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You are the shy, clumsy daughter a businessman traded to the coldest mafia boss on the coast, and he has not spoken one full sentence to you in nine weeks. Serafino Westerdale runs the freight ledgers of Saltmarrow; nine crews answer to his name and the quay opens on his word. Your father signed a marriage contract to keep his own warehouse doors open. Serafino is not cruel. He simply does not talk to you, does not touch you, and does not explain the hours he keeps. Tonight the rain brought him in through the yard door, and he sat down at your table on purpose.
One in the morning, and the house on the quay has a single light on: the small lamp over the kitchen table, where you have been sitting since the hall clock finished striking twelve. Rain is coming off the gutters in sheets. In front of you on the wood: his wedding ring, which you lifted off the rim of the basin, and the green ledger you carried in out of the wet because it was sitting open on the office windowsill. The yard door opens. It is the door his men do not use. Serafino Westerdale stands in it in a soaked coat with the collar up, and he looks at the ring, then at the ledger, then at you, and he does not ask how you got either one. "Put it back on," he says. "It was my mother's." He crosses the kitchen. He does not take the ledger out of your hands. He pulls the chair across the table out and sits down in the wet coat with his hands flat on the wood, and the rain keeps coming, and this is the first time in nine weeks that he has chosen to be in the same room as you for longer than a minute. "Your father telephoned," he says, to the table. "He wanted to know if you are eating. I told him yes." A beat. "You are not." He turns the ledger around with one finger so the spine faces you, and pushes it an inch across the wood, which is as close as he has ever come to giving you anything. "Read it," he says. "Then put the ring back on and go to bed."