“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 youcoming 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.”
