Chapter 3

The arm that came around me was warm. The one from last night had been a shield. This one pulled me back into a man's chest. I stopped looking for the door.

Then I saw the gun, at Bruno's forehead, point-blank.

"Go back," he said. "Tell your boss she is married."

His two men put their hands on their guns. He pushed the barrel until Bruno's head went back.

"In your own voice," he said. "So he hears you believed it."

Bruno stood there with the barrel against his skin. I watched him choose.

He stepped back, said a word to his men, and the door closed behind them. A moment later I heard him in the hallway, low, on a phone.

I was looking at the gun. It was the one I'd taken off him.

"When did you open the cabinet?" I said.

"You left it above the sink," he said. "First place a man looks. And don't leave a stranger's weapon in a house with a stranger in it."

"Who are you?" I said.

"Knox."

I turned it over. The name meant nothing at my father's table.

No ring on his hand. No pin on his collar. Not a thread on him to say which street he came off.

Whoever owned that street had left him bleeding in an alley and sent nobody after him.

The bandage at his shoulder was soaked through the middle.

"Bathroom," I said. "Sit. And take the shirt off."

He looked at me a second longer than the sentence needed. Then he did it, one-handed, slow, the way a man does when he's decided not to let you watch it hurt.

I got him onto the edge of the tub and took the old dressing off. He breathed out through his nose, even, and held the rest of it in.

Up close there was nowhere to look but him. My own stitches sat two inches under his collarbone. They moved when he breathed.

I've had my hands on maybe four hundred men in that condition. Not one of them ever made a room feel smaller.

My knee was against the tub and his was against mine, and neither of us moved it.

I laid the back of my hand flat under the wound to check the skin for heat. That is a three-second check.

I took longer than three seconds.

I had a professional reason to know how warm he was. I had no professional reason at all to keep noticing.

The edges were angry but clean, and nothing underneath had torn. I packed it again and taped a fresh pad over the top, then pressed down with two fingers.

"Hold it."

He put his hand over mine. Barely any pressure in it, his fingers lying along the backs of mine, his palm over all four knuckles.

I forgot to take the next breath.

And when I looked up he was already watching me. He'd been watching me for a while. I have a good face for this. It failed me there.

I pulled away.

"Why did you tell him you were married?" he said.

"To buy time. A day, maybe. Before my father hands me to Bellini."

"The five families don't touch a legal wife. You could pick one yourself."

"I grew up under that rule." I taped the last edge down. "In a day. Out of five families where I can't name one man I'd trust."

There were names in this city that could stand against a Bellini. None of them were names I could reach.

"Marry me."

"I'm not dumb enough to trust a man I just met," I said. "I stitched a bullet out of you last night. That's everything I know about you."

"You're the only woman in this city with no ties to my family," he said. "That's what I need from you."

"That isn't an answer."

"Everyone who comes at me wants something they can carry out of the room." He didn't look away. "You want to be gone. I'm not asking you to trust me. I'm telling you what you get. My name. My protection. When it's over, you walk away."

I knew he wasn't lying. Hearing a lie was something I was born with. My mother had it before me. She always knew when my father was lying. And knowing Knox wasn't lying... still didn't make me trust him.

"If I say yes, will you hurt me?"

"No."

"Will you hand me to Bellini?"

"No. Ask the last one."

He knew there were three. I had been asking men questions in threes since I was six, and nobody had ever counted them out loud.

"Will you sell me out of this—"

"No."

He answered before I got to the end of it, his jaw set.

"I need a wife the family believes in. That's all. I won't touch you, and I won't put your name on anything dirty. In three months, you go."

"Which family."

"Valenti." He gave it to me the way you hand over a receipt.

One of the five. The name had come past me once. Years ago a man at my father's table was warned off the Valenti, and nobody said why.

They could stand against the Bellini.

A thousand of them in this city, my father used to say, and most are just men with jobs. Nobody had been sent to look for this one. A soldier, then — somebody's soldier, and not one anybody had missed.

I could hear a lie. I had never once been able to hear what a man left out.

"Three months," I said.

He waited me out instead of answering.

"Three months. No interference with my work. No sex. Nothing illegal with my name on it. On the last day we divorce and I walk away."

He hadn't moved.

"I'll be your wife in public and nobody will doubt it. Those are my terms."

"You're not asking for money," he said. "Or a house. Or a name."

"No. I'm asking for three months and a divorce."

The pause lasted two drips of the tap behind him.

"Done," he said.

Knox

I shut the door behind me and put my shoulder to the frame. I counted to four. Then I called.

"Nico."

"Sir." A breath. "We've been looking for you since last night."

"I'm safe. An apartment across the river, south side. I need a marriage license, two witnesses and a judge by this afternoon. And a car."

Nico let the line sit.

"Nico."

"A marriage," Nico said. "You've turned down every family in this city for five years. Every daughter. Every arrangement. Now you say you have a wife."

"I do."

"What changed?"

I had a traitor in my house.

He was why there were men with guns in that alley. He was why I was carrying somebody else's stitches under my shirt.

Five years to make four families answer to my voice, and the man who wanted me dead still ate at my table.

None of that went on a line I wasn't sure of.

"It's what I need," I said. "A wife no one knows. Nobody looks twice at newlyweds. My family has spent five years certain I'd never marry. They'll be so relieved they won't look at her closely."

She had asked me whether I would hurt her. Level, clinical, without once lifting her voice. Her hands did not move the whole time she was asking.

She hadn't reported the gunshot. Her four clauses cost me nothing.

It had been a long time since anyone came at me wanting so little.

"I'll have the papers," Nico said. "I'll have a car."

I let her believe she was marrying a nobody. It was why she said yes.

"Make it look like a wedding car," I said.

Tomorrow her name goes on a piece of paper. Inside a week every man in five families reads it.