Fault lines

S e r a p h i n a

The reception venue is a converted warehouse in Tribeca

that my mother transformed into something that looks like

it costs twice what it does, which has always been Elena Conti's specific genius. Candles everywhere. Dark florals — deep red roses and black calla

lilies, my mother compromised on the traditional and the gothic and somehow landed on something that looks intentional and stunning.

Circular tables draped in black linen. An open bar that Fergus Callahan located within approximately forty-five seconds of arrival,

which I respect. I'm standing at the edge of the dance floor watching the room do what

rooms full of powerful people in fragile alliances always do — perform warmth while measuring distances — when I notice Siobhan.

She's talking to Matteo. My oldest brother, twenty-nine, who has my father's coloring and my

mother's composure and an unfortunate habit of being charming to everyone except the people he's supposed to be charming to. He's standing slightly closer to Siobhan than the conversation requires.

She's looking up at him with a speci$c expression I haven't seen on her face before — an expression that is distinctly not the one she uses on

people she's assessing. More like the one she uses on people she's already decided she finds interesting, and the decision surprised her.

Oh no, I think. That is the last complication this alliance needs and also I am not going to say a single word about it because frankly it's the most

interesting thing that has happened today that doesn't involve gunfire. Matteo laughs at something she says. Siobhan tilts her head. The

distance between them, which was already insufficient, decreases by another inch.

Luca materializes beside me with two glasses of wine and the expression he always wears when he's trying to look like he hasn't noticed something he's very much noticed. "Is Siobhan Callahan flirting with our brother," he says, not as a question.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Sera."

"Drink your wine, Luca."

He drinks his wine. We both watch. Matteo says something that makes Siobhan press her lips together in the way she does when she's trying

not to smile and losing. I make a mental note to watch this situation carefully, because Siobhan Callahan is a force of nature and my

brother is an idiot in the specific way that very smart men are idiots about women who can keep up with them, and this will either be $ne

or it will be a signi$cant problem and I will not know which for sometime. My husband appears at my shoulder. I know it's him before I see him know the warmth and the weight of his presence now, which is a thing I've only recently admitted to myself I've catalogued.

"Your brother," he says, looking at Matteo.

"Your sister," I say.

A pause. "Should I—"

"No."

"Right." He stands beside me and we both watch and say nothing, which is itself a kind of intimacy I didn't anticipate — the ease of standing next to someone in silence and having the silence mean

something.

D e c l a n

✦

I feel it before it happens. That’s the only way I can explain it — a shift in the room's temperature

that has nothing to do with air. A particular quality of attention from three men near the east wall who arrived with the Sorrento family's table and have been nursing the same drinks for forty minutes without looking at the bar once. Men don't ignore an open bar at a wedding unless they need to stay sharp. Men don't stay sharp at weddings

unless they're working.

I'm already moving before the first one reaches into his jacket.

"Down." I say it once, low and even, to Seraphina, as I put myself between her and the east wall — and then everything happens at once

and the room stops being a wedding reception and becomes what these rooms always threaten to become: a place where people die. Three of them. Moving toward the center of the floor towards the table where Marco Conti and my uncle Fergus are sitting, toward the

specific people whose removal would destabilize both families most sufficiently. Professional. Clean. Someone planned this with knowledge

of the seating chart. Someone on the inside. We knew that. We knew that from the name she gave

me on that park bench and I feel the confirmation of it land in my chest like a stone.

My men are already responding — Cian from the bar, Ronan from the door, two of Marco's people from the perimeter — and it's controlled

chaos, the kind of chaos that has structure underneath it if you know what you're looking at, and I know what I'm looking at, I've been in

rooms like this before—Movement to my right.

Fast. Fluid. Someone I didn't see coming from the service entrance, angling toward Seraphina, who I assumed was behind me — and she's not behind me. She's to my right and slightly forward and her hand is at the inside of her le! thigh through the fabric of the wedding dress and when it comes up there's a gun in it and she puts two shots into

the ceiling — controlled, deliberate, the room-stopping crack of it cutting through everything — and then she has the muzzle trained on

the man from the service entrance and her voice is completely level when she says: "Don't."

He stops. In the sudden terrible stillness of a room where the music has stopped and the screaming hasn't started yet, I process several things

simultaneously. My wife has a gun she pulled from a holster strapped to her inner thigh. She fired it with the accuracy of someone who has done this before. Considerably before. The ceiling shots were intentional — not panic, not desperation, a tactical choice to stop movement without casualties

in a room full of civilians. And there's something strapped to her other thigh that is not a gun.

The chaos resolves. Cian has two men on the ground. Ronan has the third. Marco's people have the service entrance man zip-tied before he

can blink twice. The room is breathing again in that shell-shocked way

that comes after something violent and brief — the specific silence of I’ve hundred people who are all realizing at the same moment that what they just witnessed was real. Seraphina lowers the gun. Smoothly. Like she's been holding guns in

wedding dresses her entire adult life, which — I'm understanding now she may have been doing the conceptual equivalent of, and it is the same thing.

She turns and looks at me. Direct. Completely steady. Not a tremor in her hands. Not a (icker in her face. Just those dark eyes on mine with an expression that is — waiting. Waiting to see what I do with this.Waiting to see if I'm going to be angry, or threatened, or shaken, or any of the things the men in her life have probably been about the

parts of her they didn't know existed. I look at her for a long moment. At the gun in her hand. At the faint outline of the knife sheath through the fabric at her other thigh. At the woman I married approximately four hours ago who has been carrying weapons in a wedding dress to her own reception and apparently also knows exactly how to use them. The three of them we caught tonight they're players, not the architect. The name she gave me, the one behind all of it, is still out there. But tonight we've peeled back another layer and that person knows it now. Tonight just accelerated everything. I cross to her. Take the hand that isn't holding the gun. Look at the emerald on her $nger.

"The knife," I say. "Le! thigh or right."

"Right."

"Fixed blade?"

"Four inches. I've carried it since I was twenty-two."

I look at her. She looks back. Somewhere in the shell-shocked room behind us, Siobhan says something to Fergus in a low voice and Fergus

says something back that makes Siobhan laugh, which is its own kind of miracle. The room with the keypad," I say.

"Yes."

"You trained there."

"Among other things."

"How long."

"Since I was nineteen." She holds my gaze. "No one outside my family knows. None of them know all of it."

She's watching me. Waiting. This is the test — I understand that. This is the thing she's been bracing for, the moment someone outside the locked room sees what's inside it and decides what to do with that information. I bring her hand up and press my mouth to the emerald on her $nger.

"Show me everything," I say. "When we get home. All of it." Something cracks open in her face. Fast and then gone, but I saw it —something that looked like relief so profound it was almost painful. Like she's been waiting a very long time to be told that the thing she is, completely, is not too much.

"All right," she says.

And somehow, with a room full of shaken wedding guests and two of my men zip-tying the last of tonight's hired assassins to a chair, the

word lands like a promise.