Chapter 2: What He Would Not Lie About

The car was black, armored, and smelled faintly of cedar and gun oil. Rain slid down the windows in long gray ropes, and the streets of Vesper Bay went by in smears of sodium light: shuttered fish markets, a bus shelter with a torn poster, the dark hulks of cranes along the container port where, eleven months ago, a man named Tomas Castellane had last been seen alive. Aria sat as far from her husband as the seat allowed. He sat as though the seat had been built around him. Dante drove. Another car followed them at fifty yards, then another behind that. A convoy for one wedding that officially had never happened. In the front passenger seat, a young soldier she did not know kept his eyes on the mirrors and his gun on his knee. "Rules," she said. Luca had been looking out of his own window. He turned his head. In the passing streetlight his face appeared and disappeared, all planes and shadow, with a mouth that seemed to have been taught to give nothing away. "You want them now." "I've been married for eleven minutes to a man who just told me someone bugged my wedding. I would like to know which of the things I'm about to be told are true." "All of them." He said it without offense. "That is the nature of a treaty. Nobody is allowed to lie in it. They are only allowed to leave things out." "That's the same as lying." "In my experience," Luca said, "it's considerably more efficient." She almost smiled. The impulse startled her enough that she looked down at her hands. The new ring caught the light. White gold, plain, a thin hard circle that already felt like a handcuff. "The first term," he said. "You live at Cormorant House, on Gull Point. My family's estate. You will have your own suite, on the east wing, with its own bath, its own sitting room, and a lock on the inside of the door. You hold the only key." She looked at him sharply. "The only key." "The only one." His eyes were on the window again. "I am told it is customary, in arrangements like this, for the husband to hold a spare. I have declined to have one cut." "Why?" "Because I would like it to be absolutely clear," he said, "that nothing in this house will happen to you that you have not chosen." The words were dry, administrative. She heard them anyway. They went into her like a splinter, small and sharp and impossible to ignore, and she held very still, because she had learned that the moment you let someone see a thing has landed, they know where to push. "That's generous," she said, carefully. "It's not generosity. It's a precondition for the treaty surviving the first month." He paused. "And it's what I would want, if it were my sister." "You don't have a sister." "No." His jaw tightened. "I had a father. I'm told the principle transfers." She did not know what to do with that, so she did what she always did with things she didn't know what to do with. She turned it over and set it on a shelf for later. "Second term. Your restaurant remains yours. Bellefiore stays open on its usual hours, with its usual staff. You may continue to work there. You may sleep there if you wish to, though I would prefer you did not, and for reasons of security, not control. Dante will assign men to the pier. They will be discreet. You will not notice them unless you are looking." "I'm always looking." "I had gathered that." The corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile. "Your sous-chef, Sofia Reyes. She is not told. Nor is any other staff. As far as the world is concerned, you are still a Castellane who cooks, and I am still the man you were raised to loathe." "I wasn't raised to loathe you. I was raised not to think about you." "That," said Luca, "is worse." It wasn't an insult. It was an observation, delivered with the same flat precision with which he'd announced the recorder. She realized she was beginning to be able to tell the difference between his tones. The flat ones meant he was telling the truth. The very flat ones meant it cost him something. "Third term. The council." He held up three fingers, ticking them off against his knee like a man reading a menu. "Once a week, in the Arbiter's offices, a representative of each family reports every credible threat against the peace. Mine will be Viktor Hale. Yours will be your uncle. You and I will attend, but we do not speak. We sit at opposite ends of the table and look at each other as people who would prefer the other to be at the bottom of the harbor." "That shouldn't be difficult." "No." His gaze came back to her. "I'm hoping that will make it more convincing." A silence fell, but not an uncomfortable one. The rain thickened. Dante turned onto the coastal road, and the sea appeared on their left, black and heaving, with a pale line of surf at the edge of the world. "Fourth term," Aria said. "I assume it's the one where we're not to touch each other." For the first time, something moved behind his face. It was gone almost before she saw it, but she had been reading faces since before she could read books. A flicker of something like discomfort, like a man being asked a question he had hoped to avoid. "The fourth term," he said, "is that there is no fourth term. The treaty says nothing about that. Your father's lawyers wished to include a clause concerning the marriage being consummated. Mine wished to include a clause forbidding it. Judge Okafor struck both." He paused. "I told her to. I'm not interested in a wife I have to be told how to treat." "And what if I'd wanted to include one?" "Then you would have said so in your father's study, and I would have listened." "Would you." "Yes." He did not elaborate. He didn't seem to think elaboration was necessary. He simply sat in the dark with his hands on his knees, looking at her as if the question had been entirely reasonable and he were prepared to be held to the answer. She did not know what to do with a man who did that either. In her experience, powerful men gave you the answer they thought would make you stop asking. Luca Drakos had given her the answer and then waited, as though he expected her to check it. "There's a fifth term," she said slowly. "Isn't there? The one you haven't said." "You're quick." "I'm a pastry chef. The recipe always has one ingredient nobody mentions because it's the one that goes wrong." He actually looked at her then, a long considering look, as if she had turned out to be a different kind of problem than the one he'd prepared for. "The fifth term is that, in the house, you will be watched. Not by me. By the staff, by the guards, by Viktor's people, by anyone who gains from seeing the two of us fail. Every servant at Cormorant House believes you are a guest of the family, here under an arrangement that has to do with the shipping dispute. They do not know we are married. If any of them learns it, it will be known by morning in every dock and kitchen and barroom in the city." "And then?" "And then," he said, "there will be soldiers who have buried brothers hearing that the man who killed them is sharing a roof with a Castellane. I don't believe I need to finish that sentence." He didn't. She could finish it herself. She had seen what happened to men on the docks who were suspected of sympathy for the other side, and none of it was something she wanted to describe. "So I'm a prisoner," she said, "and a secret." "You are a wife," said Luca, "and a risk. The first is a courtesy. The second is the truth." "Do you ever say anything just to be kind?" He considered that for longer than she expected. "I don't know," he said finally. "I've not had much practice. Ask me again in a month." The convoy swung through an iron gate and up a long gravel drive lined with black pines. At the end of it stood a house. She had expected a fortress. What she saw instead was worse: a beautiful gray stone mansion, three stories, with tall windows lit gold from within and a pillared porch where a woman in a gray dress stood waiting with a lantern, like a figure in a painting about to be disturbed. Cormorant House had been built by Nikos Drakos's grandfather for a shipping fortune, and it had the settled, patient look of a place that had absorbed a great deal of history and kept every bit of it. Dante pulled the car to a stop. The engine ticked in the silence. "You may still refuse," Luca said. She turned. "What?" "The treaty has not yet been activated. It is not binding until you cross the threshold. You can still tell Dante to drive back to your father's house, and the arrangement will end tonight, and I will tell Judge Okafor it was my decision, and no one will blame you." He said all this in the same level voice, but his hand, she noticed, had closed on his knee. "I would rather you walk in because you chose to. If you walk in because you were afraid, it will not hold." "You'd really let me go." "Yes." "You'd lose your peace." "Yes." "Why?" "Because I watched you in the chapel." His gaze was fixed on the house, not her. "Your uncle told you to smile. I saw him say it. And you smiled, and you married me, and I thought that this was a woman who has been made to do things all her life and has made a skill of it. And I find I don't want to be the next thing you are made to do." The rain drummed on the roof of the car. Eleven months ago her brother had died on a bridge. Six months ago her mother's grave had been dug, because grief, in her family, was a kind of illness that ran in the blood. Tonight her father had sold her for a ceasefire. And now a man who had every reason to hate her was giving her the keys to a door and telling her she could close it. She thought about the recorder blinking on the altar. Someone in that chapel wanted this treaty to fail. "If I go back," she said slowly, "whoever put that recorder under the pew wins." "Yes." "And I'm not particularly interested in letting them win." His head turned. In the dim, rain-streaked light the gray of his eyes was nearly silver. "That is not an answer to my question, Mrs. Drakos." "It's the only one you're getting tonight." She reached for the door handle. "And Luca?" "Yes?" "If you ever call me that in front of a staff member," she said, "I'll put arsenic in the soufflé." There was a short silence. Then, impossibly, a sound that might have been the very beginning of a laugh. Dry, rusty, half-strangled, as if the muscles for it had been out of use for years. "Noted," said her husband. "Dante, the door." She stepped out into the rain. The woman on the porch was sixty, perhaps, thin and upright, with iron-gray hair pinned tight and a face that gave away exactly as much as Luca's. "Mrs. Pell," Dante said, low. "The housekeeper. She knows." "She knows?" "She's the only one in the house who does. She'll show you to your rooms." He hesitated, a heavy man trying not to look sentimental. "Miss Castellane. For what it's worth. He meant what he said in the car. I've known him thirty years. He doesn't say things he doesn't mean. It's the most annoying thing about him." Aria climbed the steps. The lantern light fell on the wet stone, on the pillars, on her hands. The ring on her finger glittered, thin and cold. "Good evening," Mrs. Pell said, with a courteous nod of her head, the way one greets a guest with a chance of becoming something else. "Welcome to Cormorant House. I have taken the liberty of lighting a fire. The east wing is damp this time of year." She stepped over the threshold. Behind her, she heard Luca's door close, the heavy soft thud of an armored car, and his footsteps on the gravel. He stopped at the foot of the steps. He did not follow her in. "Aria," he said. It was the first time he had said her name. She turned. He stood in the rain without an umbrella, hair dark with it, one hand at his side, looking up at her with an expression she could not read and did not entirely trust. "Whatever else happens," he said, "I will not lie to you about the things that can kill you." "That's a very narrow promise." "It's the only one I know I can keep." She looked down at him a moment longer. Then she said, "Good night, Luca," and went in, and let Mrs. Pell lead her up the long, dim staircase into a house that smelled of beeswax and old sorrow, where a man had promised not to lie about the things that could kill her and had been very careful to say nothing about the things that could break her heart.

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