Chapter 25: The Second Chair

I walked to the dock gate in my wedding dress, with Adriano a half step behind me and six Corvi men around us.

Bianca stood outside the iron bars under the sodium lamp.

She was alone, as she had said.

Her black hair was matted, and one sleeve of her coat was torn off at the seam.

She had lost a shoe somewhere.

"Livia," she said, and she put both hands through the bars.

I didn't take them.

"Open it," I told the gatekeeper. "Slowly. Nobody touches her but the woman I name."

The woman I named was a Corvi nurse who had worked the wounded at pier nine.

She searched my sister on the pavement with a flashlight in her teeth.

Bianca stood with her arms out and cried quietly while she did it.

I watched her face and felt very little.

The nurse found it in the heel of the single shoe Bianca still wore.

It was a flat gray disc the size of a coin, pressed into the rubber.

"Tracker," the nurse said.

Bianca's eyes went wide, and they went to the disc and not to me.

"I didn't know," she said. "Livia, I swear, I didn't know about that."

"I believe you," I said. "You've never known what they put on you."

Adriano took the disc from the nurse and turned it over in his scarred fingers.

"We can crush it," he said.

"Don't," I said. "Put it back in the shoe."

He looked at me, and then I saw him understand.

"Silvio thinks he can hear where she is," he said. "So let him go on thinking it."

"Yes."

"Bianca goes in the gatehouse," Adriano told his men. "Four guards, no phone, no visitors. Nobody asks her anything tonight."

Bianca grabbed at my torn veil.

"Livia, please. He threw me out when the books were done. He said I was no use. I walked from the Narrows."

"Tomorrow," I said.

"Please, I only want to see Massimo's face, I only..."

"Tomorrow, Bianca. Tonight belongs to me."

I took her fingers off my veil one at a time.

She let me.

Then the guards led her through the dock yard, limping on one shoe, and I did not turn to watch.

Adriano's house was a narrow brick building on Van Brunt Street, three blocks from the water.

He had lived in it alone for nine years, and it showed.

There was a kitchen with one chair, a staircase with a worn middle, and a bedroom at the top with a bed that looked slept in on one side only.

He stood in the doorway while I looked around.

"I should have bought a second chair," he said.

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