“You weren’t,” I say. “And if you were all that knocked on my door in a different life, I would’ve changed the door codes.”
He smiles like I’m flirting. He smiles like the wordnois foreplay instead of an entire sentence that I don’t need to justify or explain.
A server removes the lids. Fish, rice, something green that looks like it remembers the ground. I don’t like fish. I guess Nico forgot that part of my dossier. He picks up his fork and remembers to say grace—not to God, to me. “To us,” he says, lifting the wine.
“There is no us, Nico. What is this?” I pick at the fish with my fork, deliberately petulant. “I don’t like fish.”
“There will be.” He sips and ignores my complaint, then watches me over the rim until I either drink or shove the glass away. I push it to the center of the table and fold my hands so he can see they’re steady.
“You kidnapped me,” I remind him. “That’s not courtship.”
“It’s correction,” he says, maddeningly calm. “I tried to warn you in the church. You made a bad choice. You picked a man who will ruin you.”
“He already did,” I say pleasantly. “In that same church. Best decision I ever made.”
His jaw ticks. “He’s a butcher.”
“He’s my husband.”
“Temporary,” Nico says, as if trying on the word. “When you remember who you were supposed to be, you’ll thank me. That marriage will be annulled, and then we will get married.”
I cut a bite of fish because defiance isn’t always refusing. I take it, taste lemon, butter, the salt of a sea I wish would swallow this place, and gag a little. “No,” I say. “I’ll bury you.”
He laughs again. It sounds like disbelief dressed as charm. “You’re not a killer.”
“I wasn’t a wife last month,” I say. “People change.”
He reaches across and tries to take my hand. I pull it back like I’ve touched the wrong wire. The guard shifts his weight, unsure how much pretending is required.
“Don’t be difficult,” Nico says, voice lowering the way men think makes them magnetic.
“I’m not pretending. I truly am difficult. It’s my best quality.”
“You were always so polite.”
“No,” I say. “I was obedient.”
“To your father,” he says knowingly.
“To fear,” I correct. “I took vows you don’t understand and didn’t keep the ones that weren’t mine. Now I do.”
“Caterina,” he says, softening, leaning in. “I can give you a life where you don’t have to be afraid. No one has to bleed for you. No one has to die.”
“People always bleed for women like me,” I say, just as soft. “The question is whether they deserve it.”
“And he does?” Nico’s smirk returns. “Your Irish saint? He killed a man over a joke.”
“He killed a man who used his mouth like a weapon to try and hurt me,” I say. “And that wasn’t the only thing he used.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know enough.”
He taps his fork on the plate—delicate, impatient. “Your uncle says your husband is lying. That he’s spreading stories about Blackvine to make the Morettis kneel.”
“My uncle is a liar,” I say, watching his face when I strip the varnish off. “And a coward. He sent boys to rooms he neverwalked into, and he did it with a rosary in his pocket so he could point to God later when anyone asked why.”
Nico’s expression shifts—there, a crack. “He’s family.”
