Chapter 2
The car took the river road at exactly the speed limit, which told her something about the man sitting next to her.
Sera looked straight ahead.
"You knew," she said.
"Since eleven this morning."
"You knew where he was going four hours before my own family did."
"Yes."
"And you came and parked outside my wedding."
Cormac Devane looked out his window at the water.
"I came to see whether you'd wait," he said.
"For him?"
"For anybody."
She turned her head and got her first real look at him.
Fifty, give or take. Gray coming in at the temples. Plain suit, no watch, hands that had done other work before this one.
"You know who I am," he said.
"Everybody in this city knows who you are."
"Say it anyway. I like hearing how it gets told on your side of the river."
"Four years ago you took the north docks off us," Sera said, "and nobody's taken them back."
"Off us." Devane turned that over. "You've been engaged to those people for a year and you've already got the pronoun right."
"I've been engaged to them since I was twenty-four."
"And what were you before that?"
"Somebody's daughter."
"Mm." He looked back out at the water. "Well. You'll want to be something else next."
"You want something," she said.
"Everybody wants something. It's the only honest thing about people." He nodded at the windshield. "Where am I taking you?"
She could have said her father's house. Her mother would be there inside the hour with the lawyer and the cousins and the whole machine.
"The Grieco house," Sera said.
Devane's mouth moved slightly.
"Say it," she said.
"I was going to say I hoped you'd be smarter." He tapped the glass, and the driver turned east. "But I don't mind being wrong today."
He didn't ask for her number. He didn't tell her he'd be waiting.
When the car stopped at the top of the drive he leaned across, opened her door himself, and said, "Have somebody read you the paperwork on your marina. The third page."
Then he was gone.
And Sera was standing on white gravel in a wedding dress at half past five.
Inside, the house had already moved on without her.
There were flowers in the hall that weren't hers. Two of the kitchen girls came down the east stairs with an armful of sheets, saw her, and stopped dead.
Nella came out of the dining room. She'd run this house for nineteen years.
"Sera." She said it very carefully.
"Whose flowers?"
"The doctor sent them."
"For who, Nella?"
Nella breathed out.
"We put Miss Cardone in the east rooms. She's sleeping. The doctor's staying tonight." A pause. "He called ahead."
The east rooms.
Not the guest wing. The east rooms, which shared a wall with his.
"He called ahead," Sera repeated.
"From the car."
So at some point this afternoon, in the middle of all of it, Rafe Grieco had gotten on the phone.
And what he'd called about was bedding.
"Ma'am." Nella's voice had gone quiet. "Where would you like your things put?"
Nineteen years, and Nella had never once had to ask that question. She was asking it now in a hall full of somebody else's flowers, because everyone under this roof had already done the math.
"Leave them," Sera said. "Nothing's staying."
He got back at four in the morning.
She heard the cars, then the doors, then the low voices in the hall, then nothing for a long time. Which meant the east rooms first.
He came into her room at ten past five with his sleeves rolled up. There was blood on his shirt and none of it was his.
He didn't turn the light on.
"You left the church," he said.
Sera was in the chair by the window. She'd been there six hours.
"I did."
"I told you not to."
"You've told me a lot of things this year."
He crossed to the shelf and poured two fingers of whiskey without looking at the glass.
His hands were steady. They were always steady. In four years she had never once heard this man raise his voice, and she had watched him have a conversation with somebody who was dead by morning.
"Ask," he said.
"Is she alive?"
"Yes."
"Are you hurt?"
"No."
"Then I'm out of questions."
"Sera."
"You want me to ask why." She turned in the chair. "Fine. Why."
He put the glass down.
"Because the Cardone name is the only reason I'm sitting in this chair," he said. "Because the old man made me, and then he died, and half his people have never been easy under a Grieco."
"Rafe."
"Because her brother died on my kitchen floor with my hands on him. He was twenty-three. He did it for me."
He picked the glass back up.
"And because the day I let the Malaras keep her is the day forty men in this family start asking whether I owe anybody anything at all."
Every word of it flat and in order. He'd built it on the drive home.
"So when she calls, I go," he said. "That doesn't change. Not for you. Not for anybody."
"I know," Sera said.
That stopped him.
He'd been ready for the other thing. Shouting, then crying, then her hands on his shirt asking why it was always her. He'd been prepared to be patient about it, which for him mostly meant waiting for a person to finish.
"Then we understand each other," he said.
"We do."
"Good. The church can wait until she's steady."
"The church isn't happening."
Rafe looked at her.
"You're tired," he said.
"I'm awake for the first time in a year. Not the same thing." She stood up. "Get out of my room. You smell like a Malara."
Something crossed his face that she'd never seen there before.
Then it was gone, and he set the glass down, and he left.
She came down at nine.
They were all at the long table. Her uncle Vince. Three of the Cardone men. Rafe at the head in a clean shirt with nothing on his face at all.
And Livia Cardone at his right hand in a robe, pale, with a bandage on her forearm.
She was wearing a ring.
Heavy old thing, yellow gold, an emerald cut flat. It was on Rafe's mother's hand in every photograph in this house.
It had been sized for Sera in April.
Livia saw her in the doorway and set her glass down.
And every man at that table stood up.