Chapter 5: The Wedding Night

"Ask your aunt yourself," I told Stefano, and walked around him.

I didn't ask Teresa.

I asked Dario, at eleven that night, in the doorway of a bedroom I had never seen.

"Who was the last woman you kept?"

He was unbuttoning his cuffs.

He didn't look surprised, and he didn't look away.

"A woman who wanted a ring and a house in the city," he said.

"I wouldn't give her the ring. She left on her own two feet, and I paid for her flat."

"Stefano says you broke her."

"Stefano was seventeen and didn't like her."

He set the cufflinks on the dresser.

"Nobody has ever been hurt by me, except in the ways they asked."

I believed it.

I want that written down, because I believed it completely.

The room was large and dark, with a bed of black iron and a window open to the sound of the sea.

On the bed lay six lengths of grey silk, folded, side by side.

"Take off your dress," Dario said. "I've thought about this all week."

I turned my back and let him undo the buttons himself.

He did it slowly.

Each button was a small cold touch.

When the silk slid down, he kissed the back of my neck.

"On the bed. On your back."

I lay down in my underwear on the black coverlet.

He took my wrist and tied it to the iron rail above my head.

The silk was soft and the knot was not.

He did the other wrist.

Then he went to the foot of the bed and tied my ankles, one by one, so that I lay open.

I pulled once, testing.

Nothing gave.

"Good," he said from the foot of the bed. "Now you know."

"Know what?"

"That you can't get away." He took off his shirt. "And that you don't want to."

I hadn't known a body could be that large and quiet.

He came up the bed on his knees.

He took the waistband of my underwear in his fist and tore it in two.

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