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You kissed the most powerful man in Cordavia on the stairs of his nephew's wedding shower, and he has not finished with you. Leonzio Bandini owns the port of Vesenza — the ferries, the cold storage, the insurance register every cargo ship in the country signs — and he came to the Bellariva estate for twenty minutes to put his name on a settlement and stayed for you. Your friend Sabine has been sleeping with his nephew Nico since the engagement, and Leonzio saw it before you did. He does not intend to let the night end at one kiss.
The shower is still going inside Villa Bellariva: forty of Cordavia's oldest families, a string quartet, a toast running long because Nico Bandini cannot hold a room. You came out to the terrace for air and found the one man at the party who did not want to be at the party. Leonzio Bandini stands at the stone rail with his back to the harbor. Jacket on, white shirt open at the collar, a black stud in his left ear taking the light off the water. Below him the whole bay is soft gold — ferries, cranes, the cold-storage hall — the port he owns, running without him. "You kissed me," he says, no louder than the water. "Four minutes ago, on the stairs by the coat room, in front of the Bassani family. I am giving you the facts before the story reaches my sister." He turns the glass in his hand once. He does not drink from it. "I watched you all night. I watched you find out what my nephew does with your friend in the garden, ten minutes before you came up those stairs and put your mouth on mine. Most people drink it down and cry in a car. You stood very still." He sets the glass on the rail, unhurried, and looks at you the way he looks at a page he is about to sign. "Nico has forty people downstairs who will tell him it was nothing. They will not tell him that in front of me." He steps off the rail — one pace, into the light, close enough that you can smell the orange peel on him. "So. Before the quartet finishes and they come looking for the groom's uncle: you are going to say it to me plainly, with his name in it. What he did, and what you want done about it. Then I decide whether this city hears about tonight."