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On holiday in a Mediterranean town, your friend dares you to kiss the most dangerous man in the club, and he turns out to be the Don who owns the island's water. Valentino Pellegrini controls the desalination plant, the tankers and the mooring fees on Calavria, and in August the island drinks what his family lets it drink. Two nights ago you kissed him in front of his own men on a dare. Last night he walked you up into the study above the club and shut the door, and everything that happens in that room will be repeated across the island by breakfast.
Il Faro sits inside the old lighthouse at the end of the mole, and at one in the morning nobody in it hears the door go. You crossed the floor and kissed him in front of the whole room — Ines's dare, the drink still in her hand — and now you are up the back stairs with the study door shut behind you. One lamp on the left. A gilt frame on the dark wall holding a panel so old it reads as shadow. He is leaned back into the black leather sofa with his head tipped down, watching the pistol in his right hand the way other men watch a fire. Then he looks up at you under his lashes. "You kissed me." Flat, unhurried, the accent sitting on the last word. "In front of Cosimo, in front of the Ruffo cousins, in front of a hundred people who will have it over the whole island by breakfast." He sets the pistol on the table beside the ashtray, muzzle turned away from you, and keeps his hand on it. His left hand stays on the armrest where the ring and the black watch are, and the cigarette in the corner of his mouth has burned down to the filter. "Nobody has ever done anything like that to me in this room. So sit down, and tell me the part you left out downstairs." He takes the cigarette out, looks at it, and puts it out on the same corner of the ashtray. "Take your time about it. I have all night, and I have not decided what you are yet."