Blood Red

D e c l a n

I’ve been told the dress is red. Siobhan told me, because Siobhan tells me everything eventually,

usually delivered with the specific energy of someone who has information they know you want and has waited for maximum impact before deploying it. "Red," she said. "You're welcome. You owe me." She didn't tell me anything else. I didn't ask for anything else. Some things are better walked into without preparation. I'm standing at the end of the aisle in a church that the Conti family has attended for four generations, in a suit that cost more than most people's cars, and I am for the $rst time in recent memory actually nervous. Not about the alliance. Not about the marriage as a strategic structure. Not about any of the things I've spent three months planning around.

About her. The doors open. The entire room exhales. I feel it — that collective shi! of attention,

I’ve hundred people all turning at once. And then I see her and every thought I've had in the last ten seconds disappears completely. Red. Deep, true, dark red lace over silk, the train stretching behind her like something out of a different era something from before the world decided women should be soft and small and easy to manage. She's on her father's arm and she's walking steadily and her back is bare, the lace framing all that exposed skin down to the base of her spine, and her dark hair is pinned up with the veil — black, shot through with red thread, trailing behind the train — and her lips are the color of the dress and she is looking directly at me. Dark eyes. Steady. Not performing anything.

She is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life and she knows exactly what she's doing and she is mine, I think, and then correct myself: she

has decided, provisionally, to be mine, which is a completely different and considerably more significant thing. Siobhan, standing to my le! as my best — Fergus objected; Siobhan ignored him — leans slightly toward me and says, barely audible:

"Close your mouth, Declan."

My jaw is closed. But I understand the sentiment.

Marco brings her to the end of the aisle. She steps up beside me. Up close the dress is even more — the lace detail, the precise red of it, the way the open back means that when I set my hand at her spine to guide her forward I will feel warm skin under my palm. She holds my gaze as she comes to stand beside me and something passes between us that is not performed and not strategic and doesn't have a name yet.

"You didn't wear white," I say, low enough for only her.

"I told you I wouldn't."

"You did." I look at her for another moment. "You look—" I don't have the word. Several offer themselves. None of them are adequate. "Like

yourself," I say finally. "For the first time since I've known you. Like yourself."

Something moves in her face. Real. Un$ltered. Gone before anyone else could see it.

"Don't say things like that," she says quietly.

"Why not."

"Because I don't know what to do with them."

I'm going to make it my project, I think, to give her so many things she doesn't know what to do with that she eventually stops trying to file them and starts letting herself feel them instead.

The priest begins. I take her hand. She lets me.

The vows. I say mine and mean every word in the way I mean things I've decided — completely, without reservation, without the option of

changing my mind. She says hers and there's something in her voice that is careful but not cold, measured but not empty, and I understand

that Seraphina Conti does not make promises lightly and that the words in her mouth right now are costing her something.

Good. Things worth having cost something.

When the priest says I may kiss her, I turn to her and she tilts her face up and I kiss her in front of I’ve hundred people with the full weight of my attention and not one single thought for the audience. She

makes a small sound against my mouth that I know no one else heard and her fingers tighten in mine.

Siobhan starts the applause.

✦ ✦ ✦

The holster sits flush against my leg, inner thigh. Custom fit, thin leather, completely invisible under the train of the dress. The knife straps to my right — a $xed blade, four inches, the one I've carried

since I was twenty-two, the one my father doesn't know about. Wedding appropriate,

I think, straightening the train in the anteroom before we walk into the reception. For a wedding like this one, in a world like this one, absolutely wedding appropriate. Luca catches me adjusting the strap through the fabric when he comes

to tell me the cars are ready. He stops. Looks. His eyes track from the faint outline at my le! thigh to my face and back again.

"Sera," he says. Slowly.

"Not now, Luca."

"When were you going to—"

"Later." I meet his eyes. "Much later. Go tell Papà the cars are ready."

He goes. But he looks back at me once from the doorway with an expression I haven't seen on my younger brother's face before — something that looks, almost, like reassessment. Like he's seeing me for

the first time in a while.

Good, I think. About time.