Hers To Choose

Chapter Three

It was 02:43 AM.

My palm opens like a blade has been drawn across it, but there's no blade.

For three nights, I've sat up against the headboard with my hand flat to the wall, waiting for the hum I've lived under my whole life, the low pulse that means that the wards are holding me. The night they went quiet, I called Roc first. He's the one who always answers. Since then, the silence has had texture: the draft in a sealed room, the space where a song stopped mid-note. I've checked every anchor I can reach—the threshold stone with its promise of welcome, the salt line in the yard. Every anchor cold, every promise mute. The most frustrating thing, is that no one will tell me why.

Matteo's eyes went somewhere else when I said the ward words.

Nonna Calla's door stayed shut. The aunts looked at me like I was speaking a language they'd never bothered to learn.

So I listen, and I count my own heartbeats in the dark. At least that answers. Then I feel the burn; it rises through the wall, through skin, through bone—a sudden deep line across my palm, heat spiraling up my wrist. My body convulses before my mind catches up. I bite down on the sound in threat so hard I taste copper. I swallow it, waiting for it to stop. When it fades, my palm is open in front of my face, catching the little light from the street. There's a mark across it; a thin red line, stark as a scar. It wasn't there ten seconds ago. I know my own hands.

There's something else underneath the pain.

It's full of something rougher and newer than the old magic that settled into this house three hundred years ago. It's like hands bracing up a shelf that's about to fall, pressing from underneath, keeping me from collapsing. It feels like someone reached across the city and caught me.

I reach for my phone and message the only person I knew would answer.

Are you awake?

The typing dots appear at once, and the relief is so sharp I almost gasp again, but then they vanished.

Five seconds. Ten. I type again.

Something just happened.

The dots return. They bounce for a long time—Roc composing, deciding what to say—and the pressure under my ribs pulses with each one. Then they disappear again, and no message. He never answers.

I give up on sleep before dawn.

Roc’s dots vanished around three and never came back.

I checked anyway. Four more times. My palm throbs under the sheet like a second pulse, and the thin red line hasn’t faded.

The kitchen is empty when I come down. Matteo’s cup sits on the counter, the coffee still warm, and propped against the sugar tin is a sealed envelope with my name on it in his handwriting. Under it, a note.

Concordance hall. Today. In person. Do not open it.

No please.

No why. My brother gave me orders without reason, as if they are a luxury. I take the envelope, leave my room, pull my keys off the hook by the door, and step out into the back drive. I’ve run errands for this family for years. Paperwork. Deliveries. Signatures nobody else wants to make. I don’t need anyone to—

My car is blocked in.

Mars' car sits across the end of the drive, engine off. He's leaning against the passenger door with his arms folded, likes he's been there for a while... waiting for me. He taught me to parallel in the church lot after Sunday Mass park the summer I turned eighteen. He has a patience Matteo never had. Mars even took the blame for me when I damaged my uncle's Buick, then never mentioned it to me again. That's who he is: the one who carries things quietly so nobody else has to, but I dont' like the way he's standing here now.

"Morning," he said.

"You're in my way."

"I was in the neighborhood."

"You've never been anywhere by accident a single day of your life."

He pushes off the car and opens the passenger door for me. That's when it catches my eye. White gauze, wrapped neat and fresh across his right palm. He sees me see it, but doesn't hide his hand or move it out of sight. Somehow, that's worse. I close my fingers around my keys until the teeth bite into the line on my own palm.

"Did Matteo send you?"

"Get in the car, Sof."

So, yes. I get in. His car smells the way it always does: like coffee, cedar, and the peppermints he keeps in the cup holder. He drives with his left hand as the right one rests on his thigh, palm down. I forgot how he likes to spend time in the gym. When he shifts gear, his bandaged hand passes close enough to my knee that I feel the heat right through my jeans.

"Rough night?" he asks, eyes on the road.

"You tell me."

The corner of his mouth moves. "I slept fine."

I know he's lying. He never lies to me. Usually he tells me the true thing that's closest to the answer.

I was in the neighborhood.

I slept fine.

Every word he says is true, but not the truth. The radio murmurs something low in Italian. Federal Hill slides past the window, bakery shutters rolling up, a woman sweeping her stoop. It was any other ordinary morning. Six minutes left until we reach Concordance Hall, and I count every one of them as I watch his hands on the steering wheel.

"Why you?"

"What?" He doesn't look at me.

Matteo could have sent Roc, Dante, Emi. Julian would have brought coffee.

"You disappointed?"

Something happens to his face. It's small, he doesn't do anything big. "Because I said I would."

He keeps his eyes on the road, his voice flat. He’s giving me as little as he can.

He doesn’t want to be here. Whatever Matteo asked of him, whatever happened last night, Roc drew the short straw, and I’m the chore he’s stuck with. It shouldn’t sting. It does.

“Great,” I say, and face the window. “Glad you could fit me in.”

He exhales through his nose. It might be a laugh or the opposite. His hand goes back to the gearshift and stays there, gripping it, the whole rest of the way.

"You want to tell me what happened to your hand?"

"No. When we get there, do as I say. Filings have to come from a Falconett's hand. Matteo's occupied. He'll explain the rest once you've talked to the Concordance. Until then, you give them the envelope, come back, and don't panic."

"Not panicked at all."

He smiles for real this time, and I see why Matteo sent him. Mars is so completely present that dangerous things start to feel manageable. While driving, I realize he's being very cautious the entire time, and I realize it's because of my. After a few, he finally parks in front of an iron door without a sign.

The Concordance hall sits underneath Federal Hill like a secret that’s been kept so successfully it’s become institutional.

Stone walls, steel filing cabinets, candles beside fluorescent tubes that buzz like they’re talking to the dark. A saint’s medal sits on the clerk’s desk next to a ledger of ward filings, and nobody notices the contrast. This is where old magic does its paperwork.

The clerk is in his seventies, with reading glasses on a chain and a pen behind his ear. He looks like someone’s accountant, which I suppose he is. His gaze slides past Mars and settles on me with the efficiency of a man who knows exactly how many Falconettis exist and whether this one is supposed to be here.

“Sofia,” he says. “Matteo sent the envelope?”

I hand it over. He doesn’t open it, just weighs it and sets it on a stack of others, all sealed, all dated. Then he pulls out a leather ledger.

“I’ll log this. Though I should mention—I assume you’re aware—the Doyles filed something this morning concerning the Falconetti wards. A formal notation of interest. I assume the family knows?”

“I—” I stop. I’ve heard the name Doyle my whole life, always in lowered voices, always in rooms I was asked to leave. I don’t let the clerk see that. I just nod, like this is old news. At my shoulder, Roc shifts his weight, close enough that I feel it.

“They’ll want to understand the new arrangement,” the clerk says, apparently satisfied. “Old families get touchy about ward changes. Especially when the ledger’s recorded four days of silence—”

“Three,” Mars says, quiet but carrying. “Three days. The envelope was prepared this morning.”

The clerk’s eyes slide to Mars’s bandaged hand, then to mine. He doesn’t ask why we’re wrapped alike. He makes a note and closes the ledger.

“Give Matteo my regards. Tell him the Doyles are in the records but not in active dispute. Yet. As long as the arrangement holds, there’s nothing for them to dispute.”

We climb out the way we came.

The upper hallway is dim and quiet, and my mind is racing through four years of family conversations that happened in rooms I was in but never really part of. Mars stops walking before I do. I turn back.

“Something happen last night?” My voice is steady. The question shakes underneath it.

He doesn’t answer. He holds out his bandaged hand, an offering, not an explanation.

I unwind the gauze and it falls away. His palm opens under mine. Same mark. Same place. A thin red line across the palm, identical to my own, mirror-perfect and deliberate.

“Mars,” I say, and it comes out like a question.

“Nothing you need to worry about.” His voice is very low.

I turn my palm up and press it against his. The two lines align, and I feel the warmth.

It isn’t gentle. It’s sudden and complete, a heat that rushes through both our palms and up my wrist like blood finding its path home. The same pressure I felt last night, the same hands bracing the shelf. But now it isn’t only bracing, recognizing. His hand knows my hand, because something underneath the skin of both of us got knitted together while I sat alone in the dark.

His breath catches. His thumb goes still against my palm.

I understand then—not all of it, but enough. Dante’s bandage. Roc’s silence. Emi at the warehouse. This isn’t an accident. Some of the men I’ve known all my life made a choice about me last night while I sat awake upstairs. They bound themselves to something that involves me, whether I wanted it or not. This mark is a promise they made, and it’s written on my skin, answering to something in my blood I didn’t know could answer. And I know that Mars knows I know.

“Whatever they did,” I say, “it answers to them now?”

His thumb moves, the smallest brush against the base of my palm. “It answers to both all of us now,” he says quietly. “And we did it without asking you.”