Hers To Choose

Chapter Four

Mars doesn't turn on the radio for the drive home.

The silence takes up room. So does he.

His seat is pushed all the way back, his knee a hand's width from mine, and every time he takes a corner I know exactly how wide that hand is. I count blocks. Seven from the Concordance hall to Atwells. I count the bakery, the shoe repair shop, the church with its doors propped open for noon Mass. I count the red line across my palm. Then I make the mistake of looking at his.

The bandage rests on his thigh, white against dark denim. Under it is the same line as mine. Same hand. Same place. Something of his is in me now, and something of mine is in him. I don't know which thought makes my face hot.

"Stop that," he says, eyes on the road.

"Stop what?"

"Looking at it like it's going to tell you something."

"Maybe it will. Nobody else is."

One corner of his mouth tightens.

It isn't a smile. It's what he does instead of one when he knows he's earned the hit. At a red light, he finally looks at me. Mars looks at people slowly, like he has all the time in the world and plans to spend it right here. His eyes drop to my mouth for half a second, maybe less, then go back to the light as if they never moved. The pressure under my ribs gives a small, traitorous tug. Toward him. I press my palm flat against my thigh. The light turns green.

When we pull up, he cuts the engine and doesn't reach for his door. "I'll be at the gate."

"You don't have to—"

"I'll be at the gate, Sof." Quieter: "I'm not going anywhere."

It shouldn't sound like a promise. It does.

I get out before I say something I'll have to take back. Or something I won't.

Matteo is on his knees at the threshold stone, pouring salt from a paper sack in a thin, careful stream along the line where the path meets the house. He's still wearing yesterday's coat. The line wavers. He brushes it away with the side of his hand and starts again.

"You said you'd explain," I say.

"I said tonight."

"It's noon. Close enough."

He doesn't look up. "Five of them. Roc, Dante, Emi, Julian, Mars. They swore a blood pact last night. To protect you."

"I gathered that." I hold up my hand. "What else?"

"None of them can claim you alone. That's the rule. That's what holds it together."

"Claim me." The word tastes like rust. "Like a coat at the cloakroom."

"That's the word they used."

"Did anyone think to ask me?"

He sets the sack down on the stone, carefully, like it might break. "No."

That's all. No excuse. Somehow that's worse than a lie.

"Why did the wards fail? Why didn't anyone tell me? Why won't Roc answer my texts?"

"It's tied to something you never had." Finally he looks at me, eyes red-rimmed, bruised underneath. "When you were sixteen."

The party. The empty corner where the priest should have stood. "The ceremony."

"Ask Nonna."

"Her door's been shut for three days."

"It won't be today."

There's salt in every crease of his knuckles, and his right hand is trembling. Three days of holding what's left of the anchors alone, and he's still out here re-laying the line by hand because it's the only part he can fix. He isn't keeping secrets to keep me small. He's scared. Across the yard, Mars stands at the gate with his back to us, giving us privacy. I can still feel exactly where he is.

"Go, Sofia," Matteo says. "Please."

He never says please.

Nonna Calla's door is open the width of a hand, breathing candle-warmth into the hallway.

She's in the chair by the window with a blanket over her knees, her rosary hanging from the bedpost where it always hangs.

The candles on the dresser are burned down to stubs. And she's smaller, folded in on herself, with a gray cast under her skin that I tell myself is the light, and age, and nothing else.

"Sit," she says. "Show me."

I sit on the edge of her bed and open my hand. She takes it. Her fingers are cold. Not cool. Cold, like she's been standing outside all night. She traces the red line with one fingertip, the way she used to trace the words in her prayer book.

"So they did it."

"Matteo said you'd explain."

"Matteo says a great many things now that he's the one who has to say them." She doesn't let go. "There's a ceremony. La Veglia. The vigil. Every Falconetti child keeps it at sixteen. A night of candles and old words, and by morning the wards know your blood as their own. You stop being someone the house protects. You become part of what protects it."

"And I didn't."

"You didn't."

"Why not?"

She opens her mouth. Closes it. Her thumb moves once across my knuckles.

"That isn't today's question."

"The wards have always answered me. Every night, for four years."

"They answered because I asked them to." She says it gently, like it's nothing. "Every night for four years, I've stood in the gap and told this house you belong to it. A guest I vouched for." Her hand trembles, and she tucks it under the blanket before I can hold on. "Three nights ago, cara, I couldn't anymore."

The cold hands.

The door shut for three days.

It isn't age.

"So the pact fixes it," I say. "They're holding the wards up instead of you."

"They're holding you up. That isn't the same thing." She looks past me at the candles. "The binding they did was with good hearts and borrowed blood."

She lets that sit.

"Good hearts don't make it hold."

I try to put it in rows, the way I always do. The pact is a patch. The ceremony is the cure. Someone decided I wouldn't have it. None of it stays in its row. It runs together like wet ink.

"Then do it now. Tonight."

"Not yet."

"Why?"

Nothing.

"You're keeping something from me."

"Yes."

She doesn't even pretend.

"What?"

"Nonna."

Her hand comes out from under the blanket and closes around my wrist, on the inside, where the pulse is, exactly where she held me four years ago in a dark hallway. The same pressure. The same old gold ring pressing into the same soft place. Only now her fingers are so cold they almost burn.

"There are things you have to want first," she says.

"I want this."

"No. You want answers." Her grip tightens one degree. "It isn't the same thing."

She doesn't let go.

The marks of her fingers are still on my wrist when I sit down on my bed: four pale ovals and the small round dent of the ring. Two facts. I lay them side by side. Five men bound themselves to me last night without asking. My family let me walk under failing wards for four years without telling me. I wait for one of them to be the worse one. Neither will. Both are unforgivable, and neither is entirely wrong. My phone sits face up on the quilt.

Are you awake? 2:44 AM.

Something just happened. 2:46 AM.

Answer me. 11:52 AM.

Read. Read. Read. Nothing from Roc. From the window I can see the gate. Mars is still there, his shoulder against the post, his bandaged hand in his pocket. As if he can feel me, he looks up. I step back from the glass. My pulse is doing something stupid. Then the pressure under my ribs changes. All day it's been steady, like hands bracing a shelf. Now it tightens, then shifts. It isn't pushing anymore. It's pulling, a thread drawn taut from behind my sternum, across the city, toward the river.

Not toward the gate. Away from it.

I'm on my feet before I've decided. One arm in my coat on the stairs, the other at the back door. I go out the back way, so the man at the front gate can't stop me. So I don't have to see his face when I choose not to let him. The thread pulls. I follow it down the hill, the cold slapping my cheeks, my marked hand fisted in my pocket. I don't know who's on the other end. I walk faster.