"Yes, Dante. I choose you."
I reached across the counter. Took her hand. Brought it to my mouth. Kissed the knuckles.
She squeezed my fingers. Held on.
"Tonight," I said against her hand. "I have something planned."
"Should I be worried?"
"With a mafia Don? Always."
She smiled.
*
She came down the stairs in the black dress and the world stopped doing whatever it had been doing.
The same dress from Gibson's. The one that fit her like an argument she'd won against her own body—the silk falling to her knees, the cut precise and simple, the kind of garment that didn't announce itself but made everything around it seem louder by comparison. The emerald earrings caught the hallway light and threw small green fires against her neck, against the dark curtain of her hair, against the pale architecture of her collarbones.
She'd done something with her eyes. Liner, maybe. Something that made the brown deeper, more deliberate. And her mouth was stained a shade of rose that I was going to spend the rest of the evening trying not to stare at.
I was staring at it now.
"You look —" I started.
"You said dress up." She smoothed the fabric at her hip. A nervous gesture, automatic, the residual programming of a woman who'd spent her life being assessed. "Is this okay?"
"Gemma."
"What?"
"You're perfect."
The blush arrived like dawn. Pink spreading from her chest to her throat to the apples of her cheeks, and the emeralds looked even greener against the flush, and I stood at the bottom of the stairs in a tux I hadn't worn since a charity gala two years ago and felt like a teenager picking up his date for prom.
I offered my arm. She took it. Her fingers settled into the crook of my elbow with the particular trust of a hand that had learned where it fit.
We walked through the house. Past the kitchen where the breakfast dishes were still drying in the rack. Past the study where the corded phone sat on its cradle like a relic from the morning she'd called Carlo. Past the guards at the front entrance who looked straight ahead with the professional discipline of men who understood that tonight was not their business.
The library door was closed.
I'd spent three hours in here while she was upstairs getting ready. Three hours of placement and adjustment and the particular obsessiveness of a man who understood that environment was language — that the space you created for a moment determined the shape of the moment itself.
I stopped. Turned to face her.
"Close your eyes."
She studied my face. The watchfulness—always the watchfulness, the reflexive scanning for threat or deception that she'd carried since childhood and might carry forever, regardless of how many baths I drew and stories I read. But underneath it, trust.
She closed her eyes.
I opened the door. Guided her through. One hand on the small of her back — that spot, our spot, the geography of a body I'd memorized and would spend my life re-memorizing.
"Open."
She opened her eyes.
Candles covered every surface. The reading table, the window seat, the shelves where Caravaggio and Bernini and three centuries of art history stood spine-out in their careful rows. Pillar candles in glass hurricanes. Votives in clear cups. Tapers in brass holders I'd borrowed from the dining room. The light they produced was warm and unsteady, painting the room in gold and amber and the particular intimacy of illumination that moved, that breathed, that cast shadows which shifted like living things across the spines of books and the worn leather of the window seat cushion.
