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.
17
CAYCE
Blackvine Ridge smelledlike bleach and pine to the men who were paid to be there.
To us, it smelled like damp rope and old pennies. The rooms where the donors toured—clean hallways, locked doors—were not the rooms where we learned what we were worth. Those rooms were downstairs. No windows, just a vent that whined, a drain in the floor, and hooks bolted where a ceiling beam should have been.
They called it a “rehabilitation site” when they wrote checks. A “camp” for wayward sons when they whispered at wakes. It was neither. It was a tool. And the man who swung it best wore my wife’s name in his mouth like a prayer.
Her uncle.
The one who shakes hands with priests and pays for playgrounds. He didn’t run the Moretti books from there—that would have been too obvious. He ran his enemies through it. Anyone who crossed him or made him feel small, he found their soft place and went for it: the children. The cousins. Boys not old enough to shave, girls who had just started to say no. He putthem in those rooms and let the men who owed him practice obedience on them.
A lesson, he’d murmur, in the language of power. He never raised his voice. He didn’t need to.
Grady and I learned the schedule in our bones—lights out, footsteps, the sound of a key, the ritual of picking one boy to set the temperature for the night.
Grady Calhoun looked like trouble even at seventeen—sharp chin, eyes that laughed when they shouldn’t, the kind of smart that gets boys hurt in towns with one bar. Some stupid high school rumor had begun circulating about Grady’s sexuality down in Virginia, the seat of Blackvine Syndicate where Grady’s father was head. It was nothing—the product of a prank mixed with jealousy and a rival’s calculation from what I managed to figure out.
But it was enough to send Grady’s father into a panic and have Grady shipped off to Blackvine Ridge just like the rest of the enemy’s kids, because heaven forbid the head of the Syndicate’s son be gay.
There’s a thing that happens to voices when the body is done. You hear it, and you know the next blow is decoration. One night, I heard that sound in Grady’s throat. They had been at him for an hour longer than they needed to—shifts of men, the way tired cruelty begets inventive cruelty. He was still laughing between his teeth. It was wrong and brave and pointless.
“Calhoun,” the taller one said, checking his watch like he had a train. “Stand.”
Grady tried. His knees locked and unlocked. The chair scraped. The taller man sighed—the weary, superior sound of a public official. That tone is worse than a fist.
“Me,” I said. My mouth tasted like metal. “Take me.”
The shorter one looked over. “You’re up tomorrow.”
“Move it,” I said. “You want him to leak out on your shoes? He’s done.”
They liked volunteerism at Blackvine. It let them sleep later. It let them say,We didn’t pick; he did.The taller one nodded and held out his hand for the strap. I held his eye while the shorter man unbuckled Grady and moved him like a sack. Grady caught my sleeve with fingers that shook.
“Don’t,” he tried.
“Shut up,” I told him, soft. “Pay attention. Count to a hundred, and if I’m not loud enough, make me louder.”
The next part is a list, not a poem.
Rope.
Cold.
Pain that arrives clean and then unwraps itself into colors you didn’t know nerves could see. You learn to breatheafterthe thing lands so you don’t waste oxygen swearing at men who don’t deserve your mouth.
