Chapter 10 Cayce #2
“And it left you with that face,” she says, not unkind. “The one that nearly destroyed us.”
“The men behind Blackvine made a mistake,” I say.
“They made it at Blackvine by hurting children. They’ve been making it since I left those walls, and I think they’ve grown too comfortable.
I intend to end the habit. Them, the money, the lawyers, the small-time crews they prop up.
The vines, roots, branches, little leaves. Every part.”
I don’t raise my voice. I don’t need to. The room remembers how I sound when I mean it.
“And if the girl has family,” Nan says mildly, “that sits at a Blackvine table?”
“What are you talking about?” I say.
“It’s always a possibility.”
“Then we need to know,” I say. “I need to make sure.”
“And if she did?” Her eyes test for cracks. “If her father had business with those men and they wrote in his books and took his calls? If she walks your aisle with their name in her pocket without knowing it?”
“Then I ask her to hand me the name,” I say. “And I eliminate the threat.”
“And if she won’t?”
“Then we measure what won’t means,” I say. “But I’m not letting her drown in their water. I’ve spent enough years pulling people from that river.”
“The river wasn’t what took you under,” Nan says. “It was the ice.”
She’s not wrong.
I take a breath that doesn’t show.
CHAPTER brEAK?
“I never thought there would be sun again after Blackvine,” I say. “I thought the weather was set. One night with her, and I saw an end that I hadn’t believed in.”
Nan tilts her head. “Sun is a fair thing to call a girl. But the sun burns, too. Don’t stand there and complain if it warms your bones and shows your shadows.”
“I don’t intend to complain.” I finally drink from the glass she gave me.
The whiskey does its job. “I intend to marry her. I intend to keep her safe. I intend to finish what I started with Blackvine. If those two lines cross and something becomes impossible, I’ll make the choice that leaves her breathing. ”
“Breathing where?” Nan presses.
Her question is clear. She wants to know if I plan on keeping Caterina.
“With me,” I say.
Giving her this much should burn. It should be like pulling teeth to give Nan the truth of my intentions. But she’s the head of our family. I may be the public face, the man in control. But Nan? No man in my family would dare move against her.
She watches me and then looks at the photographs on the sideboard.
She gets up, carries one over, hands it to me like a test. My grandfather, younger than me, hair dark, mouth set.
Nan beside him in a white dress with sleeves, chin up, eyes like a woman who agreed to something that should have frightened her and didn’t.
“He promised me,” she says. “He said, ‘I’ll build a table for you and kill before I let anyone flip it.’ He kept that promise. Even when I wanted him to be softer with the boys. I married the man he was, not the man I imagined. Do you understand me?”
“I do.”
“Then don’t sell her a dream of some sweet Italian baker and deliver her a general.” Her voice is soft; the point is not. “Tell her exactly who you are. If she runs, she runs in truth.”
“She won’t run.” I won’t let her.
I don’t tell her that I’ve got a plan to tie Caterina to me in any situation.
“That’s what your grandfather said about me,” Nan says, amused.
“And he was right. But he gave me the chance. He slept on the floor that first week with his hand under the bed and the gun on top of it, and when I woke he was already sitting in the chair by the window thinking about boys he had to bury and men he had to threaten to keep our planned kingdom. I married all that, too.”
“I’m asking you for the bands,” I say, bringing it back to the thing I came for. “I want her to start with your metal, not mine.”
Nan lifts a brow. “And the engagement ring? Because the diamond your grandfather gave me is promised to Roisin. The bands were always meant to be yours.”
“Roisín’s friend set an engagement band in dark silver with a diamond fit for a princess,” I say. “Low profile, but stunning like the woman it’s meant for. Ogham inside where her thumb can find it.” I don’t add the word cut into the silver. I don’t need to.
“That’s good work,” Nan says. “Who chose the Ogham?”
“I did.”
She accepts that, tucks it away. “All right.”
She stands. Her knees pop, and she ignores them. She crosses to the sideboard, pulls open the top drawer, and takes out a small black box wrapped in a cloth that might once have been a handkerchief and is now a reliquary. She hands it to me without ceremony.
“Open it,” she says.
I sit forward and set the cloth on my knee to protect her table. I open the box.
Two bands. Yellow gold worn to that soft glow it gets when it’s been against skin for forty years. One thin and smooth, the inside engraved with initials and a date. The other a fraction wider, with a narrow milgrain edge, not fussy. They aren’t valuable, except they are the only kind that matters.
Hearts beat all over the world. These rings hold the love of two generations and a man willing to destroy everything to keep his woman safe.
“They’re yours if you’ll follow an instruction," Nan says.
“Name it.”
“I’ll be at the wedding,” she says. “If your bride wants to run, I will see her to the door and tell no one where she’s gone.”
I keep my face. My hand tightens once on the box. “She won’t run.”
“That’s not the point.” Nan’s voice is gentle and unyielding at once.
“She gets to know someone in the room is hers and not yours or her father’s.
You and I both know that matters. You want a woman to stand in your house and never bend where she shouldn’t, you give her one door that isn’t yours to control. ”
“I don’t like it,” I say.
“It’s not for you to like,” she says.
I nod because she’s right. I also nod because I’m not about to argue with the woman.
“Do you approve?” I ask, and I hate the way the question tastes. She’s the only person who gets it from me.
“I approve of nothing I haven’t seen,” she says. “But I approve of you looking like a man who’d stop a car with his hands if she were in front of it. That’s something more than I’ve seen in any other man in our family since your father met your mother.”
“It’ll have to do.”
“It will.” She reaches across and lays her fingers on my knuckles for a second. Cool, dry, steady. “And I approve of you coming to me to ask for the bands instead of taking them out of the drawer and deciding I’d be sentimental about it after.”
“I’m not a thief,” I say.
“You are, love,” she says, with affection. “You were born to it. Just like your grandfather. But you’re a good one. There’s a difference.”
I close the box. The weight in my palm is small and exact. I put the cloth around it and slide it into the inside pocket of my jacket where it will sit against my ribs until I hand it to Caterina and tell her whose metal she’ll wear for the rest of her life.
“Anything else I should know?” I ask.
“You should know the difference between a girl who looks like a saint because she’s pure and a girl who looks like a saint because she survives,” Nan says.
“You should know that if you promise her safety and then bruise her with your house, I’ll break your nose and watch as you squirm from the pain.
” She says it with such calm I almost want to smile.
“And Blackvine,” she adds, as if she was thinking of it all along.
“You wage that war and do it without hurting her. Don’t use her as the reason you pick the time or place.
Don’t let those men think they can draw you out with your wife’s name on their lips.
They’d like it. It would make them feel like they were more than what they are. ”
“They won’t get to use her,” I say. “If they touch her, I don’t burn one vineyard. I salt the ground and shoot the crows.”
“You mind your metaphors,” she says, dry. “You sound like your grandfather when you talk as if the Bible is yours to quote. Do the work. Quiet. Final. Don’t give them a story to tell.”
“I know how,” I say.
“I know you do.” Because she made sure I knew exactly how to do it. In a world where my father and uncle wanted me harder, Nan wanted me smarter.
She stands. I stand. She kisses my cheek, me bending to her like a too-tall boy. She smells like tea and wool and something that used to be perfume and now is just Nan.
“Tell the girl my door is open,” she says. “Tell her my phone is on and I keep cash in the house because I don’t trust banks. If she wants to run, she can run with me. I’ll get her to a place you won’t find her long enough to change your mind and come correct what you ruin.”
“I don’t change my mind.”
“Then come correct from the start,” she says, not unkind.
She walks me out to the front door of her estate, and stepping back into the November air brings me back to the massive list of things I need to handle.
In the back of the car, I take out my phone and see a slew of texts from my siblings.
Tiernan: The Blackvine boys put a watcher in the North End last night. We moved him. No blowback. Yet.
Good. Let them hang themselves.
Roisín: Maeve will be ready at three. Tell the girl to moisturize.
Noted.
Unknown: We hear you’re marrying into old money that used to be friendly with Blackvine. Congratulations.
The kind of thing a coward sends when he wants to taste your name without opening his mouth. I star it and forward to Rafferty and Tiernan. The two of them will know exactly what I want them to do
Once I’ve handled that, I rest my head back for a second.
The bands sit inside my jacket, a comforting weight.
I picture how they’ll look on Caterina’s hand paired with the dark silver and the diamond. I picture her thumb finding the Ogham—safe—and making of the word what she needs that day. She’ll decide its meaning. I’ll enforce it.
I open the text chain with Aoife
Me: Have the bands. Keep her day tight.
Aoife: Always
The driver takes the slow road along the water back toward the city.
I don’t tell him to hurry. I look at the flat gray surface and the thin sun and think through the list I’ve kept since the night I escaped the Colorado.
Names. Warehouses. Lawyers who think contracts make them safe.
Men who said my father’s name and then said mine and thought that put them above ground when it was time to count.
My plan was simple. One by one, over the course of a year. Make it look like misfortune. Make it quiet. Marrying her shortens my calendar. It doesn’t cancel it.
Rafferty texts, drawing my attention away from my thoughts
Rafferty: Providence number belongs to Carrick’s boy. He’s trying to create a name for himself in the ranks. You want him pinched or courted?
Carrick is one of my cousins, although almost everyone is a cousin of some sort.
But Carrick’s father was my father’s cousin, and he’s always been good to my family.
Loyal. So if his son is causing a few issues, I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume it’s about money and not disloyalty.
Me: Neither. Ignored. Let him sweat. Move his girlfriend’s job to a new shift so he thinks he has a leak and fires the wrong man.
Rafferty: Done. You’re due at St. Brigid’s at five.
Me: I’m bringing the bands.
At a red light, I catch my reflection in the window. I look like a man who already knows the end of this. Good. The city moves around us with that sharp New England competence it uses when it wants to pretend the sea doesn’t get a vote.
Nan will be at the wedding. She will sit near the aisle on the outside end where she can stand first if she chooses. If Caterina looks at her and says “help,” my grandmother will take her hand and walk. I gave my word by taking the bands; that was the price. I won’t repay it with spite.
But I don’t plan to test it.
Caterina said no to black just to tell me she could. Good. I like the fight in her. I like the way she holds a line once she draws it. I’ll work around the edges of that line until we decide where it moves and where it doesn’t.
That’s marriage.
Not the story they give you from the pulpit—the real thing. The one with locked doors and shared words and a house that grows around the people in it instead of trapping them.
If Blackvine shows up at my door in any guise, I open it and pull them inside where no one can see what happens next. If they whisper her name to test my temper, they learn what a quiet man does when you teach him to hate and then put a saint in front of him and tell him he can have the sun.
Nan thinks she can get Caterina to a car and out a back gate if the girl asks. Maybe. Good for Nan. I respect an exit plan. I respect being the person who holds it.
Me? I’m not letting Caterina go. Not to priests, not to cousins, not to ghosts who think they deserve more of her than I do because they knew her before I did. Not to Blackvine. Especially not to them.
I text her, because I want to and need to, and honestly I couldn’t stop myself.
Me: Bring a coat. It’ll be cold on the steps.
I leave it at that. She doesn’t need me to narrate the rest. She already knows the difference between a man who wants to wear her like a medal and a man who’s built to stand outside her door and keep the monsters from knocking.
I’ll be her monster. She doesn’t need to worry about any others.
The car turns down Tremont, then into the narrow street that leads to St. Brigid’s. The towers look like they’ve been expecting us. They always do.
I touch the inside pocket once more, check the bands with my fingers, and think about my grandmother promising safe haven at my own wedding like a woman who raised wolves and loves sheep and knows that both have teeth.
Let her make the promise. Let Caterina hear it.
It won’t change our ending.
I married this girl the second she put her hand in mine in the dark and pulled in a breath like I’d given her the air. Everything else is names on paper and a priest with a book.
They can all show up and make it official. Nan can come to watch, ready to run interference. Blackvine can send messages, watchers, invitations I won’t accept. The state can stamp their approval. The families can smile for photographs they’ll pretend to forget.
I’m not letting Caterina get away from me.