The Lamb She Couldn't Eat

The fork clinked against my plate and I realised I'd been holding it still for a full minute.

"Nikki, eat," Isabella said from the head of the table, gesturing at the platter of lamb I'd barely touched. "You've been pushing that around like it owes you money."

"I'm fine, Mrs. Duca. Really."

"You're a guest in my house. Guests eat." She said it the way other people said *pass the salt* — an instruction with no room for argument. She ladled more onto my plate before I could stop her.

Across the table, Sophia was grinning at her brother, who sat with his wine glass and the expression of a man attending his own funeral. "Will, do you remember Eleanor? The girl I introduced you to at the Hendricks' do in March. Tall, red hair, read philosophy at Edinburgh."

William didn't look up. "No."

"You spent forty minutes talking to her."

"I don't recall."

"You don't recall *anything*," Sophia said, delighted. "You met her twice. Twice, and you asked her name the second time."

"He's always been like that." Isabella sighed, but there was fondness under it. "Women come and go and my son doesn't notice a single one."

William's jaw tightened, just slightly. "That isn't true."

"Oh?" His mother arched an eyebrow. "Name one you've remembered."

He was quiet. The whole table was quiet. And I knew, with the certainty of someone who had spent six months learning the rhythm of his silences, exactly which name he was not saying.

*Luna.*

I reached for my water and drank too fast.

Sophia, mercifully, changed tack. "Nikki got lost last night, by the way. Wandered into the east wing."

Every head turned to me. William's grey eyes lifted from his plate for the first time since we'd sat down.

"I'm sorry," I said quickly. "I couldn't sleep. I was looking for the kitchen and took a wrong turn. I didn't touch anything, I swear."

"You went into my study," William said. Not a question.

"The door was open. I only looked in. I left straight away."

He studied me for a long moment. I made myself hold his gaze, which was harder than it should have been, because the study had smelled of him — cedar and something sharper underneath — and standing in it had felt like standing inside a memory I had no right to.

"The east wing is closed to guests," he said at last.

"Will," Sophia said. "She said she was sorry."

"It's fine." He returned to his meal. "No harm done."

Isabella watched the two of us over the rim of her glass, and something moved behind her eyes that I didn't like.

After pudding, she caught my arm in the corridor.

"Nikki, dear. I have a favour to ask."

"Of course."

She pressed a sealed envelope into my hand — cream paper, heavy, no address, only a small black wax stamp I didn't recognise. "William left these at the house this morning and he needs them at the office before nine. And while you're in the area, would you collect Sophia's prescription from the chemist on Marchmont Street? She's been without it for two days and she won't go herself."

"I—" I looked down at the envelope. "Shouldn't Marco take these? He's his—" I almost said *his man*. "He works with him."

"Marco's in Rotterdam until Thursday." She smiled, warm and absolute. "You're doing me a kindness. Unless you'd rather not?"

There was no version of that question with a *no* in it. "I'll take them."

"Good girl."

I walked back to my room with the envelope in my pocket and my pulse doing something unpleasant. The mansion was one thing — a house, a family, lamb and teasing and a mother who insisted you eat. But the office on Delancey Street was the Loco family's legitimate front, and everyone in this city knew what happened behind legitimate fronts. Sophia had told me on the terrace that first morning: the east wing, the office, the men who came and went at odd hours — none of it was mine to see. I'd been a guest for four days. Guests didn't carry sealed envelopes.

Except, apparently, when the matriarch asked them to.

I told myself it was nothing. Errands. A chemist. A mother who wanted her son's papers delivered and her daughter's medicine collected and didn't trust the household staff with either. That was all.

But as I passed the landing, I caught Isabella's voice through the half-open door of the drawing room, low and unhurried on the telephone.

"—yes. The friend. She'll do nicely."

I stopped walking.

"Bring me everything by Friday," she said. "I want to know who she really is."

My hand went to the envelope in my pocket and closed around it so hard the wax stamp bit into my palm. She had given me the errand before she made the call, or after — I couldn't tell, and the not-telling was the worst part. Either I was a convenient pair of hands, or I was being walked into a room to see how I'd behave in it.

I went back to my room and sat on the edge of the bed for a long time, listening to the house settle around me. Somewhere below, William was still at the table, and I thought of Sophia's voice on the terrace — *he's had a hell of a year* — and of the way he'd said *no* when she asked if he remembered Eleanor. He forgot every woman he'd ever met in the flesh. He remembered, with a devotion that bordered on dangerous, the one he never had.

The one who was sitting in his mother's guest room with a sealed envelope in her pocket and her heart in her throat.

I pulled out my phone. There was a message waiting, sent hours ago, from a number I'd blocked twice and unblocked once.

*I know you're out there. Answer me. Let me hear your voice.*

I typed three words and deleted them. Typed them again. Sent them before I could stop myself.

*It's over, Dante.*

Then I turned the phone face-down on the quilt and stared at the ceiling, and tried very hard not to think about what I'd agreed to carry into the office of the man who was still looking for me.