No Audience

The storm took the city lights out on a Thursday, and for one hour the rule had no audience to enforce it.

The penthouse went black except for the fail-safe glow along the floor, the harbor below us swallowed whole, and the silence of a building without power is a different silence, close and human. I found Dario standing at the dark glass with a tumbler he was not drinking from, and because the cameras were out and the city was out and there was no one in the world to perform for, I did something I had not let myself do in the three weeks I had lived inside his rule. I stood next to him. Just that. Close enough that the distance he measured for a living was gone.

He did not move away, which was its own kind of confession.

"Whose idea was the rule," I said. "Really."

"Mine." He turned the glass slowly. "I have spent my whole life being a thing the family points at the people it wants frightened. My father raised a weapon and called it a son. You do not let a weapon want things, Lena. Wanting is how a weapon gets itself or someone else killed." He said it without self-pity, the flat way he said everything true. "You are the first thing in this house I am not allowed to use and not required to break. I made a rule so I would not forget that in the dark."

I should have stepped back. The smart move, the move my father would have made, was to file that away as leverage and step back into my side of the room. Instead I reached up in the dark and I put my hand against his jaw, and he went absolutely still, the stillness of a man who has not been touched without a reason in longer than he can stand to remember, and I felt the muscle in his face move under my palm as he closed his eyes.

"There's no one watching," I said.

"I know," he said, low and rough. "That is the only reason it counts."

We did not kiss. We stood there in the dark on the wrong side of his rule with my hand on his face and his breath unsteady and the whole bright performance of our marriage stripped away, and it was the most undressed I have ever felt with my clothes on. When the power came back the city flooded the room with light and we stepped apart like guilty people, and neither of us said a word about it, which told me it had been real.

I could not sleep. So I did what I had come to do. I went down to the study Sal kept on the residential floor, the one Renzo guarded by day and forgot by night, and I picked the lock with a hairpin the way my father had taught me when I was nine and thought it was a game. I was looking for anything with my father's name on it. I found something worse.

It was a logbook, the kind the family kept of who went where on the family's business, and I knew the date before I found it because I have known that date in my sleep for two years. The night my father died. The night the coast road took him. And there, in a hand I did not recognize, beside the time and the stretch of road where they found his car, was an assignment and a name. One man had been sent to my father that night.

Dario Orsini.

I stood in the dark with the book in my hands and the floor very far away, and upstairs, two walls from where I had just put my palm against his face in the dark and felt something in me come loose, slept the man the family had sent to my father on the last night of my father's life.