Chapter 16 Caterina
CATERINA
The ocean here looks Photoshopped. That particular unreal blue that makes you blink, then believe anyway.
I’m on a lounge chair in a white bikini I would not have bought two months ago, legs stretched long, a salt-wet paperback face-down on my stomach. The umbrella throws a stripe of shade across my thighs; the rest of me is warm and lazy.
My drink has a paper umbrella, which is ridiculous, and a slice of pineapple, which is perfect.
Cayce stands calf-deep in the shallows, sunglasses on, watching me instead of the horizon like I’m the view he flew a thousand miles for.
He’s shirtless—broad shoulders, the kind of back that makes the sun try harder.
He wants me relaxed and is doing the thing he does where he manufactures the environment like a gentleman dictator: beach cabana, private strip of sand, security far enough away to pretend they’re locals with better posture.
He comes back holding out my glass after a refill. “Hydrate,” he says, and there’s a smile tipped under it even if no one else can see.
“I am,” I say, taking a sugared sip. “This one’s called a Bahama Mama. You’re obligated to respect it.”
“I’m filled with respect,” he says. He settles on the end of my chair, warm knee against my calf. “Turn over.”
“Bossy.”
“Married.” He lifts the sunscreen by its neck, and I roll onto my stomach because I’m not stupid.
His hands are thorough in a way that should be illegal on public beaches.
He does my shoulders, the slope of my back, the sides, the long sweep of my thighs with faux professional indifference that is absolutely pretend.
When he’s done, he caps the bottle and leans down, mouth close to my ear.
“Perfect,” he says.
“Flattery on vacation hours,” I murmur, eyes closed. “I could get used to this.”
“You are going to,” he says. A beat, then quieter, “Tell me about the rosary.”
My eyes open. The umbrella ticks in the wind—plastic clicking on the bamboo pole. He’s looking at me, not past me. Not discounting. Asking.
“You really want to talk about plans while I’m in a bikini?”
“I want to talk about them while you’re safe,” he says. “And relaxed enough to tell me the parts you’d try to smooth over if we were at home.”
I roll back, sit, tuck my legs under me, and balance the sweating glass against my knee. “Okay.”
He shifts to face me. No phone, no list, no interrupting. Just attention like a steady light.
“My father will never believe it,” I say.
“Not the way you tell it. He can imagine bad men doing bad things. He cannot imagine his brother doing them, or helping men who did. He’s…
a romantic, where family is concerned. He holds the idea that family is good in his head and refuses to swallow the possibility that someone might be otherwise. ”
Cayce nods once. “He’s also a father.”
“He is,” I say. “And he lost his wife in a church protecting a Sunday school class. Including me. He needs to believe the people he still has are good. Or he’ll break.”
“You’re trying to prevent a war and a heartbreak,” he says, like he’s marking the corners of the plan.
“Yes,” I admit. “I don’t want a war if we can help it. I know we can’t always help it. But if I can take away the excuses first, I will.”
“How,” he prompts.
“On record,” I say. “Get my uncle to talk. Not a confession in a booth with a priest. Not something that can be called gossip. Tape. A voice he can’t walk back.
I want him on the wire admitting what he took and from who, or who he placed, or which room he sat in.
He loves the theater of piety; he believes in the protection of performance. I want to use that.”
His mouth almost moves—approval, tempered. “You’re asking to give him the illusion of a safe space to run his mouth,” he says. “And wire it.”
“Yes. Aunties present. Nan present. Don Marco. The kind of audience he respects. A prayer on the front end so he relaxes into lying. Then the question. Then the lie.” I breathe out. “And then we put the proof on the table so the room hears the difference between his mouth and the facts.”
“You still want to spare your father.”
“I want him to change his mind with proof, not choose sides with grief and anger.” I look at the water. “If he chooses his brother, fine. I’ll know. But I want to give him the honest chance to hear it from the man he’s defending.”
Cayce studies me for a long few seconds, the way he does when he’s checking a structure for load-bearing beams. “All right,” he says finally. “We’ll plan it when we’re home. No names, no calls while we’re here. We don’t bring it into our bed.”
“Deal,” I say, and the relief is physical—shoulders dropping, breath deepening, a knot I didn’t realize I was clenching letting go.
He reaches over, draws a circle with one finger on my knee. “You want another swim,” he asks, “or another umbrella drink.”
“Both,” I say. “In that order.”
We swim. The water is silk, the bottom a pale bowl that makes our shadows look like something from a story.
He keeps close without hovering, his hand easy on my waist sometimes, like the ocean is a street and he’s walking me across.
We float, we laugh at nothing, we kiss once and I taste sunscreen and rum and him.
Back under the umbrella, he lies on his back, forearm over his eyes, those long lines turned to rest. I read the same page three times and don’t care.
The afternoon leans toward gold. The sound of waves and the faint chatter from couples a hundred yards down trickle together into something that makes you believe your bones can actually loosen.
“Empire,” he says suddenly, arm still over his eyes.
“What about it.”
“We’re building one.”
“If you say so.” I’m not an empress, but I’ll sit at Cayce’s throne.
“On this beach,” he says, as if drawing a map only we can see. “It’s just thought right now. But it’s ours.”
I smile into my book. “It is.”
He turns his head, lifts his sunglasses. “You’re not going to let me go to war every time I’m tempted.”
“No,” I say.
“You’re going to make me be clever.”
“Yes,” I say. “And when clever fails, I’ll pass you the match so you can burn your enemies to ash.”
He laughs, soft. “That’s marriage.”
“That’s us,” I correct.
We wander back to the villa when the sun learns how to set.
It sits tucked behind hedges like a secret: low, white, coral stone floors that kiss our bare feet, the whole front open to the sea.
Security is there, somewhere, like shadows with good manners.
Our plunge pool is rinsed with orange light.
The kitchen smells like lime and char and the idea of dinner.
He leans down and kisses the hollow under my ear as we pass the bedroom. “Shower,” he suggests. “Then food.”
“Dictator of my heart,” I say.
“Say it louder,” he says, already in the bathroom turning on twin showers like he invented water.
I duck into the bedroom first to grab a fresh dress, leave my phone on the nightstand, and pause in the doorway just to look at the sea one more second. The wind lifts the sheer curtains; the room lifts with it.
“Five minutes,” I call.
“Four,” he calls back.
I’m still smiling when the power snaps.
Not a flicker—gone. The sudden dark makes the last rim of sun look like a mistake. The AC hum dies. The villa exhales.
“Generator’ll catch,” I say, too loud to no one, because an empty house and a darkness that fast wakes old instincts. “Cayce?”
“On it,” he says from the bathroom. The water cuts off. His steps are already moving. “Stay put. Flashlight’s right—”
The patio doors whisper.
I turn on instinct, heart going sharp. A figure is inside the frame before my eyes finish adjusting. Clean, quick, silent. Not one of ours. He’s tall and he moves like he owns rooms he doesn’t. A second shape shadows him, broader, head tilted like he’s catching instructions from the first.
“Nico,” I say, my mouth finding the name before my brain gives permission.
He smiles in a way that belongs in a different decade. “Caterina.”
Behind him, a third man steps in, and I can’t see past him to the path because he is the path. His hands are loose. His face is open. It’s the calm that hides a leash.
My throat goes cold. “You can’t be here.”
“I can be anywhere…even if I’m not invited,” Nico says, soft.
Somewhere in the villa, a door slams. The hairs on my arms stand up.
“Cayce,” I say, loud now.
“Here,” he answers, closer than I thought, and then there’s a sound I don’t recognize and he doesn’t make often—a hitch smothered into silence, the noise a man makes when he turns to meet something that should not be possible and finds it already touching him.
I move. Nico moves faster. He catches my wrist, not rough, like we’re dancing. “Don’t shout,” he murmurs. “We’re leaving. No damage if you’re good.”
“My husband—”
“Is indisposed,” he says neatly. “Temporary. He won’t bleed. Your uncle insisted.”
The world narrows to two words. “My uncle.”
Nico’s eyes are very pleased. “He wants to talk. Man-to-man with your husband, eventually. But you and I will go first. You’ve always been persuasive.”
“I will fight you,” I say, and I mean it, even in bare feet with salt in my hair.
“I know,” he says, almost fond. “You’re the only girl who ever told me no and meant it. I’m offering a second chance at good manners.”
A cloth appears in a hand to my left, clean and white and wrong. I jerk away, twist, kick—catch a shin, buy a second. I shout Cayce’s name and the shout gets swallowed by a palm over my mouth. I bite. He curses. The cloth lands anyway, sweet chemical, heavy as a nap.
Not like this, I think furiously, and shove backward into a body that doesn’t give. Arms like a bar around my shoulders. A voice at my ear—Nico’s—saying, “Easy, easy,” like I’m a skittish horse he means to steal.
I fight the way girls fight when they didn’t think they’d ever have to. It’s not pretty. It’s not strategic. It’s all heat and refusal. It’s not enough.
The room tilts. The last of the light from the sea slides off the floor. The cloth lifts and air should help, but it doesn’t; the world feels far. Sound stretches: men’s voices, a thud, someone invoking the Virgin in a dialect I don’t know.
“Boat,” someone says. “Now.”
They’re careful with me—my uncle’s condition, I realize through the blur—no marks he’d have to explain to a room that demands piety even while it buys sin.
They carry me, careful not to drag. We pass the plunge pool, the flame of the sky, the hedge line, the security post that is empty because someone bought the right moment.
We slip through a gate I didn’t know existed and down a narrow path that smells like wet limestone and bougainvillea.
At the end is a dock, a slip, a black boat.
“Cayce,” I try again, voice wet, and the man holding me says, “Shh,” like a lullaby, and I hate him.
Nico steps in ahead and offers a hand like a gentleman boarding a girl on a gondola. “You’ll forgive me eventually,” he says. “Or you won’t. I can live with either.”
“Why,” I manage, fighting for one clean breath. “Why now?”
“Because you’re mine,” he says, like a child, and then with adult malice, “and because your uncle wants to see how quickly your husband relearns those lessons he was taught…how fast he learns to kneel once more.”
I lunge, but don’t get far because the men tighten their hold.
The boat takes us. The engine is quiet—it should be louder—and the lights are off.
The villa shrinks, then disappears into the treeline.
I think of the rosary on our nightstand.
I think of the plan that had time built into it, and how time just got purchased out from under us.
I hold Nico’s gaze and promise him, in whatever place inside me is older than fear, that I am not his anything.
He smiles like he heard it and doesn’t believe anything I might say. The horizon erases us.
Behind us, somewhere on a darkened island, my husband is in a room empty of me. Ahead of us, an uncle is waiting with the kind of smile men have to practice in mirrors because it’s fake.
I do not pray.
I count the waves against the hull. One, two, three—I’m coming back.