Page 4 of Cruel Rite

“Legally? One person.” She says it like trivia, a fact she’s pulling out because it’s interesting, not because she understands why I’m asking, and I don’t correct that. “Under the rulings, the only office that can void a standing family contract without the family agreeing to it is the Corvane president. Because Corvane’s the oldest seat, and mostly because the people who wrote the rulings wanted that to be true.”

“Has it ever happened. Someone asking and getting it.”

“Once or twice, maybe. My grandmother used to tell it like a story, so who knows how much of it’s true.” She knocks a fork off the table with the back of her hand and doesn’t notice. “But nobody currently walking around has ever asked Corvane for anything and gotten a yes. I wouldn’t recommend you be the first.”

I don’t tell her why I’m asking. She doesn’t ask why I’m asking, which is its own kind of mercy, and I file the whole exchange the way I file everything—flat, dated, no interpretation attached yet—and somewhere underneath the filing I find myself picturing the man from the steps this afternoon. Not his face. I never got that far. Just the stillness of him in that doorway, and how long he held it, and the fact that two hundred people walked past what he’d just done without so much as slowing their stride.

“Corvane could,” Junie says again, chewing, like she’s enjoying the shape of the idea more than its use. “If Corvane wanted to. Nobody’s ever wanted him to want to, if that makes sense. Nobody’s dumb enough to ask.”

I don’t say anything back. The silence sits there a second too long, and Junie, for once, doesn’t fill it.

Then she does, with her mouth full, not looking up from the tray.

“Seriously,” she says. “Don’t.”

Chapter 3: The Room Already Made Up

I bought her before her father was dead. Fifteen months before, wired and dated and filed under an account with my name at the top of it, back when the paper was only leverage on a man who was still alive and still useful to me. I didn’t buy the daughter. I bought the debt. The daughter came with it later, the way a house comes with whatever’s buried in the yard, and I didn’t go looking for what that meant until the yard was already mine.

Her name is Isadora Ferrante. I have never spoken to her.

Twenty-two chairs recite the rank order before the first course goes down, the way they do every Sunday I’ve run this house, and nobody at this table finds it strange, because nobody at this table has ever eaten a meal any other way. Radiators knock somewhere behind the wainscoting, out of season, an argument the building has with itself every year around now. Woodsmoke gets in under the door from the kitchen along with whatever the cook’s doing to a shoulder of lamb, and both smells sit over the original counting-house table the way they’ve sat over it since 1802, back when this room settled real accounts twice a year instead of the kind I settle in it now.

A second-year, three chairs down, has been behind on his debt to the house treasury since July and has decided tonight is the night to renegotiate it in front of an audience. He’s careful about it. Reasonable tone, a joke first, something about the summer being expensive for everyone, testing whether I bend further for a room than I would for a hallway. My hand is flat on the table’s grain while he talks, the wood worn soft and pale under two centuries of forearms in this exact spot, and I let him get all the way to the end of his sentence before I answer it.

I don’t raise my voice. I never have to.

“Twelve thousand,” I say. “Friday.”

That’s the whole exchange. He starts to answer and I’ve already turned to the next course, and the silence that comes down over that end of the table does more work in the next ninety seconds than anything I could have said in them. I could have given him six weeks. I gave him five days, in two sentences, because the year needs to understand early what kind of year it’s going to be, and a lesson taught to one man at this table gets learned by twenty-one. Forks go back to work. Nobody looks at him again for the rest of the course, which is its own sentence, served without a word.

A pledge on kitchen duty gets sent from the room before the soup is cleared—hand on the wrong tray, reaching across a place that isn’t his to reach across, a breach of the order of service and nothing else. I don’t explain it. Explaining it would suggest I owe somebody a reason, and I don’t, and the kid knows that by the time he’s out the door, because everybody here learns that before they learn anything else.

I’m not thinking about either of them by dessert. I’m thinking about nothing, which is the correct amount to think about a Sunday, until I look up through the tall seaward windows at the end of the room and there she is, crossing the quad two floors below with a laundry bag slung over one shoulder like it weighs nothing, which it doesn’t, because everything she owns fits in two bags and I’ve known that since July.

I know exactly who she is before she’s close enough for anyone else at this table to place her. I’ve had a photograph since June and it did not prepare me for the walk.

The dinner doesn’t stop. I stop.

There’s a stillness I’ve spent years getting good at handing to other people—the second-year down the table just got a small, controlled dose of it—and it turns out I have none of it in reserve for myself right now. What I have instead is a very specific, very deliberate hunger, and I’m not going to insult either of us by calling it anything softer than that.

She’s real. That’s the whole revelation, and it should embarrass me that it’s a revelation at all, twelve weeks into owning the paper on her, but there’s a difference between a mechanism and a woman crossing a quad with a laundry bag, and I am finding out what that difference feels like in real time, at my own dinner table, with a spoon halfway to my mouth and a want in me that has nothing polite left in it.

She has a way of not looking like she’s checking exits. I clock it anyway, because I taught myself a long time ago to read that particular kind of stillness in people for reasons that had nothing to do with her, and it turns out the skill transfers. She doesn’t slow down crossing that quad. She doesn’t speed up either. She just crosses it, bag on one shoulder, like a woman who has already decided this ground isn’t going to get to pick her pace, and I sit at my own table with my own house around me and understand, in the space of about four seconds, that I have built an entire architecture around a person I know exactly nothing about except that she does that.

I have two ways to handle this and I already know which one I’m bad at.

Option one: log it. File tonight’s sighting the way I’ve filed every other piece of this for eight weeks—under business, under the acquisition, under a word that keeps the thing at arm’s length from whatever I actually am about it. I’ve been telling myself that story since March of last year and I’m not a bad liar, generally, but I’m bad at telling myself lies that don’t hold, and this one stopped holding somewhere around the second course.

Option two is the only honest one, so let’s do that instead. I’m going to tell you everything, all of it, with nothing softened, because you’re going to find out anyway and I’d rather you hear it from me before you hear it from her, since she doesn’t get to hear it at all yet.

I’ve wanted her since I was fifteen years old. I’m aware of exactly how that sentence lands and I’m not going to spend a paragraph apologizing for the arithmetic of it. Seven years is long enough to build a want into a permanent fixture in a man, the kind you stop noticing the way you stop noticing your own hands, until a girl with a laundry bag crosses a quad and every fixture in the building starts rattling at once. I have thought about her more consistently, in that time, than I have thought about anything I was actually taught in school. That’s not a confession people make comfortably. I’m not comfortable. I’m telling you anyway.

A year and a half ago I bought the entire Ferrante balance from Salvatore—fifteen months before anybody shot her father—every note, every figure, including one she signed herself at sixteen at a kitchen table in Vermont that I didn’t know about until the paperwork crossed my desk. I bought it as leverage on her father, who was alive at the time and useful to my family in ways that had nothing to do with her. I want that part on the record precisely because it complicates the rest of what I’m about to say: I didn’t build this to get her. I built it to hold Anthony Ferrante, and I would have gone on holding it quietly for another decade if somebody hadn’t put a bullet in him in a parking garage in June.

I didn’t know that was coming. I want that on the record too, for whatever it’s worth, which—I’ll be honest—is fuck-all, because a man can build the gun without pulling the trigger and still be the reason it was loaded, and I’ve had all summer to sit with that particular piece of arithmetic.

The balance landed in my hands the hour he died, because that’s how these things work, debt doesn’t wait for anyone to grieve. And once it was mine and she was the only name left on it, I spent eight weeks doing what I do with anything that matters to me, which is secure it before I’ve worked out whether I’m allowed to want it. I arranged her enrollment through Salvatore—she thinks it was her uncle’s doing, and it was, in the sense that his signature is the one on the form. I paid the Corvane treasury to revive a Rite that hasn’t been used since 1986, so that when Michaelmas came there’d be a mechanism sitting there waiting, oiled and legal and mine to use the moment she stood on that floor unmatched. I had a room made up on the third floor three weeks before she ever set foot on this headland, which means I was furnishing a life for a woman I had never spoken to based entirely on a photograph in a file and seven years of not being able to stop. If a doctor heard the last five sentences in that order he’d have me committed before I finished the sixth. I don’t have a doctor. I have a signet ring and a family name, and around here that does the same job for considerably less money.