“No, he won’t. Because, like I said, I have a plan.”
She inspects my face.
“All right,” she says, and I can hear the trust in her words. It comes with responsibility, but I’ve never taken on a mission more readily than I’m taking on this one. I will save Isolde from the monster, if it’s the last thing I do.
I make to get up and pull up a chair, but Isolde stops me, grabbing my hand. She stares at me out of big blue sparkling eyes, and a sensation of melting goes through my body.
“Can I ask you something, Tristan?”
“Sure, whatever you want. But eat first.” I sit down in a chair, my back at the terrace doors, my face to Isolde.
She starts picking at the sausages—I’ve noticed what she likes to eat during the meals we’ve all had together in the dining hall these past few days. I tell myself it doesn’t mean anything, in my business I have to notice everyone’s preferences, but I did take special note of hers. In fact, she picks at her food more than she eats it, but I can tell under normal circumstances she’d love what she puts on her plate.
“It’s something that Mark wonders about as well,” she says, taking a small bite of sausage, then reaching for a salt pretzel. “It’s on his mind quite a lot. Actually, if I think about it, he’s becoming obsessed with you, he wants to know you on a very intimate level.”
My stomach revolts, but I repress any physical reaction that might betray that.
“What did you want to ask me?” my white dove, I want to add, but I stop in time. I do take my hand to my chest, though, pretending to arrange the open sides of my shirt. It’s a very strange sensation, this need of calling her a pet name, as if that could do her good in some way.
“Well, it’s about—” She takes a sip of the orange juice, but I know she’s stalling. I lean forward and take her hand.
“Like I said, you can ask me anything. You can do no wrong.”
A smile quivers on her face. “I’m sorry for blabbering around, it’s just that you look so forbidding, so dangerous.”
“I could never become dangerous to you.” Even my voice grows much softer with her. It’s still deep, but no longer hard, it’s pleasant, like I’m inviting her to trust me, open up to me. Snap out of it, Tristan.
“Well.” She sets the glass down, her fragile hand beginning to sweat. She’s nervous, and I think I am, too.
“I was wondering about your love life. I mean, I know, you said you were never in love, you said that being trained as an assassin ever since you were child made certain things hard if not impossible, but still.” She raises her eyes meekly at me. “You don’t look like a man who’s lived without, well, without sex forever.” She’s so careful with the word ‘sex’ that I could jump on her. Damn, I’m full of impulses I don’t understand.
“I—” What do I tell her? I can’t possibly tell her the truth. But then I look into her expectant eyes, and I just can’t lie to her. Serpaint abused her physically and emotionally. If I lie to her, I would be abusing her as well. And I want to be her protector, her... her what? Her father, her brother? Her lover?
“Well?” She nudges when I don’t speak.
I take a deep breath. Okay, here we go.
“I used women.” That didn’t come out right, I rub my forehead. “Er....”
“Used?”
“Only if they were into that kind of stuff, too. Okay, here it goes. As assassins, we were trained to direct our sexual energy into battle, focus, strategy. If we got horny, we trained harder, or we’d go meditate while sharpening our blades. As boys and teenagers, if we had hard-ons in the morning, they’d take us out into the cold and make us walk in circles with a slab on our shoulders with two full buckets of water on each end. Often for a full hour. They’d do that no matter the weather, even in extreme cold. Often we returned frostbitten, but, if properly trained, the human body can regenerate quickly and recover from just about anything. And, if anything, we were properly trained.
“Now, sure, sex drive is something powerful that you can’t repress or re-focus forever, but all that training and punishment re-shaped the sexual needs and sexual expression of many assassins. Insiders know we’re, well, whacked. The more carnage and mayhem clutter an assassin’s resume, the less he’ll be able to see more than that in a sexual partner—meat.”
Isolde extracts her hand from mine, and it hurts. My hand feels empty, pointless. I clench my jaw as she braces herself.
“I’ll stop, if you want.”
“No. Go on.” Her voice is softer than I expected.
Continuing is hard. By the way my cheeks burn, and by the unwillingness to do it I take it I’m experiencing shame, but there’s no way around it now.
“I actually never had experiences with women before I became a vampire. After all, I was only eighteen at the time Lord Dracula turned me. But vampirism comes with a great inclination for the carnal. We do feed on blood, after all. So needs and desires that I had repressed for the first eighteen years of my life bubbled to the surface, and eventually boiled over.” I bite my lip. “Lord Dracula sent me to help a witch once. She was a dark witch, her skin crawling with ancient drawings. She was very sensual, and she enjoyed being used by men. Multiple men at the same time.” I have to stop here.
“I’m sorry, Isolde. As much as I want to be honest with you all the way, I just can’t get into the details. You get the gist.”
“That’s why you look so young. Because you were turned into a vampire at eighteen.” She smiles warmly.
“After everything I told you, that’s what you got stuck on? My age?”
“No, I’m stuck on what you like in bed.”
I knit my eyebrows, stricken. I don’t know what to say.
She moves, and I think she’s standing up, but no. She lies down on the bed, compelling me to look at her.
“What are you doing?” My body stiffens.
“So, all in all, you enjoy using women,” she says, raising her hand and stroking her chest down to her breasts through the open neck of her shirt.
I shake my head. “Isolde, let’s not go there.”
“Oh, yes, let’s.”
I want to look away from her, but I can’t. The way the chocolate waves of her hair spread over the bed, the way she pushes aside the white shirt.
Damn. She’s exposing round white breasts to me, with pink little nipples that harden. My cock twitches.
“Isolde, I can’t believe you’re doing this.” You, my white pure dove.
“I haven’t been with a man of my own free will in a very long time, Tristan.” The sound of her voice, the look in her sparkling blue eyes that express so much melancholy and sadness, it’s driving me crazy. “I think it’s been twenty years. I miss intimacy, I miss carnal love.”
That cracks like thunder through my ears. “Twenty years?”
“There was the boy who took my virginity on prom night, then there was my first boyfriend, a law school student. Sadly, after two years of having a relationship with me he took an older woman. She was a lawyer and helped with his career, but I think there were things she did in bed, too, that didn’t even cross my mind, let alone my fantasy.”