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I have never needed that training more than I need it now, at the foot of my father's table.

"Marriage," I say at last. "For one year, to Laszlo Novak. Then it dissolves, and everyone walks away."

Février's thumbnail stops moving on the tin. Somebody groans. My father doesn't react, which is worse.

Sandro comes out of his chair. "Non. Absolutely not—" and Olivier is talking over him, fast, urgent, "Henri, if this gets out before we have a chance to figure a way out, the other families will read it as surrender—" and Février's cane cracks down on the table, scattering a bit of stationery, and the old man insists that no daughter of this house goes to a Novak, not while he’s still breathing… "Plutôt la guerre, Henri, tu m'entends, la guerre plutôt que ça…"

Yeah, better war than this, in their eyes.

And under all the commotion, Julien, who was ordered to silence, is now murmuring my name in a dejected tone, as if he has any right to sound wounded.

Half the men are now out of their chairs, spouting arguments in French at once. I stand in my spot without chiming in. I did my screaming already, earlier today. Twenty minutes on the road with the windows up, before I composed myself and went to get Julien. My throat is still raw from the bloody screaming but nobody in this room gets to see me going crazy.

I keep staring at my father. Everything else is noise.

He hasn't said a word yet. Glass untouched, watching me. His stillness frightens me more than all the chaos, because Henri Valmont in a temper is like weather, it passes, but I have seen him go quiet like this twice in my life and both times a man stopped existing shortly afterwards.

"Ça suffit."

Enough—that's all he says and it does its job. It’s as if he’s fired a round of bullets into the ceiling.

"There will be no marriage," he informs me firmly. Not a request, not even really an order. He says a thing like it already happened and waits for everyone to agree that it did. "No daughter of mine goes into that house. We will resolve the matter of Julien ourselves. Whatever it requires."

"It's already resolved," I argue, but he won't listen.

"Bullshit. That's no resolution, it is⁠—"

"I gave my word, Papa."

The words tumble down the table, all the way to him. Regret fills me. Maybe I should not have come tonight.

"I negotiated for Julien's life and I gave my word. You know what that means. My word, the only currency this family claims never to debase. Isn't that what you taught me? What your father taught you, and his father taught him? Novak kept his promise not to hurt him further. He was going to kill Julien, but now my brother is sitting at your table with all of his body still intact. And now you want to show me that a Valmont's word bends the moment the terms sting."

"You had no authority to bargain like that."

"If I didn't, Julien would have been dead. It's as simple as that. Then it would have been payback, and more men would be dead." I don't apologize—there's nothing to apologize for. So many years of being in college, training and practicing medicine have taught me how to give a family bad news and take whatever comes back. "You were forty minutes away. The rules say a life for the blood, on the spot, on their ground—your rules, Papa, you made us recite them. Was Novak going to keep him warm until you arrived to open negotiations? I was there. So I worked with what was in front of me, which is what I do every day of my life, because the alternative would have been standing in a corridor with a perfect plan and a corpse."

"We take it back," Sandro says to my father, over me. "Tonight, with force, before this thing hardens into fact⁠—"

"Walk me through it." I turn on him, and perhaps it's the twenty-hour shift, or the blood on my sleeve, or a lifetime of men discussing me across tables, but I am fucking done with being overlooked or dismissed. Thirty-three years of me—that's how long I've been on this earth—and I'm about sick of this state of affairs. "Really, Sandro, educate me.

"You go to war over a contract I agreed to. Men die—yours, theirs, some random twenty-year-old who doesn't even know who I am. Perhaps you even win. Probably not, because that man had the whole thing planned out before I'd finished making my request, and men like that don't leave their obvious flank open. But win or lose, the first body is Julien's, because the moment the agreement breaks, the guarantee breaks with it." I look at them all, one after the other, furious that they question my choice to save my brother, all my false uncles. "I've spent ten years on the other end of nights that start in rooms exactly like this one. So no, I won't stand here and applaud you for finding a fresh way to get my brother killed."

"Tout sa mère," Février says to nobody in particular. “Stubborn, but not as quiet.” Yes, I'm much like my mother it seems, although in a different way. I’m the volcano, she’s the stream. What he says isn't quite a compliment. It isn't quite not one, either.

"I left." I'm only talking to my father now, because a bunch of idiots won't listen. "Fifteen years ago I walked out of this world and built one of my own, where now the only blood I touch is blood I'm trying to keep inside people. And it held, Papa. It held for this long until tonight, when Julien needed me to step in. One night of folly for him. That's what it cost—everything I built I have paid for, so no. You don't get to stand at the head of this table and demand a price that came out of my life and not yours. I will do this so I can stand by my choice and keep living as I have worked so hard to do."

My father remains silent for a long time. The smoke moves under the chandelier. Somewhere behind me, Julien has finally, mercifully, stopped talking once more.

"Why you?" my father finally asks.

"What?"

"Novak," he spits, decades of hatred in one word. "Think, Manon. He held a Valmont life in his hand. He could have asked for anything. Money. Territory. The eastern docks, he's wanted those for a decade. He could have asked for ten favors to be called in over ten years, and I would have paid, and he knows I would have paid." A pause. "Instead, he demands a wife to be kept for only twelve months. Did he say why?"

"No."

"Did he ask about me?"