin hunger. She recommended hugging my dad, getting a pet, and downloading a dating app. I dismissed all three at the time, but if I’m having to catch my breath after a handshake, then maybe it’s necessary.

“I’ll let you know, sir,” I say, and then I walk down through the glass fortress of Lyonesse with the folio under my arm and my mind replaying the crunch of his fork against the butterfly’s wings over and over again.

two

I’m aware of two things as I flip through the portfolio that night, beer in hand, my father’s empty Virginia farmhouse creaking and sighing around me.

The first is that this job should be everything I hate. I hate lying, thieving, manipulation—and Mark doesn’t even do that for our country anymore; he does it for himself. That’s greed; that’s selfishness. And that’s even on top of how Mark makes a living, which is with his kingdom of vice.

I flip through page after page of acts of sex and pain and humiliation, having to Google half the things I come across, even with the helpful descriptions printed after each term. I know nothing about this world; I barely know anything about sex that hasn’t come from porn. Porn that apparently was limited in scope if I’m having to research this much.

I’m a walking punch line—a twenty-nine-year-old combat veteran who’s also a virgin. And I’m going to shadow someone who’s made a living out of screwing?

But the second thing is wholly and incontrovertibly this: I can’t live another day as Tristan Thomas, unemployed former soldier.

I can’t stay in my father’s farmhouse, even though I know he’d let me, since he’s moved in with Blanche in the city. I can’t spend my hours trying to read, trying to watch TV, driving around the not-quite-suburban, not-quite-country roads instead. Running until my lungs feel like they’re made of broken glass. Jerking off with my teeth clenched together as if I’m still afraid of waking my teammates.

I have to do something.

Or rather—God help the soldier left in me—someone has to tell me to do something.

It only takes me until midnight to email and accept the job. I don’t bother countering the salary or benefits—after the army, they both look embarrassingly good. Probably to make up for the meager time off, but I don’t care. I don’t want time off.

After I send the email, I take a shower and go to bed in my teenage bedroom, which still smells faintly of cheap cologne and deflated basketballs. I fall asleep to a cold wind blowing against the old house, dreaming instead of wind against new tents. Of a long convoy, a coffee-stained paper map. Bullets spraying through ferns and, just once, through a carotid artery.

Dream me already knows they’ll write up a citation for that bullet, nominate me for something. They’ll say I’m a hero; they’ll talk about courage and valor like they’re lucid, uncomplicated things.

But dream me knows it’ll be a lie, just as I know it’s a lie every moment that I’m awake.

There’s nothing simple about killing. Not ever, but especially when they want to give you a medal for killing your best friend.

* * *

The next Monday, I’m back at Lyonesse. Ms. Lim, wearing no collar this time but instead a set of keys at her narrow waist, takes me behind the desk to a hallway. To my validation, it does indeed lead to a security room, albeit one much bigger than I imagined.

She leaves me with a giant of a man named Goran, who has deep gold-tan skin, black hair buzzed short, and a tattoo of an insignia featuring a grim reaper on the back of his neck, peeking above the collar of his suit jacket. Before he turns to greet me, I catch the lettering around the edges of the insignia—First Battalion, Ninth Marines. The Walking Dead.

“Hello, new guy,” he says cheerfully. He’s older than me by a couple of decades, with plenty of lines around his eyes and a starburst scar on the side of his mouth. He has a broad face with a lantern jaw, and a twinkling gaze. He looks like the kind of guy whose laughter fills a bar—also the kind of guy a bartender looks to for help with an unruly patron. But I don’t miss the quick, efficient flick of that same twinkling gaze over the wall of screens in front of him. A former 1/9 like him would be more than a gentle giant. And Mark doesn’t strike me as the kind of employer to hire someone for their genial personality alone.

“I’m Tristan Thomas, sir,” I say, taking his offered hand and then sitting in the chair next to him. “Ms. Lim said you’d be showing me around today?”

“Kink club orientation, right, right,” Goran says, reaching for a sheaf of papers. “We have a bit of an unusual situation with your position.”

“A bit of one?” I ask as I accept the papers and then a pen. I use the long desk in front of the security screens to start flipping through everything. My employment contract. Another NDA. A direct deposit form. “Everything in this place is unusual.”

Goran laughs, and I’m right, it’s a sound that fills a room. It almost makes me smile, it’s that nice to hear. “Damn right it is, but you’ll like it. You just got back from Carpathia, right? Well, the food is better, and the view too. Plus you’ll never meet a more unhinged son of a bitch than Mark Trevena—never a boring day with him around.”

“Right,” I say. I start signing my way through the papers without giving them more than a cursory once-over. Like I said, the military has ruined me for signing my life away.

“But your position is unusual even for here. See, I’m the head of Lyonesse’s security, but as his personal bodyguard, you’ll report to Mr. Trevena directly. Or put another way, he’s your boss but come to me with all the boring shit, and I’ll handle it.”

“Got it. Are there other people on Lyonesse’s security team?”

Goran leans back in his chair. “There are ten of us—eleven including you—and then an outside team we contract with for larger events. Since Mr. Trevena’s primary residence is here, the team is available for your relief shifts whenever Mr. Trevena is in DC. But when he travels, you’ll be on call twenty-four-seven. All done already? You don’t waste too much time reading the fine print, huh?”

I slide the papers his way, pen placed neatly on top. “Nothing’s worse than where I’ve been.” I mean it in a gallows humor sort of way, like ha-ha, isn’t it funny that I spent the last eight years of my life getting yelled at, shot at, getting scared and scorned and was somehow still lonely even around sixty other people? but Goran’s face goes still when I say it.

“Yeah,” he says, and something in his voice makes me wonder if he was in Carpathia back when President Colchester was there, when the war was still a war and not a conflict.

The Walking Dead re-earned their nickname several times over in Carpathia—highest killed-in-action ratio of any Marine battalion. And for a minute, the difference between Marine and soldier disappears, and we’re just two men hiding scars on the insides of our thoughts, scars in the shape of mountains and forests and too-empty villages.

“Yeah,” he says again, heavily, and then stands. “Come on. We’ll find someone to man the cameras, and then I’ll take you for the nickel tour before I give you to the boss.”

* * *

I’m given a laptop, earpiece, gun, and harness. Then I meet two of the other security team members and get acquainted with the shift rotations—skeleton crew during the day, with increasing shift coverage toward the evening. The club is busiest from dinner till two or three in the morning; Fridays and Saturdays are the busiest of them all, with members drinking, fucking, and making use of private rooms until dawn. I get the impression that Goran runs an amiable but tight ship, and the two team members I meet seem to respect him immensely.

On an upper floor, we stop by some glass-walled offices and meet the club’s manager, Dinah—a slender woman with dark, jewel-toned skin, undercut purple curls, and a cell phone that won’t stop chiming with club business as we make introductions—and Sedge, a fair and freckled young man with nearly colorless eyes, who’s Mark’s administrative assistant. We also meet a pale woman with a wary expression and dark hair in waves over her shoulders. Andrea, the club’s treasurer. I don’t know if she is the treasurer of the club’s money or of its hoard of information. I wonder if she helps Mark with his sometimes-blackmail.

She doesn’t seem to like me.

But Goran’s cheerfulness bulldozes through any awkward moments, and then we’re touring the building: the large open hall in the center, ringed with balconies and with a stage at the front; the private rooms, furnished in the most luxurious depravity and outfitted with panic buttons and cameras for the safety of guests and club employees alike; the decadent, speakeasy-style bar on the second-highest floor.

“They’ll tell you in some corporate bullshit seminar that you can only have one priority,” Goran says as we take the elevators down past the ground floor and to a subfloor. “But you’re better than that, so I can tell you that we have two priorities here at Lyonesse. The first is to keep everyone here safe—guests and employees. The second is to keep this floor locked down at all fucking costs.”

The elevator doors open not to a dank concrete corridor but to a spacious vestibule lit with blue lights. Glass double doors are opposite our elevator, and beyond them, I see a second set. I also see a thumbprint scanner, a retina scanner, and a surfeit of cameras.

I don’t need Goran to tell me what’s down here. “The information.”

“Membership dues,” Goran says, sounding pleased at my deduction. “Servers are down here. All sorts of fancy stuff to keep them cool and air-gapped and whatever else. We don’t need to know all the tech-y shit, but it’s our job to make sure no one comes down here except Mr. Trevena, Dinah, and Andrea. It’s rigged up pretty tight against someone trying to get something, but it’s not foolproof.”

“Rigged up?”

Goran nods at the locks. “Any attempt to open the doors without a valid thumb and retina scan will trigger an alarm. The floor around the servers is built with weight sensors—if there’s any kind of unauthorized approach to the machines, the room responds by sealing itself off with aluminum shutters, and the servers will power down. Nothing online and no way out until we let you out.”

“And that’s not foolproof?”

He scratches his neck. “There’s a lot of machinery to shut down, and it has to go offline in the right way so nothing is corrupted, or something—I don’t know. The upshot is that someone conceivably could have nearly a full minute to connect with the servers and try to get something.”

“But then they’d still be locked in the room.”

“Yeah. Unless they rolled out from under the doors before they came all the way down—but you have less than sixty seconds from triggering the sensor to the room being sealed off. So it’s unlikely someone could get what they wanted and then make it back out in time, but unlikely isn’t impossible, and we’d do well not to forget that.”

I look through the two sets of doors again, able to make out a larger room beyond, lit with more blue light. I wonder what kind of information people surrender when they come—and if it’s worth it, knowing someone has the potential to blackmail you at a moment’s notice.

As if sensing where my thoughts are, Goran says, “It doesn’t have to be information about yourself, you know.”

I glance back at him, confused. “What else would people give, sir?”

“Oh, my sweet army puppy,” Goran laughs. “Information about other people, of course. Or information they’ve gotten from whatever jobs or positions they have. We have a Moldovan diplomat here, for example—he’s not telling Mr. Trevena about the time he cheated on his college girlfriend. He’s telling Mr. Trevena about arms deals. New mercenary groups. Cabinet members who sympathize with the continuing rebellion in Carpathia. That sort of thing.”

I look back at the server room with a new respect . . . and a new wariness. When Mark and I spoke of blackmail the other day, I suppose I had been thinking of all the shallow and tawdry peccadilloes that people would be desperate to buy silence for. Not state secrets. Not whispers of martial movements, governmental shifts, and all the other tesserae that come together to form a mosaic of a world still dragging itself back from the edge of war.

“Now,” Goran says, shepherding me back to the elevator. “Let’s see your new digs.”

Part of my employment offer was to live here at the club, and it’s something I’ve accepted, since commuting in from the farmhouse would be a pain in the ass, and this place comes rent free. Mark is paying me enough that I could afford a decent apartment nearby, but it seems like a waste to pay for a home I’ll barely be in.

And when I see my apartment on the third floor, I know I’ve made the right decision. It’s in the prow of the building like his office above me, with glass walls overlooking the river, a small but expensive kitchen, and equally expensive furnishings. I walk over to one of the glass walls while Goran explains parking and a few other details to me. The prow doesn’t face the city, but rather the Potomac itself, pointed like a ship about to sail to sea. For a minute, I imagine it is, that the whole building is moving to the open ocean, spreading massive sails above it.

“ . . . and he’ll be expecting you in his office within the hour. My guess is that he’ll go over his rules and requirements and what he’ll need from you then.”

I nod, my eyes still on the place where river meets sky, thinking of Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic beyond.

“ . . . and you should know that no one will think any differently of you. You can’t work at a place like this and not have it change the way you think about things, and if any one of us were in your shoes, we would probably end up doing it too. Mark has that way about him, and this place has a way about it too. Gets into your bones. Makes you want things you thought you would never.” A pause and then a cheerful: “And his last bodyguard never seemed anything but over the moon with the arrangement.”

I turn away from the view and stare at the former Marine, utterly lost. “Pardon, sir?”

Goran’s eyebrows lift and then his mouth slowly closes as his hands come up. He’s the picture of someone saying oh shit, never mind. “You know what, I shouldn’t have said anything,” he says, seeming to fumble a little. “It’s nothing. You’ll hash all that out, I’m sure. Or not. Either way, none of my business.”

I open my mouth to tell him to stop, to explain himself, but he’s already beating a hasty goodbye, surprisingly brisk for such a large man.

Mark has that way about him.

Makes you want things you thought you would never.

Maybe Goran just means working here in general. Here, where the mundane is made of blindfolds and ropes and the extraordinary is kept locked away below the waterline, trapped behind two sets of glass doors.

With a final look around my new home, I leave to find Mark upstairs and start my new life as his shadow.

three

“Ah, my new bodyguard,” says Mark as I’m let into his office by Ms. Lim.

He’s standing up from his chair and his suit jacket is off, thrown over the side of his desk next to a laptop, a folder, and his seemingly perennial glass of vodka or gin on the rocks. The other day on the roof, I saw his proportions under the immaculate tailoring of his suit, but without the jacket, with only the expensive cotton of his button-down shirt, I can see that he’s more than just well shaped. The neat lines of his waist leading into his trousers and the curves of his arms and shoulders are those of a man in his prime.

Goran had showed me a gym here—available for all club guests and employees—but strangely, I can’t picture Mark in it, fussing over the kinds of muscles that are for show. He’d be more into running and calisthenics, maybe. Push-ups in the morning, squats and sit-ups after.

I tell myself I’m only noticing because I may need to help scout running routes when we travel. His habits are my business now.

“Good afternoon, sir,” I say, coming to stand in front of his desk.

“I take it Goran has taken care of the paperwork and the essentials. He explained the dress code to you?”

“Yes, sir.” It isn’t much of a dress code—suits in black or gray, an issued firearm, and a leather shoulder harness for wearing said firearm. But there is a stipend for the suits at least.

Mark looks at the suit I’m wearing now, his gaze trailing from the slightly too-short trouser cuffs to the tightness at the shoulders. It’s something my father bought me after I graduated West Point, saying that a man always needed at least one suit for the occasions he couldn’t wear his dress uniform to. It’s eight years old now.

“I’ll give you the name of the tailor I’d like you to see.” He holds up a hand, as if forestalling any protest. “I’ll make sure the club covers it. You are mine now, so I’ll need you to look the part.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Those army manners,” he says. “They’ll fit in well here. Did you meet Sedge?”

“Yes, sir.”

“He will email over my schedule each day, along with travel itineraries. I’ll try to give you as much notice as I can with travel, so you can make whatever security arrangements you’ll need to make, but many of my trips are unexpected, so my promises are cheap. When we’re here at the club, most of my meetings will be here in my office—and for most of those, you will be asked to wait outside, as a show of privacy and discretion for my members.”

I nod.

“In the evenings,” Mark says, lifting his jacket off the desk and shrugging it on, “if I’m not traveling or having dinner in the city, I’ll generally eat in the club and then make my presence known after. I’ll take meetings there too, more informally. Unless I’m in a private room or I explicitly dismiss you, I’ll expect you to be close.”

He tugs at the cuffs of his jacket sleeves with crisp efficiency. I see that silver watch again and think of how it would glitter through the trees or from the window of an abandoned building. I was able to return fire at someone in a dark alley once because they were wearing a watch just like that.

How strange life is now, that wearing something that can reflect light feels unbearably and ostentatiously reckless. Mark’s hand drops to the folder on his desk, his fingertips skimming the front. “You emailed over your consent to what you might witness at the club and your limits.”

My eyes drop to the folder. He gave me the folio filled with terms and explanations. He sees stuff every day I can’t even imagine; what’s more, he facilitates it. It should not feel like such a private thing to share, what I can withstand watching in a professional setting.

“No waterworks or scat,” says Mark, not flipping open the folder, as if he already has the salient points of its contents memorized. “That’s quite all right, as we don’t do that here at Lyonesse. You seem comfortable potentially witnessing everything else, which I’d expect from someone with your record overseas. Watching someone happily being caned is certainly better than watching someone’s fingers get blown off because they lit a cigarette after dusk. Although . . . ”

I know what’s coming. When I’d walked in, I’d automatically shifted into a parade rest position, my feet planted and my hands behind my back, and now I feel the tiniest impulse to fidget, to rub my thumbs together. I resist.

“You’ve annotated wax play here,” continues Mark. “Not as a hard limit but as something you would find hard to watch.”

His blue eyes lift to mine, and I feel the penetrating force of his gaze.

“Normally, I wouldn’t interrogate someone on limits, but we’re in a special circumstance and wax play is exceptionally common. And”—a small tilt of his head—“rather initiatory-level stuff when it comes to kink. So I admit I’m curious. And for work purposes, I do need to know if this is a mild aversion or if it’s something more painful than that.”

“No,” I say before I can think about how I want to phrase my explanation. “Not painful. And not an . . . aversion.” And then I flush. Embarrassingly, humiliatingly.

I’m twenty-nine and I’m hot-cheeked about wax.

A beat passes as Mark studies me. “I see,” he says. “And so the other thing you’ve marked here—breeding kinks⁠—”

I have to look down at the floor. “Also not an aversion,” I manage to say. My jaw is tight, my face is on fire. “I just wanted to tag that I might struggle to stay professional if we were watching something. Like that.”

I hear footsteps; when I’m able to force my eyes up, Mark is in front of me. He’s shaved since I saw him last, and his face without stubble is like something from a magazine. Too handsome, too striking, too entrancing to be hidden under a helmet and protective eyewear. No wonder the CIA poached him and sent him out to woo and lie and kill.

“Breeding,” he murmurs. The word on his lips is sinful.

“Sir.”

“Is it about pregnancy? Procreation?”

I want to die. “It’s not about pregnancy.”

I have to dredge the words out of my chest. It’s the first time I’ve ever spoken about this. Ever. “I like . . . I like the closeness,” I add with some difficulty. “The idea of leaving part of yourself inside someone.”

“So it’s about the fluid itself. Like a creampie kink.”

“Yes, but—” I’m struggling. It’s so much easier to type breeding into a porn site and let the search engine do the work than frame this in words spoken out loud. In front of my boss. “It’s more than unprotected sex.”

It’s the ownership, the claiming. The idea of using someone . . . or being used myself.

“It’s not about actually making babies,” I repeat, just to make it extremely clear. “I, um. The breeding kink is for me too. Not just for what I’d like to do to someone else.”

Mark’s expression doesn’t change, but his pupils do.

They bloom.

“Good to know,” he says after a minute. “In that case, rest assured that I don’t expect you to be made of stone when it comes to the things that happen at Lyonesse. In fact, I’d be rather disappointed if you were.”

“Sir,” I say. It takes more willpower than I’m proud of to hold that sharp, perceptive gaze.

The corner of his mouth indents. “Well, with that settled, I have a meeting in the city. You may as well come and begin getting acquainted with the little chores that make up my day.”

four

“They will be curious about you,” Mark says later that night as we take the elevator up to the central hall of the club.

“Who?”

“Everyone” is the reply as the elevator comes to a stop and the doors open.

I’m doubtful as I follow Mark down a glass-walled corridor. After spending the day in the back seat of a car and standing outside two different doors—one of them at an office for a company that sells weighted blankets of all things—I’m already settling into being a nearly inanimate shadow, and I find the idea of being the subject of anyone’s curiosity faintly ludicrous.

I suppose if they knew who my father was, there might be the tiniest flicker of interest—at least for any DC natives familiar with the minor leadership in the American military, or for any international guests who might benefit from leveraging such a connection.

Even though he can’t see my frown, Mark seems to know which way my thoughts are tending and says over his shoulder, “I suppose I should have asked this earlier, but would you like to work here under a pseudonym? On account of your father?”

I think a moment. “No, sir.”

I’m not famous, and in the world of generals, my father barely ranks as anyone of note. And if Mark can stride around his club with everyone knowing he used to work for the CIA and that his twin sister currently does—well, I can handle the tiny chance that someone might connect Tristan Thomas to General Ricker Thomas.

“As you wish,” Mark replies, and then we walk through a secure door to the titanic central hall at the heart of the club. The ceiling, a few stories above, is a pitched tent of glass and steel. During the day, it gave the space the feeling of a cathedral. At night, it’s a canopy of purple-streaked clouds and whichever stars are bright enough to burn through the city’s glow. It stretches over the space as if to say, yes, night children, the time for sinning is now.

And sinning they are, dancing, drinking, probably more, judging from the amount of skin I see. I flick my eyes quickly over the crowd on the floor, seeing nothing dangerous, and then return my attention to the balconies. Above us are two more levels and then a floor with windows overlooking the space—the upper story of the club, where Mark lives. Our own balcony is made up of nooks, some filled with chairs and some with leather-upholstered booths.

I follow Mark to the largest one, in the center of the balcony, with an unobstructed view of the stage and a black leather armchair surrounded by other chairs, these armless. By some sort of architectural genius, the nook is not nearly as loud as the hall itself. When I take my place at the back, several paces behind Mark’s armchair, I can hear Goran’s genial tones in my earpiece clear as day.

“Well, kid? What do you think?”

“It’s busy, sir,” I say, using our new stationary position to more carefully take in the room and the club’s guests.

“Yeah, and it’s only a Tuesday. Just wait until the weekend.”

“I can’t imagine.”

I really can’t. The place seems full to bursting now. It must be a zoo then. A nightmare to continually assess risk in. I think of the parades and rallies I had to work in Carpathia while doing diplomatic escorts, and anxiety flicks hotly across the skin of my nape.

“Don’t worry about it,” replies Goran easily. “Club duty will be a piece of cake because no one is suicidal enough to take on Mark Trevena on his home turf. It’s mostly just reminding the people wasting his time that he’s invulnerable.”

“Wasting his time?”

“You’ll see,” Goran says, and then the line clicks off.

Dinah, the club manager, joins us soon after, wearing not the tailored pantsuit I saw her in earlier but a strapless leather jumpsuit, tight and corseted, baring her gleaming shoulders. When she sits next to Mark, I hear Mark say, “Well?”

“He’s mollified for now,” Dinah says. With the nook the way that it is, I can hear them easily, even while standing behind them. “But we need to tread carefully. If he’s recognized . . . ”

“I’m aware of what he’s risking. We’ve given him every allowance Lyonesse can offer. Does he think he needs more privacy than the president of the United States?”

The president of the United States . . .  I’m glad no one is looking at me just now because I’m certain my expression is betraying my shock. I think about how long Lyonesse has been open, and then I have to wonder which president came here—the late President Maxen Colchester, who died in a Carpathian terrorist attack two years ago, or the current president, Embry Moore, who married Colchester’s widow.

From behind them, I can only see Dinah’s hand lift, palm upwards, as if in a shrug. “He seems to think so.”

Their conversation is cut short when they’re joined by three more people—Andrea the treasurer, still wearing what she was wearing earlier today, and a suited man I don’t recognize with dark olive skin and long hair leading a shirtless man on a leash. He sits next to Mark, greeting the others, while the leashed man sinks to a graceful kneeling position next to his chair.

I blink a moment. Despite the fetish clothing on the dance floor tonight—and the nonzero amount of nudity—this is the first time I’ve seen someone explicitly . . . submitting. Even after all the research I had to do to get through Mark’s consent forms, it’s jarring to see a grown adult, a man tall and layered with muscle, allowing himself to be led around like a dog.

After eight years in the army, and the four before it at West Point, the very idea is taboo. Strength and pride—they run as rigidly through my concept of masculinity as wrought iron, as sharp as barbed wire.

And yet I think of the army. Of standing at attention, of marching in straight lines. Of the sweet relief of being told where to go and what to do there, even if it was only dropping to the ground and busting out push-ups until our arms gave out.

I shake it off.

It’s entirely different.