Hers To Choose

ChapterSix

Dante stops at the corner of the compound wall, where the streetlight doesn’t reach.

“This is me,” he says. “Unless you want me to walk you to your door like a gentleman. I could fake it.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re wearing my jacket.”

“I’m aware.”

He grins, but it doesn’t make it all the way to his eyes. His bandaged hand is shoved in his pocket. The grin slips, just for a second, and I know we’re both seeing the same thing: a man on a bridge, perfectly still, then turning away.

“Night, Sof,” he says, and goes before I can decide whether to give the jacket back I don’t use the front gate. Mars is gone from it now, and I don’t want to explain to whoever replaced him why I smell like river and someone else’s leather. I go around the back, past the kitchen window, where three of my aunts are bent over the sink and the radio is playing something old. Aunt Theresa laughs at something. Nobody looks up.

The jacket is too big.

The sleeves cover my hands. It smells like motor oil, musky aftershave, and Dante. I should take it off, but I don't want to. All the way home I’ve been seeing it.

Roc at the railing.

Roc not calling down.

Roc’s back, straight and unhurried, walking away like I was something he’d decided not to look at.

He read my texts. All three. And then he stood on a bridge and watched, and walked away. He has never once not answered. Not in eight years. Not since I was twelve, and he wrote his number on the inside of my wrist in ballpoint and said, “Any hour. I answer.”

He answered three nights ago, on the first ring, when I called him at one in the morning because the house had gone silent. He answered every time before that. He picked last night to stop. I’m so angry my teeth ache. At the end of the back path, where the kitchen garden gives way to the rosemary and the old stone wall, a lantern is lit. Someone’s out there. Roc is sitting on the low wall by the salt line, his elbows on his knees and his bandaged right hand resting on one of them. The lantern sits on the stones beside him, throwing light up across his jaw. He doesn’t look surprised to see me, and he's been waiting.

“You read my texts,” I say.

“Yes.”

“All three of them.”

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t feel the need to answer one.”

He didn't answer. I stop a few feet from him. The rosemary is wet, and the smell of it, sharp and green, rises around my ankles. The salt line runs past his boots, a pale ribbon in the dark marking where the garden ends and everything else begins.

“Why?” I ask. “Why couldn’t you just say something?”

He looks at the bandage on his hand for a moment. Then at me. “I wrote you six answers,” he says. “I deleted them all.”

“Why?”

“Because if I’d answered, I’d have told you everything.” His voice is level, nothing in it to grab on to. “And you’d have told me to stop. And I couldn’t stop. So I didn’t answer.”

It isn’t the answer I expected. It’s worse, because it sounds true.

“You don’t get to do that,” I say. “Decide for me and then hide from it.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

“I’m not sorry we did it.” He holds my eyes. Roc always holds your eyes, like looking away would be a kind of lie. “You’d be dead, or close to it, or worse. I won’t apologize for that.” A pause. “I’m sorry nobody asked you. I should have. That one’s mine.”

I don’t have anything ready for that. I had a whole speech for the version of him who’d make excuses.

I notice his hands instead.

That’s what I do when I don’t know what to say: I catalog things.

His hands are steady. The bandage on the right one is clean and tight, nothing like Dante’s. His shoulders are still. He’s sitting the way he always sits at our table, like he doesn’t need to take up space to own it. The lantern light catches a small scar on his chin I’ve seen a thousand times and never really looked at. I’ve been looking at him too long.

He’s Matteo’s best friend. He’s the one who left the kitchen light on the year my mother died, so I’d have somewhere to go at three in the morning. He’s the one who drove me home after my cousin’s wedding two years ago without saying a word, his hand locked on the gearshift like it needed holding down, and then spent every day since making sure we were never alone again.

I told myself I imagined that drive. I’ve told myself a hundred times. I should not be standing in a dark garden counting the scars on his face.

“You felt it,” I say. “Last night. When it took.”

“I was in the center of the circle.” He turns his palm up on his knee, the bandaged line facing the sky. “I feel it more than the others. I feel where you are.”

“All the time?”

“All the time.”

So he felt me get up this afternoon. He felt me walk out the back door and down the hill. He felt the thread pull me to the river.

“You followed me,” I say.

“I went to the bridge.” His jaw tightens, just slightly. “I saw.”

The jacket. He means the jacket.

His eyes drop to it, to the too-long sleeves and the collar Dante tugged closed under my chin. Something moves behind his face and is gone again, like a door closing in another room.

“That’s Dante’s,” he says.

“Yes.”

A beat.

“It suits you.”

Then nothing. He doesn’t say anything else, and somehow that’s louder than if he’d shouted. I’m angry. I’m still so angry. But I’m also standing here with my pulse doing something it has no business doing, and the thread under my ribs is pulled so tight toward him it almost hurts. I take a step closer. He doesn’t move. That’s the first thing I notice. He doesn’t lean back, and he doesn’t stand up. He stays exactly where he is on the wall, and I’m standing so close now that his knee is almost touching my thigh and I have to tip my head down to see his face.

“Tell me what the rule says,” I say. “Exactly.”

He’s quiet for so long I think he won’t answer.

“None of us claims you alone,” he says. He says it flatly, like a man reading his own sentence aloud. “No one of us takes what belongs to the five. If one of us breaks it, the binding breaks with him. And it takes you with it.”

"CLAIM me? Like I'm some kind of object?"

He doesn't answer, and I don't push. I sigh out of frustration, and continue my version of an interrogation. “Takes me how?”

“That’s what nobody’s going to find out.”

“Nobody,” I say.

“Nobody.”

The lantern hisses. Somewhere in the house, a door closes. He’s looking up at me, and I’m looking down at him, and there are maybe six inches between our faces. I can see his pupils are wide, even in the light. I can see his hand on his knee has closed into a fist around the bandage. I can hear him not breathing. I’m not breathing either. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know what I’d do if he moved. I don’t know if I’m testing him or testing myself, or whether I just want to see the great, controlled Rocco Bellandini break one single rule he made.

He doesn’t move.

Neither do I.

The salt line flares. White light rips along the boundary like a struck match, with a sound like a high wire humming, and the salt cracks down the middle with a noise like ice. I don’t see Roc stand. One second he’s on the wall, and the next he’s in front of me, his body between mine and the dark beyond the garden, his arm out, his good hand flat against my stomach, holding me back.

The hum dies, the light goes out, and the garden is dark again. So quiet, and smells like rosemary and something burnt. Roc’s hand is still on me. I can feel it through two layers of jacket. He turns his head, and in what’s left of the lantern light I see his face.

He’s relieved, not because the ward held. Not because I’m safe. He’s relieved because now he has a reason to step away.

He does.

He drops his hand like the touch burned him worse than the salt, and takes one step back, then another. His control slides back over his face, smooth and closed.

“Go inside, Sofia,” he says.

“Roc—”

“Go inside.”

I go. At the back door, I look over my shoulder. He’s standing at the boundary with his back to me, his bandaged hand hanging at his side, looking down. Where the salt line was, a long black scorch mark cuts across the stones. It’s still there when I close the door.