Mafia Vows and Vengeance

Chapter 1Caterina

Caterina

He wipes blood off his ring.

Thirty feet of marble between us, and the only thing I can't afford to do is let him see me notice.

So I don't.

I keep my eyes soft and my pace even, four counts toward the center of a foyer the size of a chapel. I clock the blood the way you'd clock a dog nobody has introduced you to, without slowing, without looking like you're looking.

He's standing in a long stripe of window light, working the stain with his thumb. Patient. The way you lift a smudge off a wineglass.

The signet is gold. The napkin is monogrammed. The blood has dried rust-dark at the edges, which means it has been there an hour.

Which means he is not in a hurry to be clean.

He is in a hurry to be presentable. For me.

I keep walking. If I stop, he wins the first round, and we have not been introduced.

The pearls at my throat are cold. Real ones always are. The one detail Gemma Fioretti got to keep.

They pulled her out of the Gowanus Canal the morning her witness list was supposed to keep her breathing. When they were done they left her wardrobe, her perfume, her fiancé, and her name for somebody to wear.

That somebody is me.

Uncle Rocco slid the folder across a diner table like a check he didn't want to split. Forty-eight hours of prep. Her mother's maiden name, the dog she lost at nine, the hook she put on the tail of her R's because an aunt taught her cursive on a chalkboard in Reggio.

Forty-eight hours is enough, when the man you are walking in to marry has only ever met your handwriting.

Two years of letters and one photograph he kept face-down on his bureau on the days he had work to do. A peace between Sicily and Staten Island, paid for in a bride.

He has never sat across a table from her. Never heard her laugh. Never been close enough to know whether she signs her name the way Gemma did or the way I do.

The arrangement forbade contact. No calls. No faces. No voices.

Old Don Fioretti's condition, and Cosimo's price for meeting it. Two patriarchs who trusted ink and a wax seal over anything a screen could fake. Bride and groom would not meet until the church.

Rocco handed me that rule like a gift. He was right to. It is the only reason a woman can walk into a man's house wearing a dead girl's name and expect to live past the foyer.

He folds the napkin twice and tucks it into his breast pocket, stain hidden against the lining.

Then he crosses to me. Two steps on marble, two on the runner. I count them, because counting is the thing my hands do when the rest of me is lying.

He takes my hand, lifts it, and presses his mouth to my knuckles without once looking down to see where he is aiming.

"Gemma," he says.

"Massimo."

The photographs Rocco had were all shot from distance. Telephoto, parking garages, the turned cheek at somebody's funeral. Not one of them warned me that his attention arrives in a room a second before he does.

He is not a tall man. He is built like someone who learned young that stillness reads more dangerous than size.

Dark hair cut close. A nose broken once and reset clean, which costs money. Gray suit, white shirt, and the ring the only loud thing on him.

His thumb finds the inside of my wrist as he lowers my hand. Settles on the pulse point. Stays one second past courtesy.

He is counting too.

I keep my breathing exactly where it was on the gravel outside, when I was counting his men instead of his fingers. Two at the gate. One at the fountain pretending to smoke. One on the balcony pretending to be a shadow.

A groundskeeper knelt in the boxwood and did not look up when a strange woman in heels walked past his elbow. A real groundskeeper looks up. I filed him under armed and pretending and counted the exits while I was at it.

Service door left, main door center, French doors right. Three. You always want three.

I crossed that gravel the way Gemma crossed it in the footage Rocco played me, a little slower than I move on my own, weight back on the heels, the walk of a woman told her whole life to take up space and only now believing it.

Nobody at the gate looked twice. The walk is the lie I'm most confident in. The pearls are the one I'm wearing.

"You're early," he says.

"You're bloody."

The corner of his mouth moves a fraction, the way a dealer turns a card face-down. "Was."

"Was," I agree.

He lets go.

The lilac Gemma wore has gone warm on my wrist, and under it now there's something iron and faint. The ghost of whatever was on the ring before the napkin. I leave my arm at my side. I do not rub it.

Against my sternum, stitched into the bodice seam, the button-cam presses like somebody else's pulse. I think about the lens of it pointed at the most dangerous man my uncle could find me, recording him being gentle.

In the door pocket of the car already rolling back toward the city is a padded mailer with my real driver's license inside, addressed to a PO box in Astoria that Rocco swears he has never written down.

By tonight the only version of me left in this house will be the one I invented on the drive up.

"My grandmother is on the stairs," Massimo says, without turning. "Don't make her come down. Her hip."

Ottavia Valenti stands on the landing in black. One hand on the banister, the other working a rosary she is not praying.

Eighty-one years old, watching me the way a cat watches a bird it has not yet decided is worth the jump.

"Nonna," I say, in the soft register I rehearsed three nights running. " Grazie per avermi accolta. "

" Vedremo ," she says.

We will see. Fair.

A man comes out of the left-hand corridor with my single suitcase already in his fist. Built square, the kind of face that smiles an instant before the eyes agree to it. Today the eyes never catch up.

"I'll take this up," he says.

"Third floor," Massimo says. "The one over the boathouse."

" Sì , capo."

His smile reads my pockets on the way past. Ottavia turns and follows the bag up without a word, the rosary swinging once against her thigh.

"Walk with me," Massimo says.

I walk.

He takes the stairs at my pace instead of his, and points without slowing.

"Library. Don't go in after ten, my father reads.

Chapel. Use it or don't, nobody's counting.

" A nod down a hall. "Kitchen stairs that way.

If you want coffee at three in the morning, that's how you get it without waking the house. "

"Helpful."

"I try."

Third floor. He opens a door on the left and stands aside.

The room is bigger than my whole apartment. Cream walls, a bed you could lose a body in, a writing desk angled to catch the light off the lake.

The boathouse sits white-painted at the end of a stone dock, shutters closed. Below the window, lower and to the right, a wing of the house pushes out with three lit windows on the ground floor.

One of them is the study. Rocco's blueprints said the desk faces the water.

Rocco's blueprints did not lie.

"Sunday," Massimo says from the doorway.

I turn. "Sunday what."

"Wedding." A beat. "Dinner's at seven. My father expects you. Don Cosimo doesn't like to be kept waiting and he doesn't like to be performed for. So don't do either."

"Noted."

He looks at me a beat longer than a man reading out a schedule needs to. His eyes go to the pearls once and come back up.

He doesn't mention them. He doesn't mention the lilac. He doesn't mention that I never once asked whose blood was on his ring.

"Seven," he says.

"Seven."

The door closes. I listen to his footsteps go down the hall, then the stairs, then nothing.

I count to twenty before I move.

The house settles around me. A pipe ticks somewhere in the wall. A dog in the kennel says something to another dog. On the gravel below, a guard walks the line at the pace of a man who has walked it for years.

I cross to the window. I take the lipstick from my clutch, uncap it, and use the little mirror in the base to angle the cam down at the study glass.

The light is on. A man's shoulder crosses the frame and is gone. The desk sits exactly where Rocco promised.

I hold it ten seconds, then recap the lipstick like a woman who has only just touched up her mouth.

On the bureau, someone has set down the napkin.

Folded. Monogrammed. His. The stain has gone pale, a rust-colored crescent on white linen, left where I will see it the second I turn around.

He wants me to know he knows I noticed.

The pearls are still cold.