The Widow Bassi came to Gull Point the day before my wedding, and the first thing she did was ask to be shown the doors.
I had spent eight days lying under that roof, and I wore it badly. I'd put the photograph back in the drawer exactly as I found it, under the sail bag, and said nothing to anyone. Rafe was barely home, and when he was, he was a black coat going out.
Which doors, I wanted to ask her. And who had told her to count them?
Serafina took her coat. Rafe stood in the hall with his hands in his pockets. The Widow tapped her cane across the kitchen floor, past the bread rising under its towel, and stopped in front of me like a woman checking a ledger she did not trust.
"Tomorrow, at St. Agnes, you will be married before the Table," she said. "Until the vows are spoken, any breach of the peace by either family, and the Table rules against the family that breached. Fully. Without appeal."
"Understood," Rafe said.
"I wasn't asking you, Mr. Corvino." She kept her eyes on me. "I have one rule older than this treaty, Miss Ferro. At my table, blood does not speak against blood. After tomorrow you are a Corvino. Whatever you know of your husband, you will not say it in my hearing."
"And today?"
"Today you are still a Ferro." The cane lifted a half inch and came down. "Today is the only day you have."
She left. Nobody breathed until the front door closed. Then Serafina clapped her hands once and said, "Dress. Up on the stool."
One day, then. Until tomorrow I could stand in front of that Table and call Rafe Corvino a murderer, and be heard. I had no proof. I had a photograph I couldn't mention and a woman with a mouthful of pins.
The dress was ivory and cut for someone with more patience than I had. I stood on the stool in the kitchen while Serafina knelt and worked the hem, and I made my voice small and bored.
"Friday the tenth. What time did he come home?"
Pins stopped. "Hold still."
"I'm holding still. What time?"
"I don't keep his hours. Ask him."
"I'm asking you. You've waited up for him since he was nine." I looked down at the gray crown of her head. "Why won't you say?"
The kitchen clock ticked. Nico's watch, loose on my wrist under the lace cuff, said 2:17, the way it always did.
"Ten past two," Serafina said to the hem. "He came in the back. There was blood on his shirt, and he stood in my kitchen like a boy who'd broken a window, and I burned it in the stove. That's all. That's the whole of it. Don't look at me like that."
I couldn't feel my hands. I made them stay in the lace.
"You burned it."
"I fed him eggs." She sat back on her heels and her chin shook, then set. "And you want to know about men in this house? Sofia Corvino wrote the charter herself. Harbor leases pass to the Don's widow. Not to blood, not to a son, to the widow. She knew, that woman. The men in this house die young." She laughed, and it was an ugly small sound. "Marry him and see. Half the harbor is yours by thirty."
She took the pins out of her mouth and did not offer me anything to eat. That was the cost, and I paid it standing on a stool.
"Serafina."
"Hem's done."
When I turned, Rafe was in the doorway. I didn't know how long. Long enough that Serafina took the dress's skirt in both hands and went very busy with it.
I should have let it go. Instead I used what I had.
"You taught my brother to sail."
Not a flicker. Gray eyes, perfectly still. "Did I."
"He knew you. Before. He never said, and you never said, and I'd like to know why."
He looked at the watch on my wrist, then at my face. Something happened at the corner of his mouth and went away.
"Ask me something I can answer," he said.
"That is something you can answer."
"Livia." Quietly, like a hand on my arm. "Tomorrow you can ask me anything."
The front door hit the wall hard enough to rattle the glass in the cupboards.
"Rafe!" Enzo Corvino came down the hall in a cloud of cold air, twenty-nine years old and loud as a gun. "Tell me why I'm the one who drove out to the Featherstone warehouse at dawn like a damn paperboy."
Rafe turned. I got down off the stool, pinned and stiff, and stood in the kitchen doorway where I could see both of them.
"A container of copper cable," Enzo said. "Worth six hundred thousand dollars. Last night. In, out, no alarm, no broken lock. They knew which berth. They knew the day. They knew the guard's rounds." He shoved a hand through his hair. "Somebody had the schedule, cousin."
The schedule. Fourteen pages. Two captains' names. The little bar crawling across my phone, and the word Delivered.
I held on to the door frame.
My father hadn't called in eight days. I had taken the silence for caution. He had been waiting until the day before the vows to break the peace, and he had made it my signature on the break.
If this came out, the Table would rule against the Ferros. Fully. Without appeal. And then Port Morrow would have its war, and Tommy from the linen service would be in the back row of it.
"Who had the schedule?" Rafe asked.
"Nobody had it." Enzo's eyes slid down the hall and found me, and he smiled the way you smile at a bad check. "Nobody who isn't a Ferro."
I looked down at my wrist. Nico's watch. Two seventeen, wrong and loyal. The voicemail, fourteen seconds I knew by heart. I'm fixing it tonight, all of it. I had been so angry that I hadn't picked up. Eight days later I had fixed nothing. I had only handed over the pages.
Rafe said something low, and they went down the corridor toward the study, and Enzo's voice carried the length of the hall.
"The study has a camera. Rafe's pulling the footage tonight."