Chapter 1: Smile, or This Ends

Smile, or this ends before the vows. Uncle Salvatore said it the way other men said grace, lips barely moving, his hand warm and heavy on her arm as though he were steadying a nervous bride. To anyone watching from the pews, he was a doting uncle giving away a niece. To Aria, he was a man reminding her that there were guns in this chapel and that he knew exactly where every one of them was. She smiled. It was a good smile. She had spent twenty-six years learning to build one on command, the way she built a sugar cage: slowly, from the inside, one brittle strand at a time, so that no one could see how much of it was heat and how much was held breath. The chapel of Saint Brigid of the Tides had been closed to the public since the war began. Midnight, rain hammering the stained glass, thirty candles that did nothing but make the shadows look hungry. The doors were locked from the inside. She had heard the bolt slide home behind them, a flat iron sound, and every muscle in her back had flinched toward it. Eleven people in the room, not counting her. She counted them again, because counting was what she did when she was afraid. It was the same trick she used in her kitchen at the dinner rush: name the stations, name the hands, know where the knives are. Father Anselm at the altar, seventy years old, his Bible shaking so slightly she only saw it because the candle flame in front of it trembled too. Judge Ines Okafor, the city's neutral arbiter, in the front pew in a charcoal coat, her face like a closed ledger. Two consiglieri: the Drakos side's, Viktor Hale, tall and silver-templed, with the kind of pleasant expression you only get from practice; her family's, old Pietro Marchetti, gray as ash and sweating. Four men in dark suits along the side walls, two from each family, hands folded in front of them in a way that meant their hands were not empty. Her father's chair, set in the aisle, because Don Enzo could no longer stand for longer than a few minutes. He sat bundled in a black coat, oxygen tube tucked under the collar where he thought no one would see it. He had not looked at her since she walked in. And at the end of the aisle, the man she was here to marry. Luca Drakos stood with his hands at his sides, in a suit so dark it swallowed the candlelight. He was thirty-one. She had seen his photograph in her father's study for eleven months, always with a pin through it, always with Tomas's name written beneath. In photographs he looked like a stone saint. In person he looked like something that had been carved and then told not to move. He did not look at her as she came down the aisle. He looked at the room. That was the first thing she noticed, and the thing that frightened her most. A bridegroom looks at his bride. A man walking into a negotiation looks at the door. Luca Drakos looked at the pews, then the walls, then the shadows above the choir loft, and only when he had finished did his eyes come to rest on her, gray and level and so completely empty that for one breath she thought he was blind. He wasn't. He was hiding. She knew it because she had grown up in a house where hiding was the family trade. "Who gives this woman?" Father Anselm said. His voice cracked on *woman*. "I do," said Salvatore, warmly, and the hand on her arm squeezed once, hard enough to leave a mark. Then he let go, and she walked the last three steps alone. The treaty had been explained to her in her father's study four days earlier, in the voice people use to describe surgery. Marry Luca Drakos. Live in his house. Keep your restaurant. Tell no one. If either family broke the peace, the marriage dissolved and the war resumed. Forty-one people had already died. Her brother Tomas had been the first, found on the Ferrier Bridge with a Drakos signet ring clutched in his dead hand, and Nikos Drakos, Luca's father, had been the second, two weeks later, his car at the bottom of the harbor. She had wanted to scream at her father. Instead she had asked how many of their men were left. He had said, "Fewer every week." So she had asked what time the wedding was. Now she stood in front of the man whose name she had spent eleven months learning to hate and found she could not summon it. There was too much else. The cold of the stone floor through her thin shoes. The smell of wax and wet wool. The tiny pulse of a muscle in Luca's jaw. "Do you, Luca Drakos," Father Anselm began, and then stopped, because somewhere high in the chapel, above the choir loft, something creaked. Every man along the walls moved at once. It was beautiful, in a terrible way: eight hands going inside eight jackets in the same half-second, like a flock of birds turning. Viktor Hale went still. Judge Okafor did not even turn her head. And Luca, without looking at Aria, moved his body one step to the left, which put his shoulder between her and the loft. It was the smallest motion in the world. She would think about it for weeks. "Wind," said a voice from the choir stalls. A young Drakos soldier leaned out, pale, one hand raised. "It's the shutter. Sorry. Sorry, Don Drakos." Nobody breathed. Then, one by one, the hands came out of the jackets. Her father coughed into his sleeve. Salvatore laughed softly, the sound of a man who has already won and is being gracious about it. That laugh bothered her. She filed it away. In a kitchen, you learn that the loudest sound is rarely the one that matters. The thing that matters is the pan that goes quiet. Father Anselm began again. His voice was thin. "Do you, Luca Drakos, take Aria Castellane..." "I do." Two words, flat as a ruling. No tremor. But his eyes had come to hers, and in the gray there was something she could not name and did not like, because it looked uncomfortably like an apology. "And do you, Aria Castellane, take Luca Drakos..." "Smile," Salvatore had said, "or this ends before the vows." She thought of Tomas on the Ferrier Bridge. She thought of the ring in his hand, and the way her mother had screamed, and the way she had not screamed, because she was already counting, already naming the stations, already learning how to be a person who survives. "I do," she said. The priest swallowed. "By the authority given me, and the treaty ratified by both houses, I pronounce you..." He could not make himself say *husband and wife*. The words hung in the candlelit air between them like something none of them were willing to touch. Judge Okafor rose from her pew, brisk and unhurried, and said into the silence, "They are married. Sign the register." The signing took place at a small oak table by the altar. A book bound in black leather, a pen with a silver nib. Luca signed first, in a straight, severe hand. He held the pen out to her without a word, and when she took it, their fingers touched. His hand was cold. Hers was shaking. She hated that he could feel it. "Breathe," he said, so quietly she might have imagined it. His lips did not move. It was her uncle's trick, reversed. Not a threat, but its opposite. "Sign. Then look at your father." She signed. *Aria Castellane Drakos.* The last word looked like a lie she'd told in someone else's handwriting. She looked at her father. Don Enzo Castellane was staring at his shoes. His hands trembled on the arms of his chair. He had sold his daughter for a ceasefire and could not bear to see what he had bought. Something inside her went very quiet and very clear. "Rings," said Judge Okafor. Dante Marek, a broad, scarred man who stood at Luca's shoulder like a wall with opinions, stepped forward holding a velvet box. Inside lay two bands of plain white gold. Luca took the smaller one. He did not slide it onto her finger. He held out his palm, and she understood that he was giving her the choice of whether to put her hand in it. It was a small thing. It was also the first moment of the night that anyone had asked her anything. She put her hand in his. The ring went on cold and fit perfectly, and she realized with a lurch that someone had measured her hand without her knowledge. In a family like hers that was not a kindness. It was a warning about how much they already knew. "Now," Judge Okafor said, her voice carrying to every corner. "Under the terms of the treaty, the witnesses will remember only what is written. The ceremony did not occur. Nothing was said. Anyone who speaks of it ends the peace, and I will personally see that the ending is theirs." She let that settle. "Leave through the sacristy, in pairs, six minutes apart. Don Drakos, Mrs. Drakos, you leave last." *Mrs. Drakos.* Her knees nearly went. The room emptied by degrees. Salvatore kissed her forehead on his way out, damp lips, cologne over something sour, and murmured, "Remember who you belong to, little one," and she realized she had been wrong earlier. He had not been threatening her with the Drakos guns. He had been threatening her with himself. Viktor Hale shook Luca's hand. "Congratulations, Don Drakos. Your father would have been proud." A courtesy so smooth it barely made a sound. Luca's eyes did not move from the man's face, and Aria saw something pass through them, there and gone, like a fish under black water. Then they were gone, her father carried out in his chair by two men who would not meet her eyes, and the chapel was empty except for Judge Okafor, Dante Marek, a priest at his prayers, her husband, and her. Her husband. She turned the ring on her finger. "So," she said, because someone had to speak first, and she had spent her life learning that the person who speaks first sets the temperature of the room. "Is this where you tell me the rules?" "Not here." Luca's voice was low and steady and entirely without warmth. "Here, the walls listen." "The walls? In a locked chapel?" "The chapel was swept at six." He glanced at Dante, who gave a very slight shake of his head. "It was not clean at nine." She stared at him. "Someone came in after the sweep." "Someone left something behind." His gaze went, deliberately, to the choir loft where the shutter had creaked. "Dante found it under the third pew an hour before you arrived. He left it where it was, so that whoever put it there would think we hadn't noticed." The cold in her spine turned to ice. "What was it?" Luca reached into his jacket, and every muscle in her body clenched, but what he drew out was a handkerchief wrapped around something small and flat. He opened it on the altar rail beside the guttering candles. A small black recorder, no larger than a matchbook, its red light steadily blinking. "Someone in that room," her husband said, very quietly, "wanted to hear every word we said tonight. Which means someone in that room already knows exactly how little this marriage is holding together." His eyes met hers. "And one of them is sitting at your family's table." The recorder blinked on the altar, red and patient, and for the first time since she had walked down that aisle Aria understood that the treaty had not been written to end the war. It had been written to give someone a reason to start it again. "Mrs. Drakos," Luca said, and held out his arm. "I suggest we don't give them the satisfaction of waiting."

Before you start reading

You must be 18 or older

Comments (0)