She was the daughter who stayed quiet at the table. That was the arrangement, and she kept it for twenty-six years, and it worked right up until the evening somebody said her brother's name in the study and she was standing on the wrong side of the door.
Dinner plates have not reached the table before Antonio's fork clatters against his water glass.
*Two months*, he says, pitched high enough to carry the length of the mahogany. *You've been saying two months for six months.*
Don Enzo does not look up from his veal. He carves another slice, spears it, chews with the methodical patience of a man who has never once been rushed. The wolf's head ring catches candlelight as he reaches for his wine.
*Antonio.*
The warning comes soft from the far end of the table, but Antonio is already standing, chair scraping the parquet.
*I'm not a child you keep in a tower.*
Matteo arrives as the solution to a problem nobody has explained to Sophia, with an invitation she is not permitted to decline and a manner that suggests he already knows how this ends.
The arrangement is explained to her in eleven sentences by a man who has clearly rehearsed all eleven. Her family owes something that cannot be paid in money. She is what is being offered, and she is being told rather than asked, and the person telling her is not the person who decided it.
What follows: a debt she did not know she owed, a wolf's invitation, a feast of blood, a confession in a safe house, the price of a brother, a ransom play, a dinner conducted entirely in questions, and a shrine she cannot get away from.
*Yes. Yes, of course yes.*
Her lips were salt from tears and smoke from the candles.
What Sophia finds in that file, about her father, about the two months that kept becoming two months, and about which of the men at that table has been paying for her education, may permanently rewrite everything she has believed about her own family.
