I wait. He watches my face like he needs to be sure it can take the weight he’s about to put on it.
“Blackvine Ridge,” he says.
Two words that create a landslide of emotions inside me. Blackvine is the threat people in our world use to keep their children in line. Teenagers who need to be taught to survive when everyone and everything around them wants to chew them up and spit them out.
“Your uncle is one of the men who took pleasure in my pain. They never needed permission to take. They just did it.”
I don’t need him to clarify what happened to him at Blackvine Ridge. I see it in the set of his mouth—the invisible scars that never faded. The tallies he carries on his soul.
“I’m not standing in a church hall with your hand in mine while a man who tortured me smiles at us like we’re equals,” he says, flat. “I’m not that healed. And I didn’t know his name until today.”
“Okay,” I say. “Then we’re not going to stay in a hall with him.”
He huffs something like a pained mix of a laugh and being punched in the gut. “You could have asked me to be polite.”
“I’m not polite,” I say. “I’m married.”
That earns me a look that saysI hear you. It doesn’t unwind the coil in his shoulders.
“What happened to you?” I’m not asking about the paperwork version. “Not the family story. Yours.”
He doesn’t flinch. “They held me under a frozen lake,” he says. “Cut holes in the ice and used it to make everything worse. They did it long enough for me to learn what I’d be when I got up. I didn’t die. Sometimes that’s not a mercy. I watched friends die. Watched people I cared about sacrifice themselves for others. And in the end, none of us made it out whole.” He shrugs once, the kind of motion that would look casual if you didn’t know him. “You asked to know. That’s the answer.”
I put my thumb on the notch at his throat because that’s where breath lives and because I need him to feel the difference between now and then.
“You’re not alone,” I say. “You weren’t then. You’re not now. You carry the ones you lost with you.”
“Little saint,” he says, warning and gratitude in one word.
“Don’t saint me,” I say. “Don’t you dare.”
His mouth moves—almost a smile, almost a wound. “What do you need from me right now?”
“I need you to hear that you’re mine,” I say, crisp as a vow. “You are my family now. I won’t let anyone hurt you.”
He gives me the look he gives when people say big things and don’t know the bill. “You don’t know how to fight, Caterina,” he says, just giving me the truth.
“I’ll learn,” I say. “For you, I’ll figure it out.”
There’s the crack, the small one he doesn’t show in public. He bows his head the distance between our foreheads. I feel the breath he’s holding let out slowly when his skin touches mine.
“Okay,” he says.
“Okay,” I echo.
“Now,” he says, practicality back in place but softened, “we go back out there and shake hands with a thousand cousins so none of them think you’re afraid of them, and none of your family think I’m holding you against your will.”
“I’m not,” I say. “They should be afraid of me. All of them. You told me I was dangerous.”
He kisses me for that, not long and definitely not private. On purpose, in a storage alcove with a crucifix and a mop. It’s not a claim. His kiss is a thank you. When he pulls back, the coil has loosened. Not gone. Not all the way. But I can see that it’s manageable.
We step out. Aoife pretends to scold us and Pru hands me a glass of water like it’s an award. The line restarts. I smile. Cayce nods. People saybeautiful,blessed,be good to each other, and I take all of it and hold only what doesn’t burn.
We make it through a dozen more guests, then two dozen. It almost feels ordinary.
And then a laugh cuts the room in a way the band can’t smooth. Not loud. Not the kind that’s happy. A little cluster of younger Irish soldiers—low level, too much whiskey, too little sense—lean in together at a cocktail table like boys in a locker room.
“Did you see the picture of her in the confessional?” one of them says, not bothering to lower his voice. “No wonder the boss wants her on her knees for him.”
