The Weight of the Sword

The eastern corridor of the royal palace stretched before Selena like a gilded throat, chandeliers dripping wax onto marble that had been polished by a hundred servants that morning alone. She stood near a pillar and watched her cousin Beatrice twirl in the arms of a baron’s second son, both of them flushed with wine and the particular stupidity of people who had never been told no. The engagement party had been going for three hours. It would go for three more. Selena had smiled at everyone who required smiling at, had declined two dances and accepted one, had listened to her father explain to a cluster of old men that his daughter was soon to be married herself, and wasn’t that wonderful, and wasn’t Bellandi a fortunate man. She had not thrown her champagne glass at his head. She considered this a victory.

“You’re doing it again,” Alessia murmured beside her.

“Doing what.”

“Looking at the door like a horse that’s spotted an open gate.”

Selena turned her head. Alessia’s fan was open, fluttering just below her chin, and her blue eyes held the particular brightness of a woman who had noticed something interesting and intended to be told about it later. “I am looking at nothing,” Selena said. “I am standing here being decorative. It’s what I’m for.”

“Decorative and sharp-tongued.” Alessia snapped her fan shut. “Go. I’ll tell anyone who asks that you’ve developed a headache and are lying down in the blue salon. Lady Rossi saw you heading that way with a hand pressed to your temple. She’ll swear to it.”

“You’ve already told her I have a headache.”

“I told her twenty minutes ago. You’re merely being consistent.”

Selena looked at her friend, at the small conspiratorial smile tucked into the corner of her mouth, and felt something in her chest loosen. “You’re a terrible influence.”

“Darling, I’m the best influence you have. Now leave before your father finishes cornering the ambassador and remembers he brought you.”

She left.

The forgotten garden lay behind the old chapel at the palace’s eastern edge, where the ivy grew thick enough to swallow sound and the stone paths had crumbled to gravel two generations ago. Selena had found it when she was nine, chasing a cat she had been told not to chase, and she had been coming back ever since. The garden belonged to no one. The gardeners had abandoned it, the courtiers had forgotten it, and the chapel behind it had been closed since a beam fell through the roof during a storm in her grandfather’s time. It was the only place in Naples where she could breathe without someone measuring the depth of the breath.

She pushed through the gap in the hedge, the one that looked too narrow for a woman in silk but wasn’t, and stepped into the clearing.

The garden was not empty.

A man sat on the crumbling stone bench beneath the old cypress tree, one leg crossed over the other, a half-eaten apple in his hand and a book open on his knee. He was tall, lean, dressed in dark wool and leather that marked him as someone who worked for a living rather than merely existing in silk. His hair was long and blond, tied back but escaping its binding in strands that caught the last of the sunset. He did not rise when she entered. He looked at her with eyes that were very green and very direct, and he took another bite of his apple.

“Are you lost?” he asked.

Selena’s spine went rigid. She had been raised to expect deference from men who were not her father or her fiancé, and this man was offering her none. “I am not lost. I am escaping. And you are in my garden.”

“Your garden.” He chewed thoughtfully. “Do you have a deed?”

“I have been coming here since I was a child. That’s a stronger claim than paper.”

“Possession is a flexible concept.” He grinned, and his teeth flashed gold in the dying light. Several of them, the front ones, capped in metal that gleamed against the shadows of his mouth. “Sit down. I don’t own the bench either.”

She should have left. She knew she should have left. A proper noblewoman did not sit alone in abandoned gardens with strange men who wore leather instead of silk and had gold in their teeth like a pirate’s treasure. But she was tired of being proper. She was so tired of it that her bones ached with the weight of every curtsey she had ever performed. So she walked to the bench and sat down at the opposite end, arranging her skirts with the automatic precision of years of training, and she looked at the book on his knee.

It was anatomical drawings. Muscles stripped back from bone, tendons laid bare, the machinery of the human body rendered in ink with clinical precision. She had never seen anything like it.

“You’re staring,” he said.

“You’re reading a book of dissections in a garden at an engagement party. I think staring is permitted.”

“I wasn’t invited to the party.”

“Neither was I, technically. I was commanded.”

He turned a page. The drawing on the next leaf showed a human hand with the skin peeled back, each tendon labeled in Latin. “Commanded. That’s a strong word for champagne and dancing.”

“You’ve never been a nobleman’s daughter.”

“No,” he said. “I haven’t.” He closed the book and set it aside, and then he looked at her properly, his gaze traveling from her pinned hair to her pearl choker to her silk gown, taking her in with an attention that felt nothing like the assessing glances of the court. Those glances calculated her value. This one was simply curious. “What are you escaping from?”

“Everything.” The word came out before she could stop it, too honest, too raw. She folded her hands in her lap and tried again. “My cousin is getting married. I’m supposed to be celebrating.”

“You don’t sound celebratory.”

“I’m not.” She looked at him. “What are you escaping from?”

“The noise.” He took another bite of his apple, and the crunch was loud in the quiet garden. “Too many people in the palace tonight. Too many voices. I prefer it here. Quiet. Empty. Usually.”

“I can leave.”

“I didn’t ask you to.”

She stayed. The sun sank lower, turning the sky to amber and rose, and the cypress tree threw long shadows across the broken flagstones. She should have been afraid of him. She knew his reputation, or at least she knew enough to guess at it. The leather, the gold teeth, the casual way he held himself like a man who had never needed to bow. He was the executioner. The Zeppeli heir, the one who had inherited the scaffold and the axe and the grim responsibility of carrying out the king’s justice. Her father had pointed him out once at a procession, his voice carefully neutral, the way he spoke about servants who were useful but not respectable. That man has ended more lives than the plague, he had said, and Selena had watched the executioner walk past without looking at anyone, his green eyes fixed on some point in the middle distance, and she had thought: He looks like a man who is very tired of being looked at.

Now he was sitting three feet away from her, eating an apple, and he had not once looked at her like she was something to be assessed.

“You know who I am,” she said.

“I do.”

“And you haven’t asked me about my father’s political connections or my fiancé’s shipping interests or whether I play the pianoforte.”

“Do you play the pianoforte?”

“Badly.”

He laughed. It was a real laugh, surprised out of him, and it changed his face entirely. The sharp angles softened, the unsettling directness of his gaze warmed into something almost handsome. “Good,” he said. “I hate the pianoforte.”

“You hate music?”

“I hate the way noblewomen play it. Like they’re trying to prove something.” He finished his apple and tossed the core into the ivy. “My name is Gyro. But you already knew that.”

“I did.”

“And you sat down anyway.”

“I did.”

“Most people don’t.”

“Most people are idiots.”

He looked at her for a long moment, his expression unreadable. Then he smiled again, slower this time, and she felt it in her stomach like a swallow of brandy. “You’re not what I expected,” he said.

“What did you expect?”

“Someone who would leave when she saw me.”

“I don’t leave places that are mine.” She gestured at the garden around them. “I told you. I’ve been coming here since I was a child. You’re the interloper.”

“Interloper. That’s a very aristocratic word.”

“I’m a very aristocratic woman.”

“You’re sitting on a crumbling bench in a forgotten garden trading insults with an executioner. That’s not very aristocratic.”

“Perhaps I’m bad at it.”

“Perhaps you are.” He leaned back against the bench, stretching one arm along the stone edge behind her, not quite touching. “The pearl choker,” he said. “Does it chafe?”

Her hand went to her throat before she could stop it. The pearls were cool under her fingers, perfectly matched, perfectly strung, a gift from her father on her eighteenth birthday. She had worn it every day since. She had never thought about why. “Yes,” she said, and the word felt like a confession. “It does.”

“Then why do you wear it?”

“Because I was told to.”

He nodded, as though this made perfect sense to him, as though he understood something about her that she had never said aloud. “The last man I executed,” he said, “was a nobleman who killed another nobleman in a duel. Over a gambling debt. They were both drunk, both armed, both stupid. But one of them was richer, so the other one died. That’s how justice works in Naples.”

She did not flinch. She had spent her entire life in the orbit of men who made decisions like that, who weighed lives against gold and found the lives wanting. “Did he deserve it?”

“No one deserves it.” His voice was quiet, matter-of-fact, as though he were discussing the weather. “But some deserve it less than others. He was one of those.”

“Then why did you do it?”

“Because it’s my job. Because if I didn’t, someone else would, and they might make it hurt more than it needs to.” He turned his head to look at her. “I’m good at what I do. That’s not a boast. It’s just true. I’m precise. I’m fast. The men I execute don’t suffer. That’s the only mercy I can give them.”

“And does that help you sleep?”

“No.”

The word hung between them, heavy and honest, and Selena realized she had been holding her breath. She let it out slowly, and with it went some of the tension she had been carrying in her shoulders since the engagement party began. He was not trying to impress her. He was not trying to flatter her or frighten her or maneuver her into some advantageous position. He was simply talking to her, the way one person talks to another when neither of them has anything to gain.

She could not remember the last time that had happened.

“My fiancé,” she said, “is a man named Vittorio Bellandi. He’s sixty-three years old. He’s very rich. He’s very powerful. And I think he’s the cruelest person I’ve ever met.”

Gyro’s expression did not change, but something behind his eyes went very still. “I know who Bellandi is.”

“Everyone knows who Bellandi is.”

“That’s not what I meant.” He was quiet for a moment, and when he spoke again his voice had lost its teasing edge. “I’ve carried out sentences he arranged. Men who crossed him in business. Men who owed him money. Men who looked at his first wife too long at a dinner party. He finds reasons.”

Selena’s stomach turned to ice. “His first wife died of a fever.”

“That’s what the official record says.”

“And the unofficial record?”

Gyro looked at her, and his green eyes held something that was almost pity, almost grief. “She had bruises on her throat. Her maid told the physician, and the physician told the magistrate, and the magistrate told no one. Because Bellandi owns the magistrate. He owns half the judges in the city. He doesn’t own me, but he thinks he does, because I’m a servant of the crown and the crown does what men like him want.”

“But you know.”

“I know.”

The garden was very quiet. Somewhere in the distance, music drifted from the palace windows, the string quartet striking up another waltz for people who had nothing to fear. Selena pressed her hands together in her lap and felt the bones of her fingers through the silk of her gloves. She had known Bellandi was cruel. She had heard the rumors, the whispers, the careful euphemisms that polite society used to discuss unpleasant truths. But she had not known about the bruises. She had not known about the men sent to die for looking too long.

“I’m supposed to marry him in six months,” she said.

“I know.”

“My father arranged it. He told me it was a great honor. He told me I should be grateful.”

“Are you?”

She looked at him, this strange man with gold teeth and a book of dissections and hands that had killed more people than she had ever met. “No,” she said. “I’m not grateful. I’m terrified. And I’m angry. And I’m so tired of being told what to feel that sometimes I think I might scream, just to see what would happen.”

“What would happen?”

“My father would have me sedated. Bellandi would have me beaten. And everyone would agree that I deserved it.”

Gyro was silent for a long moment. Then he reached over and took her hand, his fingers warm and calloused against her gloved palm, and he turned it over as though he were reading the lines of her future in her skin. “You don’t deserve it,” he said. “Any of it. You know that, don’t you?”

She did not know it. She had never known it. She had spent her entire life being told that obedience was virtue and sacrifice was duty and her happiness was irrelevant next to her family’s standing. But the way he said it, so simply, so certainly, made her want to believe him.

“Why are you telling me this?” she asked.

“Because you asked. Because you didn’t flinch when I told you what I do. Because you’re the first person in this palace who’s looked at me like I was a man instead of a monster or a tool.” He released her hand, but he did not move away. “And because I know what it’s like to be trapped in a role you didn’t choose. I was born into this. The scaffold, the axe, the mask. My father was the executioner before me, and his father before him. I never had a choice. I never will.”

“That’s different.”

“Is it?”

She thought about it. She thought about the weight of expectation, the way it pressed down on her from the moment she woke until the moment she slept, the way every decision in her life had been made by someone else for someone else’s benefit. “No,” she said. “I suppose it isn’t.”

“We’re both in cages,” he said. “Mine just has a better view.”

She laughed. She couldn’t help it. It burst out of her, startled and genuine, and she clapped her hand over her mouth like a girl caught misbehaving in church. Gyro grinned at her, gold teeth flashing, and for a moment they were just two people sitting on a crumbling bench in a forgotten garden, and nothing else mattered.

“You’re very strange,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“It wasn’t a compliment.”

“I’m choosing to take it as one.”

The music from the palace changed, slowing into something softer, and Selena realized the sun had nearly set. The garden was sinking into twilight, the cypress tree a black silhouette against the darkening sky, and she should have been inside. She should have been at the party, smiling at her cousin, accepting congratulations on her own engagement, playing the role she had been trained to play since she was old enough to walk. But she did not move. She did not want to move. She wanted to stay here, in this quiet place, with this strange man who made her laugh and told her the truth and looked at her like she was a person instead of a possession.

“I should go back,” she said.

“You should.”

“They’ll notice I’m gone.”

“Probably.”

She did not stand up. He did not stand up. The space between them on the bench had shrunk somehow, though neither of them had moved, and she could feel the warmth of his arm where it rested along the stone behind her shoulders. She could smell him, too, leather and something herbal, rosemary perhaps, clean and sharp.

“You said you’ve been coming here since you were a child,” he said.

“Yes.”

“And no one’s ever followed you.”

“No one remembers this place exists.”

“Then stay a little longer.”

She stayed.

They talked as the stars came out, one by one, pricking through the velvet dark above the cypress tree. He told her about his training, the years of anatomical study, the way his father had taught him to swing an axe so cleanly that the condemned man would not feel the blade before he was already gone. She told him about her mother, who had died when she was eight, who had been the only person in the D’Ambrosio household who ever told Selena she could be more than a bride. He told her about his gold teeth, a family tradition, each one capped when a Zeppeli came of age, a reminder that they served the crown with their bodies as well as their blood. She told him about the pearl choker, how her father had fastened it around her throat himself, how he had told her it was a symbol of her value and she had known even then that it was a leash.

“Take it off,” Gyro said.

“What?”

“The choker. Take it off. Just for a moment. No one will see.”

She reached up, her fingers trembling, and found the clasp at the back of her neck. It was delicate, difficult, designed to be fastened and unfastened by a maid’s practiced hands. But she worked it loose, and the pearls fell away into her lap, and she pressed her bare throat to the cool evening air and felt something inside her crack open.

“Better?” he asked.

“Yes,” she whispered. “It’s better.”

He reached out and touched her throat. Just the tips of his fingers, calloused and warm, tracing the line where the choker had rested, the faint indentation it had left in her skin. She did not pull away. She did not want to pull away. His touch was gentle, so gentle, nothing like the possessive grip of the men who had handled her at court, and she closed her eyes and let herself feel it.

“You have a mark,” he said. “From the clasp.”

“It always leaves a mark.”

“Then stop wearing it.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“It could be.”

She opened her eyes. He was very close now, his face inches from hers, his green eyes dark in the starlight. She could see the fine lines at the corners of his mouth, the faint scar along his jaw, the way his breath caught slightly as she looked at him. He was not as composed as he pretended to be. Neither was she.

“You don’t know me,” she said.

“I know enough.”

“You know an hour of conversation in a garden.”

“I know you’re brave enough to sit down next to an executioner. I know you’re angry enough to admit you’re terrified. I know you’re the first person in years who’s made me want to talk instead of just wait for the conversation to end.” He cupped her jaw, his palm warm against her cheek. “I know I should walk away from you right now, and I don’t want to.”

“Then don’t,” she said.

She reached up and pulled his mouth down to hers.

The kiss was nothing like the chaste pecks she had received from suitors at chaperoned dances, nothing like the dry press of Bellandi’s lips against her knuckles when he came to call. It was warm and soft and startlingly tender, and Gyro made a sound against her mouth that was half surprise and half relief, as though he had been waiting for this and had not let himself hope. His hand fisted in the silk of her gown at her lower back, pulling her closer, and his other hand cradled her jaw with a gentleness that contradicted every rumor about the brutal executioner with blood on his hands.

She kissed him harder. She did not know what she was doing, had never kissed anyone before, had never been allowed. But she learned quickly, her mouth moving against his, her hands coming up to grip the leather of his jacket, and he let her lead, let her set the pace, let her take what she wanted from him without demanding anything in return.

When they finally broke apart, both of them breathing hard, he pressed his forehead to hers and laughed, a low shaky sound.

“That was a terrible idea,” he said.

“Yes.”

“The worst idea either of us has ever had.”

“Probably.”

“Your father would have me executed. Your fiancé would have me drawn and quartered. And Bellandi would watch.”

“I don’t care what Bellandi would do.”

“You should.”

“I’ve spent my entire life caring what men like Bellandi would do. I’m tired of it.” She pulled back far enough to look at him, her hands still gripping his jacket, her heart beating so hard she could feel it in her throat where the choker used to be. “Meet me here again. In three nights. After the evening meal.”

He did not say yes. He did not say no. He looked at her for a long moment, his green eyes searching her face, and she could see him weighing the danger against the desire, the risk against the reward. She knew what he would find in that calculation. She knew what he should decide. A sensible man would refuse. A sensible man would walk away and never look back.

But Gyro Zeppeli was not a sensible man. She could see that in the way he grinned, slow and crooked, gold teeth glinting in the starlight.

“Three nights,” he said. “I’ll bring apples.”

“I hate apples.”

“Then I’ll bring something else.” He stood, finally, and offered her his hand. She took it, and he pulled her to her feet with the easy strength of someone who had spent his life doing harder things than lifting a woman from a bench. He did not release her hand immediately. He held it for a moment longer than necessary, his thumb brushing across her knuckles through the silk of her glove. “Selena.”

It was the first time he had said her name. It sounded different in his mouth than it did in anyone else’s, softer, warmer, as though he were tasting it and finding it good.

“Gyro,” she said, because she wanted to know how his name felt on her tongue.

It felt like a secret.

He lifted her hand to his mouth and pressed a kiss to her palm, his lips warm even through the glove. She curled her fingers around the kiss as though she could trap it there, hold it, keep it for the long nights ahead when she would lie in her bed in her father’s house and wonder if any of this had been real.

“Go back to the party,” he said. “I’ll wait until you’re gone.”

“Why?”

“Because if I watch you leave, I’ll know you made it safely. And because if I leave first, I’ll spend the whole walk home wondering if someone saw you come out of the garden alone.”

She nodded. She did not trust herself to speak. She picked up the pearl choker from the bench where it had fallen, and she held it in her hand for a moment, feeling the weight of it, the cool smoothness of the pearls. Then she tucked it into the pocket of her gown instead of fastening it back around her throat.

Gyro noticed. He said nothing, but his smile deepened, and she thought she had never seen a man look so pleased about a piece of jewelry being put away.

She walked to the gap in the hedge, and when she reached it she turned back. He was still standing by the bench, a dark shape against the darker cypress, and she could just make out the gleam of his gold teeth. He raised a hand in farewell.

She raised hers in return.

Then she pushed through the hedge and walked back into the palace, back into the light and the music and the careful performance of her life. The corridor was still crowded with guests, the chandeliers still dripping wax, the string quartet still playing something bright and meaningless. No one looked at her as she slipped back into the crowd. No one noticed that her choker was missing or that her lips were slightly swollen or that her eyes held a glitter that had nothing to do with champagne.

Alessia found her near the refreshment table, a glass of wine in her hand that she had not drunk from. “Your headache is cured, I see.”

“Miraculously.”

“Miracles are such convenient things.” Alessia’s fan flicked open, and behind it her blue eyes were sharp with curiosity. “You were gone for nearly two hours. Lady Rossi asked after you twice. I told her you were weeping in the blue salon and did not wish to be disturbed.”

“I have never wept in my life.”

“Lady Rossi doesn’t know that. She thinks all young women weep constantly. It’s why she’s so tedious.” Alessia snapped the fan shut. “Your choker is missing.”

“Is it?”

“Don’t play innocent with me. You’re terrible at it.”

Selena looked at her friend, at the knowing smile tucked into the corner of her mouth, and felt a rush of affection so strong it nearly knocked the breath out of her. “I met someone,” she said quietly. “In the garden.”

“The forgotten garden. Behind the old chapel.”

“You know it?”

“I know everything in this palace that’s worth knowing. It’s my only talent.” Alessia linked her arm through Selena’s and began walking them slowly toward the balcony, where the cool night air would make their conversation harder to overhear. “Who did you meet?”

“The executioner.”

Alessia stopped walking. For a long moment she said nothing, and her face was perfectly composed, the mask of agreeable blankness that every noblewoman learned to wear before she learned to read. Then she started walking again, her grip on Selena’s arm tightening. “The Zeppeli heir. The one with the gold teeth.”

“Yes.”

“Selena.”

“I know.”

“He’s dangerous.”

“He’s not. He’s—” Selena stopped herself, because she did not have the words for what Gyro Zeppeli was. He was strange and sharp and unexpectedly gentle. He was the first person who had ever looked at her and seen someone worth talking to instead of someone worth acquiring. He had kissed her like she was something precious, and he had told her to take off her leash, and he had made her laugh for the first time in months. “He’s not what I expected,” she finished.

“They never are.” Alessia’s voice was dry, but there was worry underneath it, a genuine fear that made Selena’s chest tighten. “If your father finds out—”

“He won’t.”

“If Bellandi finds out—”

“He won’t.”

“You don’t know that. You can’t promise that. This palace has eyes everywhere. Servants talk. Courtiers gossip. Someone will see something, and someone will tell someone, and then—”

“Alessia.” Selena stopped walking and turned to face her friend, taking both of her hands. “I am going to marry a man who bruises his wives. I am going to spend the rest of my life in a house where the servants are afraid and the walls are thick enough to muffle screaming. I am going to be a possession, an ornament, a thing that Bellandi owns until he decides he’s tired of owning it. And I will never, ever have anything that belongs to me alone.” She squeezed Alessia’s fingers. “Except this. Except him. Whatever it is, whatever it becomes, it’s mine. Do you understand?”

Alessia was quiet for a long moment. Her blue eyes searched Selena’s face, and whatever she found there made her expression soften into something that was almost grief. “I understand,” she said. “But I’m afraid for you.”

“I’m afraid for me too.”

“Then why are you doing it?”

“Because being afraid is better than being nothing.”

Alessia let out a breath, a small shaky sound that was almost a laugh. “You’ve changed,” she said. “Something happened in that garden. You’re different.”

“I’m the same.”

“No. You’re not. You’re standing straighter. Your eyes are brighter. You look like a woman who’s remembered she has teeth.” Alessia smiled, and this time it reached her eyes. “I think I like it.”

“You like anything that isn’t boring.”

“True. And you, my darling, have never been boring. Terrifying, yes. Reckless, absolutely. But never boring.” She linked her arm through Selena’s again and resumed walking toward the balcony. “Now tell me everything. Leave nothing out. If I’m going to be an accessory to scandal, I want to know exactly what I’m protecting.”

They stepped out onto the balcony, and the night air washed over them, cool and clean after the stuffy heat of the ballroom. Below them the palace gardens stretched into darkness, manicured hedges and marble fountains and gravel paths that wound through flowerbeds planted to please the king’s eye. Somewhere beyond those gardens, beyond the chapel and the hedge and the crumbling stone bench, Gyro Zeppeli was walking home through the dark streets of Naples. Selena wondered if he was thinking about her. She wondered if he was already regretting what they had done. She wondered if he would be there in three nights, or if she would wait in the garden alone until the stars came out and she had to admit that he had been wiser than she was.

She did not think he would be wiser. She did not think he wanted to be.

“Selena,” Alessia said. “You’re smiling.”

“Am I?”

“You are. It’s very unsettling. Stop it immediately.”

Selena laughed, and the sound carried out over the balcony into the night, and she did not care who heard it. Let them hear. Let them wonder. For the first time in years, she had something that was hers and hers alone, and she was not going to let anyone take it from her.

Not yet.

She stayed on the balcony with Alessia until the party ended, until the last guests had climbed into their carriages and the last musicians had packed away their instruments and the last candles had been snuffed in the chandeliers. Her father found her in the foyer, his expression unreadable, his signet ring catching the light as he gestured for her to follow him to the carriage. She climbed in across from him and folded her hands in her lap, the picture of a dutiful daughter, and he looked at her for a long moment without speaking.

“You disappeared for most of the evening,” he said.

“I had a headache. I was lying down in the blue salon.”

“Lady Rossi said you were weeping.”

“Lady Rossi is a gossip and a fool.”

Her father’s mouth tightened. “You will speak of Lady Rossi with respect. She is a friend of this family.”

“She is a friend of your political ambitions. That’s not the same thing.”

For a moment she thought she had gone too far. Her father’s jaw clenched, and his knuckles whitened on the head of his cane, and she braced herself for the cold fury that always followed her moments of defiance. But then something shifted in his expression, a flicker of something that might have been surprise or might have been respect, and he leaned back against the carriage seat.

“You’re in a strange mood tonight,” he said.

“I’m tired.”

“Then rest. You have a fitting with the dressmaker tomorrow. Bellandi wants your wedding gown to be finished by the end of the month.”

The wedding gown. The wedding. The future that pressed down on her like a stone lid closing over a tomb. Selena looked out the carriage window at the dark streets of Naples and thought about the pearl choker in her pocket and the kiss she had curled into her palm and the man with gold teeth who had told her she did not deserve any of it.

“Yes, Father,” she said.

The carriage rolled on through the night, and Selena D’Ambrosio closed her eyes and let herself dream of a forgotten garden where the ivy grew thick enough to hide anything, even hope.