the unexpected smell of fresh blood

No, Grace answers, and she pensively wets her bottom lip with her tongue, which means she isn’t done. She’s wandering the graveyard of her past decisions and picking through her thoughts like picking through old bones. If Everett’s supposed to feel bitter vindication that her reckless, selfish endeavors have failed to secure her satisfaction, it doesn’t come.

Nothing much comes with Grace, nowadays.

He can never quite get a foothold on his feelings when she’s around, strung in a limbo between brittle pity and rueful anger and wounded betrayal. It was so much simpler, once. Growing up in the Craven-Daly families, the rule went like this: when Everett and Grace were good, they were a peculiar sort of spectacular; when Everett and Grace were bad, they were a nightmare. Five minutes into an interaction he’d know instinctively which one it’d be for the day. Then came the distance that came with crossing the threshold into adulthood and leaving Grace behind in adolescence, and the grey area added in between.

Everett looks at her now, simultaneously readying himself for another ugly argument and knowing one won’t come. Pointless, she says. Yes and no. He plucks the cigarette from his lips with his now-bandaged hand and lets out another steady, languorous exhale. They wouldn’t be having this conversation if Grace was truly happy, that much is right, but — 

“They’re not good people. That’s where you’re wrong.” Everett taps his cigarette, watching the tip dissolve into powdery ashes. He brings it to his mouth again. “We’re not good people. None of us are, in this godforsaken city,” he mutters. If he gathered all the collective blood on their hands, he could drown himself in it, crimson and metallic and slick. He’s long since stopped believing in any inherent goodness in Verona. Which is more commendable — for a good man to choose good according to his nature, or for a bad man to choose good against it?

Conversations with Alva spiral through his head. Religion. Morality. Original sin. His mother may have christened his middle name for Joseph, but lately, Everett’s felt more like Jacob, wrestling with God through the dead of night until his body is all but spent. Forever the question of what does it matter, forever the weight of sin still pressing thick on his shoulders. He wonders if he’ll ever be relieved of either.

He wonders if Grace feels the same.

They’ve always been different when it came to the Catholic masses they’d sometimes attend together with their families as children — both with a certain lack of deep interest, though Everett always viewed religion with mild, if incurious, favor as opposed to Grace’s suspicion that bordered on disregard as she grew older. Always two sides of the same coin: tradition versus independence, duty versus freedom. He’s always been able to predict, save a few occasions, the manner in which she’ll respond.

She surprises him this time.

I want Catia to be safe.

Everett stills, cigarette pinched between his fingers, trapped between his desire for reconciliation and the wary distrust still warning in his heart. I don’t know if there’s anything I can do anymore, she’d said. Everett thinks of Lillian, and Maeve, and the flowers he leaves on their graves. Thinks of Vivianne, too, and how exhausting it is to harbor bitterness in his heart. He watches her for a long moment, green eyes gleaming under the low kitchen lights. “Then help me.” We could do this, together. “Though, you’d better speak with Catia yourself.”

He stubs out the last of his cigarette into the ash tray, then runs the towel under the warm water before squeezing it gently, one hand extended towards Grace. “Here. Your turn.”

Everett ashes his cigarette and proclaims judgement on them all - a whole city of sinners, pure black and white. She could argue, but it’s the truth: good is a relative term, shades of grey that exist only far from the light. She sees them because her soul has been stained - she knows he sees them too, since his is just the same. When a good man tells you he is damned, what can you, the wicked, say to deny it? How could you know goodness better than he?

Grace has long wondered about the people that flock to Verona - what draws them in to this bloodstained city, whose cruelty is whispered in the shadows beyond its borders? Who would choose this place for themselves, other than the vicious and the wretched? What does it make them, those that have clawed empires out of the bloodied earth, shared in the wealth borne of the slaughter of others - what then, if not the wickedest of all?

It had been easy for her to fall into the birthright the city had given her. Whatever moral soul her Catholic upbringing had attempted to instill had withered and died at the foot of the festering rage that had built up inside her for years - and yet she still hopes for redemption. She will turn her face to those worthy of adjudication and lay herself at their feet. She has begun already with Everett - her harshest judge, her most loving friend.

Help me, he says, and she knows she has been found worthy.

“Yeah,” she says thickly, tears clogging her throat and threatening to spill. “Yeah, I’ll talk to her.” Nearly a month later, she can still feel the weight of Catia’s body in her arms, the warmth of her tears in her shirt. She thinks for the first time that her sister may want something from her that she is willing to give. 

Everett stubs out his cigarette with a finality that has Grace straightening up, ready to steel herself for a return to normalcy, to a space beyond the bubble they’ve made of the kitchen, this space for revelations.

Your turn, he says instead, holding out his hand, and this is what breaks her.

It is an olive branch, this simple act of tenderness. A signal that she is worth tending to, worth caring for. She, used to the tenderness of dulled blades, grasps at this chance for healing like a drowning man. 

Tears spill as she takes his hand and she shuts her eyes to them, surrendering herself to his machinations. The towel is warm and rough against the raw edges of the gash on her forearm, but Everett’s hands are steady and kind, efficient as he cleans the cut of the blood just starting to dry. She cannot look at him, cannot bear to see the gentle thing that has surely risen into his gaze. She feels a child again, crying frustrated tears onto Everett’s ever patient shoulder. It’s like a dam has burst within her - she cannot stop.

I doubt she could have predicted it would end up like this, Grace says, and Everett thinks of sitting in fluorescent-lit canteens, shoes squeaking on linoleum with the scent of antiseptic sharp in the air; thinks of smooth, scratchy hospital sheets under his fingers; thinks of his mother reaching to brush cold fingers against his face as he struggled not to look at the cannula taped to the inside of her arm. He thinks of being twelve, of her makeup only partially covering red-rimmed eyes as she’d gathered him to her chest and pressed a kiss and a vow to his temple, that whatever his father did, it would be them together — mother and son. 

He thinks of the last time he ever saw her, the September before he left for his second year of graduate school. He’d promised to call, promised he’d be back before she could blink. His goodbye was sealed with a gentle hug and a careful kiss to her pallid brow, and before he’d left the room, she’d squeezed his hand with a soft, fond smile. You’re a good boy, Everett. Stay safe.

He thinks of clasping hands with Don Capulet only six months later, bruises littering his body in the months following, praying desperately with blood-slicked hands as he’d clung to a rosary that’s now God knows where.

Everett swallows. “I doubt she could have predicted much of what’s happened.”

He’s nearly glad his mother isn’t here to see it.

Years of practice make the movements automatic as Everett rips open the antibiotic packet and begins applying it to his wound. He sets his jaw. It stings, but Grace’s words are abrupt enough to yank his attention away from it. Everett stares, green into green, tracing the face of a woman he’s known longer than anyone else in his life, save his own father. How did they get here…? Vulnerability flickers in his expression like cigarette smoke, hazy and insubstantial, before he breaks her gaze in favor of finishing up with his cut.

“I never wanted it to be,” he admits quietly, busying himself with a bandage. “You’re the worst when you’re angry.” It’s blunt, direct, carrying all the familiarity present between two people who know each other all too well. Everett doesn’t take the opportunity to say I told you so or agree that Grace should shoulder the blame, not when the wound’s been ripped open all over again. 

Instead, he remains silent as he listens, the smell of smoke thick in the air. “Are you happier?” A beat. “With the Montagues.” The question hangs between them like a loaded gun as Everett waits for her to say the words that’ll rent them apart. If she’s happier with her new family, there’s no point to what’s said between them except a final conversation for closure’s sake, and all of this — the crumbling house they’d once built a friendship in thirty years ago — is doomed to fail. He can’t — won’t — make excuses for someone who’s content to side with an organization that would point a gun at their own family.

The silence grows near-suffocating, displaced by the weight of his still-unanswered question. A sigh compresses his lungs. Everett raises his eyes to meet hers, searching her expression for something. What it is, he doesn’t know. “What you can do depends on something else. What do you want, Grace?”

Grace waits for the rebuke that never comes, because Everett has been and always will be a better man that she gives him credit for. The burden of guilt is hers to bear, and it is enough for him to recognize it without comment. She has always been the petty one between the two of them. She wonders how much he’s still holding back, even as she serves her heart up to him. 

Are you happier? he asks instead, and it stings almost as much as his gloating would have. Another reminder of the fundamental break between them, the difference in the way their minds work. Happiness - in her mind - had never been part of the equation. Satisfaction, maybe, but never happiness. What sort of mundane trifle was that, when she’d wrapped herself in the gory cloak of promotion tendered in blood?

“No,” she says, mostly because she knows it’s the only thing that might keep them together - something she still wants, desperately, illogically, in total spite of the festering wound that is their relationship, the pain she knows it causes them both. She’s always been greedy, and especially so about Everett. She’s startled by the ring of truth to it, this acknowledgement of that what she’s lost seems insurmountable, that what she stands to gain will always be a hollow shell of something she’d had before. Self-doubt is an unfamiliar beast, and she stands cornered by its ravening gaze. 

“But yes, as well,” she continues, contrary to the last. “They’re good people, Everett, and I like them, even though most of them still don’t like me - and it’s all pointless, really, since it all came down to this.” She gestures expansively, encompassing all of it - the minor property damage,  their cuts and scrapes, herself and Everett and Brielle and Catia in the other room. The unspoken threat of Don Montague’s warped perception of loyalty. “Was I happy with the Capulets? Yes and no, same as this. If I’d been perfectly happy, I’d still be a Capulet. If I was perfectly happy with the Montagues, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

Are you happy, Everett? Grace wants to ask, but she already knows the answer. His allegiance to the Capulets has always been one of begrudging need rather than desire, and the deaths of the last few months have taken a particular toll. Get out, she wants to say, but they’re both in too deep to extricate themselves now. She’d reveled in that, once - in getting his hands dirtier, in pulling him down to the depths with her. Now she’s not so sure. She’ll sink with her bloodied ship, but he shouldn’t have to.

What do you want, Grace?

She wants sunny days with Rafaella, laughter rich in her ears and skin warm to the touch. She’ll never get that again, least of all now due to her betrayal - the woman she knew and loved is a thing of the past, taken apart piece by piece in a torture room Grace kept herself as far as possible from. She wants what she already has - coffee with Ivan and Lucrezia, whatever vicious thing the friendship between herself and Katerina has morphed into. She wants Everett - wants something, from him, something she’s never known quite how to describe. Respect, or acknowledgement, or acceptance, in whatever shade he’s willing to give. She wants - and this nearly makes her laugh, horrible and surprising as it is - she wants her sister to be happy. To have a future of her own shaping, not tied to the understanding that she could be dead at any moment.

“Champagne.” Vivianne requests of the bartender, perching prettily on one of the old, wooden stools as Grace follows suit beside her. It isn’t her drink of choice in a bar, but it’s all part of a carefully curated image of victory, and she isn’t about to let that detail slip in the presence of a Montague — even if this particular Montague is nothing like the rest. She doesn’t know what time and politics have done to Goneril over the last few months since she switched sides, but she isn’t about to let her guard slip low enough to find out. At least, not if it comes at her own expense.

“Is that what you’d like to believe?” Grace insists that Cosimo will never be out of la mafia, and at the back of her mind Vivianne wonders if that’s a hope or a warning. 

“Dimmi, Daly; what would you prefer? That Cosimo returns at this city’s expense, because it would unravel whatever I’ve achieved — or that I should keep him out for Verona’s sake, even if it means you swallow the bitterness of my triumph?” She leans forward to pull a packet of cigarettes from her pocket, before offering one to the woman sitting beside her. Which do you crave, she wonders, blue eyes never leaving green; Verona’s chaos, or my personal destruction?… Would you watch me burn even if it meant the city burns with me?…

“You may think you know Don Capulet, but not as well as I, and certainly, you don’t know what it means to be a parent.” The Underboss continues, though what levity her voice carried previously is replaced by a quieter, weightier edge as she lights her cigarette. “He won’t move against us so long as his daughter sits on the throne.” Why do you think I’ve put her there despite her youth and inexperience, she doesn’t say, though the inference shines plainly in her eyes as her gaze returns to Grace. The Montague confesses that Verona’s no city for family, and although she won’t admit it aloud, Vivianne can’t deny that particular claim. Her mind goes inevitably to Cyrus, but then she pushes him away, lest Grace sniff him out from within the confines of her skull like a trace of blood to a bloodhound.

“I would’ve never made you choose between your family and the Capulets.” She continues instead, delivering the remark in even tones and lacking in her usually sly subterfuge. Did you ever think me so cruel an employer?… Vivianne questions in the resulting silence, but it’s no use. Whatever Grace once knew to be true about her is as ephemeral as the night sky that surrounds the bar, and equally dusky and opaque. It’s the same vice-versa. She raises her glass to meet the Montague’s; 

“ — To family, then… But which one, Goneril?”

“Vivianne,” she says, deliberate in her use of her first name, even while Vivianne continues to place roadblocks between them. “I threw eleven years of my life out the window because I thought Cosimo Capulet was not a man worth working for any longer. It is a miracle that you’ve seen it too.”

If you insist on making it personal, Grace thinks grimly as she accepts a cigarette, then I’ll make it personal. “If you falter now, it’s no fault but your own. That is far more interesting to me than seeing you fail with the poor plans of a man who is losing his grip over his people.” The cigarette remains unlit as she looks at Vivianne, really taking in the woman before her.  “It was never you, you know that? None of this,” she gestures vaguely to herself, the strange distance between them, the not-so-veiled threatening looks the bar keeps shooting her way, “none of it was about you. I do enjoy keeping you on your toes, but I didn’t switch allegiances out of spite.” Vivianne’s fixation on her role in Grace’s defection is as amusing as it is frustrating - so similar to Everett that Grace, if she wanted to push buttons, would bring it up. She bites her tongue, for once.

“I’ve always respected you, Vivianne, so stop pretending your issues with what I’ve chosen to do with my life come from some slight I dealt you. It isn’t personal.” Grace finally lights her cigarette, inhaling deeply. She feels a phantom twinge in her thigh, the months-old injury a physical mark of this mixed-up cause and effect that has sat for too long between them. 

I would’ve never made you choose, Vivianne says, and all Grace can do is smile around the smoke. “Yes,” she acknowledges, filled with the sudden aching wish that all of this had happened a year before, that somehow she could rewrite history through sheer force of will to bring them both here in truthful celebration - with Juliana on the throne and themselves still sisters in arms. Just Grace and Vivianne, a captain and her capobastone. Just friends. “Yes. You never would have needed to.”

Grace claims her conviction for herself and herself alone, as she always has, as she always will. It’s a brilliant, selfish individuality that’s always inspired measured disapproval and secret envy in Everett, inherently something of a slave to expectation for good or for ill. It’s what drives him, dutiful and conscientious of the role others want or need him to achieve — a responsibility due towards his own honor, towards society, and first and foremost — always foremost — towards his family. Flying without strings is a notion he’s entirely unaccustomed to.

Still, the disappointment that she’d cut her ties with those who begot and raised and cherished her hasn’t entirely disappeared from Everett’s throat. Left behind, for a different family and better loves, flipping the direction of her pistol from protector to predator in one fell swoop. Everett wonders how she must feel, living as an individual rather than a thread in a greater tapestry. There’s a warmth and vibrance to being a part of something, however flawed it may be… though he’s not sure Grace sees it that way, even as she claims that her sister is hers and hers alone.

Everett takes in a thoughtful lungful of smoke and listens to the whoosh of errant cars and a faraway radio wash through the open window. They can’t have her. She’s mine. He exhales, the white plume drifting to the outdoors, and closes his eyes. It smells of sun-baked stone from the cobblestones outside. Rich tobacco. Oranges, wafting from the park down the street. All the drops of a sweltering Italian summer stirred with the lethargy the loss of adrenaline’s left in his body, and for a second, it’s simply himself and his godsister, a woman who’s known him longer than anyone else in his entire life.

She’s ours, he nearly corrects. He doesn’t.

How long has it been since he and Grace have been a we, and not two separate, divided entities?

Her voice plucks at his attention, though his eyes still stare unseeingly through the window, not until — Not to you. Everett shifts now, shirtsleeves rustling softly as his gazes swivels quietly, abruptly, to land on the sharp cut of her features. I’m tired of having the same fight. His eyes trace the bruise on her cheek, the rip in her blouse, the blood seeping into the expensive fabric. He’s only marginally better, disheveled and sweat-slicked, jaw sore and throbbing and a cut that’s more bark than bite eating across the back of his hand.

Silently, Everett pushes off the counter and ambles around the pile of porcelain shards to where he knows Catia’s first aid kit to be in the bottom cupboard. “I don’t enjoy fighting with you, you know. It’s exhausting,” he remarks, subdued, tucking the cigarette in the corner of his mouth. He turns on the tap, lukewarm water thrumming against the sink, and winces when he slips his injured hand underneath. It’s unusually quiet for a few moments as he grabs a clean dishtowel and gently dries the area, before slinging the thing over his shoulder and plucking the cigarette away for an exhale.

He doesn’t know what he’s trying to say. He doesn’t know what he wants to say. Everett watches her for a long moment, licking his lips hesitantly. “You know, that time in the garden, I only…” His eyes slip back to the first aid kit, fingers deftly flicking open the box as he reaches for the antibiotic. “I was afraid of this.” It’s simple, blunt, as he busies himself with cleaning and dressing the wound. “Of whatever this has become. All I wanted was — our families have always been —” Fragments fall from his tongue like every fragment of their relationship, unsure and stilted. He feels the weight of everything on his shoulders as they lapse into silence. It lasts as he finally applies the bandage, wrapping it carefully around his hand.

It’s then, that his eyes flicker back to Grace’s as he picks up his idling cigarette. Everett hesitates, then shakes his head lightly as he looks back to his hand. “She always thought we fought too much. My mother, that is.” A smile flickers on his lips like a sunbeam revealed then immediately swallowed up by clouds. “I suppose some things never change.”

Something hot prickles at the back of her eyes and she swallows harshly, grinding them shut as the tap turns on behind her. The silence stretches taut between them and she cannot bear to look at him, at the mess she’s made. It all feels futile, this farce for Don Montague. The greater farce that is their relationship, broken and rotted to the core. Her death grip on it, her inability to ever let something go the only thing keeping them together.

Family means everything to Everett, this she knows. But would he have let her cut herself free if she’d actually taken up the knife to do so? If she’d stopped clinging to the vestiges of herself, if she’d let him go instead of dragging them back together by whatever means possible? It’s easy to get lost in the ifs - if Louis Daly was less lenient towards his wayward daughter. If Catia and Regina had never joined the mob. If Grace had found something worthwhile to do with her life. If she’d remained an only child.

She’s played these scenarios out before. She never ends up happier.

The taste of the cigarette grows more bitter with every stumbling word from Everett’s mouth, acrid smoke burning her throat. She keeps taking drags, burning it to the filter. The last vestige of him, an overture of peace. She doesn’t want to squander it.

Everett evokes his mother, and it startles a snort out of her, incongruous to the bleak mood that’s settled over her. “I doubt she could have predicted it would end up like this,” she replies. “Though I was a vicious child, so maybe she could see it.” Every time they’d tussled, Margherita had chided Everett for bad behavior, for giving in to Grace’s chaos. Like Grace was some unstoppable force - or simply out of her jurisdiction. 

“Is this all we’re ever going to be?” The words fall out of her mouth in a huff of smoke, surprising her. “This stupid back and forth. Always fighting.” It’s what they’ve been doing for twenty-some-odd years, since Grace grew into her terrible self, since Everett gained a life beyond her. She’s tired of it, and angry with herself for not seeing how she’d torn them apart years ago. She couldn’t have known. It still doesn’t help the sting. 

It’s a strange, almost dream-like sensation when Grace falls into step beside her. Whether mirroring the seemingly innocuous beginnings of a nightmare, or the far more insidious sort of dream drawn from foolishly-nostalgic memory, Vivianne doesn’t know. She’s never put much stock in her dreams either way, and doesn’t search for meaning as they begin to walk in the dark within touching-distance of each other; within knifing-distance too. It’s all the same, she thinks, with Grace Daly.

’… You always have been good at what you do.’

Is that why you defected?… She can’t help the quiet thought that threatens to temper her staunch satisfaction, even now. It’s a crown of thorns squeezed tight around the scar-tissue of the Underboss’ heart. Former friendships, old betrayals… No longer capable of drawing blood, though the reminder still scrapes and stings whenever it resurfaces. Vivianne ignores it now, choosing instead to respond with something half-wry, half-guarded, and all-around better-suited to her present temperament. 

“ — Keep going, Daly. Flattery will earn you your favourite seat at the bar.” 

In fact, she doesn’t particularly care where they sit so long as, in doing so, she gleans the real reason for Grace’s emergence tonight. It’s been too many bitter months for her to believe that the former-Capulet ventured all this way, at considerable risk to her own life — merely to offer congratulations. But in hoping to pry the truth from her adversary’s lips, Vivianne anticipates she’ll have to offer some in turn. “Grazie,” She hums, as Grace holds the door open to the bar in one sweeping gesture. “If you must know, I wouldn’t call the break between father and daughter ‘easy’. Nor would I call it an absolute.” Her words serve dual purpose, even now. Both morsel of truth and political reinforcement that la famiglia, even at its worst, is not so divided as to cause the Kingdom to fall, as no-doubt some Montagues must hope. “Family is so much more complicated than that… You’d know that better than most, wouldn’t you?” 

Would you?… Vivianne questions silently, despite how offhandedly the comment is made on the surface. She wonders if Grace has ever regretted turning against the same family she still visits for dinner. The same family she might one day be ordered to eliminate. “Pick your poison, Montague. Pray the barman doesn’t make it literal.”

There are eyes on her from the instant she walks into the bar, trailing a step behind Vivianne like a shadow. She has her wolf’s grin on, lazy and wide and sharp, a familiar swagger to those Capulets that know her. She lets her gaze slide over the faces, telegraphing her obvious disinterest. She’s here for Vivianne, and Vivianne alone.

The dogs stay at bay for now. She isn’t so sure her luck will hold through to the moment she leaves the bar, but she’s been itching for a fight all night. 

She mulls over Vivianne’s words, flagging the bartender as she turns the half-answer over. This feels like they’re back on familiar terms, conversation littered with barbs, cutting to the meat of the other in what would otherwise be civility. Today’s words cut deep, but they strike on blunted nerve. It is a familiar wound, torn wide by Don Montague’s orders, picked at again and again by Everett’s overture of peace. 

“A negroni,” she says smoothly to the bartender when they deign to take her order, “please. And whatever la capobastona wants.” If she'd really thought about it, she’s sure she could have dredged up memories of Vivianne in a bar - perhaps even this one - a drink in hand, and had an order ready for her. Instead, all that come to mind are half-hazy memories of Vivianne at a dinner table over a decade ago, laughing into her wine. Almost family. She smooths her palm onto the bar, grounding.

“I know Don Capulet, Vivianne. He may be out, but he will never be Out.” The emphasis is subtle but clear. The man’s hands are too deep into the viscera of the city, too tied to the players still at work. The king may be dethroned, but he was still once a king. “I doubt he ever could be, unless he was dead.”

What a different world it would be, had her shot last November struck true. What splinters of her life may still be gathered, had the don died that night?

Their drinks arrive. The liquor burns as she takes a sip. “Verona is no place for family,” she says over the rim of her glass, gaze heavy, looping their conversation back to its start. “Joining the mob should absolve you of other family ties. What loyalty comes first? The only person lucky enough to never question it is the one that makes you choose.” Another burning sip. She sighs, ignores the feel of bile in the back of her throat as she thinks of her newest orders. It doesn’t sit right, the specificity of the pairing, of the job. The timing, too pointed yet completely unprompted. The recent upheaval in the Capulet ranks only highlights the instability of the don’s position - a scrap that Grace clutches to. 

Her smile faded as she mulled over Grace’s words, a shroud of thoughtfulness dragging itself across her scornful expression and settling in place to conceal the way her anger lurched and roared beneath the veil. An image to maintain. How ironic, that the Montagues ought to learn from none other than the turncoat in their midst. It was highly doubtful that Grace was speaking in reference to the overall landscape of the mob rather than on a personal level, yet Ramona couldn’t help but contemplate the way her words served to highlight the brimming apathy of this celebration.

The Montagues went to great lengths to brandish their loyalties and blood-ties as though they were both sword and shield to their crimson-crowned clan, yet one stride forward and they were already cast at their feet, shunned and thrown to the side like worthless trinkets. Ramona loathed the fact that she had ever expected anything different from her so-called comrades, when it came to Valentina and beyond that. “And what image is that?” She asked after a moment of simmering silence. “Going off assumptions again,” She spread her palms in lighthearted admission. “But I don’t take you for someone who gives a shit about maintaining their image.”

It’s been a long fucking week. Ramona hiked her brows and nodded, tipping her head back as she gulped down her drink. Her anger was invigorating, an emotion wholly different from the sorrow and grief that had held her captive for the better part of a year – yet not unfamiliar. To earn back her rage, to once again feel as it burned within her empty spaces and weeping hollows; it was a grand, empowering victory. Yet even so, Ramona couldn’t deny that it was rather relaxing to feel it ease into a simmer beneath the spiking buzz of the liquor. It coaxed her mouth into a smirk as she tilted her head back and appraised Grace. “Always, huh? Teach me your ways, Daly.” She hummed, nodding in belated understanding. “Oh, so is that the image you’re trying to maintain? The Don’s brand of deadliness?” She scoffed, drawling, “I’d rather die.”

Eyes glimmering, Ramona met Grace’s smile with one of her own, softer and smaller yet no less mischievous. It stretched for a brief, meaningful moment then faded as she turned to survey the crowds. Despite having decided within two seconds of receiving the question, Ramona feigned contemplation for a long moment before finally declaring her target. “My sorry excuse for a sister. Celia.” She said, putting forceful, grudging emphasis on the moniker before turning back towards Grace. “And you?”

Going off assumptions again, Ramona says, and Grace could laugh. The things the Montagues assume about her could fill a room, the indelible mark of her strange history. “Precisely,” she replies. “That’s an image in its own right. The one who never cares, the one who always causes a scene...” She trails off, raising her eyebrows at Ramona, half shrugging. “I really don’t care what people think of me, but if being here tonight keeps me in someone’s good books for a moment longer, it’s a small price to pay. A couple of hours showing my face, making polite conversation and pretending I don’t notice everyone’s a second from knifing each other the moment their back is turned? Easy.”

She takes another sip of her drink, rolling the alcohol around her mouth. It doesn’t do jack shit about the burning taste of it, but it gives her time to gaze cooly at Ramona, cataloguing the minute shifts in her expression, the way she takes Grace’s callous words in stride and throws them back in Grace’s own face with a droll air. Her obvious distaste for the evening’s festivities intrigue Grace more than any of the truly forced cheer she’s seen plastered on the faces of other Montagues. It’s refreshing, to see someone almost as disenchanted as she, but for such utterly differing reasons.

Grace can’t hold back the inelegant bark of a laugh that tumbles from her lips at Ramona’s next words. “Jesus,” she says, wide-eyed, “Fuck no.” She’d never suited the slick and collected modes of Don Capulet, but neither has she found a true place in the impulsive brutality of the Montagues. “This organization doesn’t need another attack dog, but that sometimes seems to be all that Don Montague intends to cultivate. I do things he may like, but I certainly don’t do things for him to approve.” Her smile is predatory, sweet and sharp. “There are parts of me the Don really wishes would just vanish completely, but really, that’s what made me a compelling new acquisition.” 

If he could purge her Capulet years from her, wipe her clean and remake her in the Montague image, he would, but Grace would never stand for it. She wears a new mantle but she is still the same person, a fundamental truth that everyone in Verona seems eager to improperly perceive. She’s been vicious since birth, a cutting knife grown sharper with age and experience. She stands alone, despite orders she takes, despite the side of the Adige that holds her on their books. It seems impossible for Ramona to see this, but she’s never liked underestimating people. Maybe she’ll surprise her.

“Yes, you do,” Everett says mildly, dismissively. Grace swaggers and flaunts her prowess in combat like any other seasoned mafiosa would, but he knows that a part of it is an act — like her dismissal of Catia is an act, like her pretense of indifference towards her family is an act. Her legacy of fierce brutality is stained glass, brilliant and blinding, pieced together from jagged shards and all too easily shattered. If she hadn’t needed a reason, she’d have done it ages ago.

And yet — he’s still not certain of this woman who’s been in his life as long as he can remember. His mind is crowded with so many memories like smoke and mirrors, like lucid dreams distorted by the onslaught of time. Once, he might’ve been sure of the things that made up Grace Daly, down to the very drop. Now, Everett guesses, and hopes that he’s not horribly off. He knows there’s compassion in her. He knows there’s cruelty, too. The balance of the two is now a mystery to him, and often he approaches her with a wariness borne from the uncertainty of which one will win out that time. He’s certain which one’s claimed victory now, but how many times has he estimated incorrectly? Their horrible phone call in June, the piazza in front of il Duomo in October, an argument renting a longstanding relationship in two on a chilly spring morning.

She swipes the cigarette from his lips with a grin that makes him feel, for a second, that they’re twenty-eight and twenty-four, sharing a smoke out on the balcony of Villa Santarossa during the Craven’s annual holiday gala. He, too burdened with memories of a proposal that ended in a blaze of deceit and heartache; she, finding the company too dull to suffer. Their relationship was already a shadow of what it once was — already half a decade too late — but there was still that string of familiarity tying them together, stitched between them with their then-twenty-four years worth of shared memories.

If that string is still there, Everett’s sure she severed it when she’d switched to the Montagues, choosing a family of crimson over the one she’d grown up with all her life.

But she’s here.

I’ll take whatever punishment he deems fit for my failure, she says tersely, drawing Everett’s gaze like metal to magnet. Another cigarette dangles between his lips in the silence between her sentences, before he flicks his lighter once again and takes a drag as she continues to speak. I wouldn’t have done it. Not for him. He exhales, watching her as if trying to analyze an oil painting in a museum.

“And for someone else?” he asks, though his voice is devoid of accusation. Would she kill Catia for Genevieve? Did she support Rafaella’s attempts to turn her younger sister into a glutton for bloodshed? They live in a land of monochrome shades, a greyscape where lines can be drawn and erased for each person’s moral beliefs — and Everett wonders, for the first time since her defection, whether Grace is shifting hers, or if they’ve been the same from the beginning.

She frowns, still staring out the window, Everett’s gaze cool and heavy on her. It makes her squirm, the way he’s able to see into her, through her — she knows what he perceives is warped, somehow, vision clouded by years of tension — but it cuts all the same, too sharp and too close to home. It’s easier to look away, to keep tracing the rooftops of Verona, tracking the smoke they breathe into the night air — but she’s never been one to shy away from a challenge, even one as veiled as her simply being is, here beside him in Catia’s apartment, slotting into a void she’d left a year before, Grace-shaped and ragged around the edges in ways that don’t align with her own jagged shell. 

As if she’d ever fit here anyway, before.

She takes a deep drag of her stolen cigarette, letting the acrid smoke settle in her lungs and burn its way back out in a huff. There’s so much to say and no words to say it with — just loops, endless repetitions of the same argument they’ve seemingly been having their whole lives. Still, she wants — desperately, foolishly.

“For myself,” she says quietly, finally flicking her gaze back to his. It’s the truth, the twisted rotten core of it, the only thing she has left to give. He won’t understand — he never has — and she’s never been able to put into words what she so clearly feels in deed, in action. It’s their biggest divide — him reserved and cerebral, her impulsive and physical. Every attempt to bridge the space has ended poorly, with Grace dragging him down, or Everett forcing her face up to the light, or both of them stuck in a static space, claws sunk too deep to pull away, no matter the frustration, the anger. Staying because they have to, because there is always something else to chase deep into the other’s core. They’ve always complemented each other in that strange way — seeing hidden things. Whether they were truly there or not is up for debate.

“No one else,” she starts, still fumbling around the tightness in her chest, still all too aware of Catia and Brielle in the other room even as she drowns in the weight of Everett’s gaze, a second audience to this confession she desperately wishes would disappear. She forces the words out, spits them harder than she means — too thick with truth, still inadequate. “They can’t have her. She’s mine.”

It’s a horrible kind of protection, all too much and too late, not good for anything, but it’s hers all the same. 

She’s laying herself bare before him, flaying herself open on the slightest chance that he’ll take from it what she means — that he, too, falls under this claim, her own twisted breed of affection that drove the first knife into their friendship. He has to see it, the unspoken words written all over her face, in the uncertainty in her gaze. Everett’s always known she was selfish, hoarding those she deemed worthy close to her chest, since he’s held pride of place the longest. Then came Katarina, Rafaella, Ivan, Henry — Vivianne, once, fleetingly — Lucrezia and Mikael and Tiberius at arm’s length — finally, Catia, slipping her way in like a wraith. Certainly, a year ago she had not felt this for her youngest sister, but the year has been long and brutal. They’ve all changed, despite Grace’s protestations, approaching more of a middle ground than she ever thought possible.

Standing here before her, gaze inscrutable, smoke curling from his fingers, Everett seems a familiar fortress — walls too high to breach, stone facade pockmarked from her failed attempts. Tonight, she is no longer assailant but instead ragged bones, collapsed at the gate, still barred from the goings-on mere inches away. What must he think of her, this strange outburst? 

Everett tenses, a tight exhale caught in his diaphragm as Grace purposely puts her weight into his stomach in an effort to push herself up. Christ. He doesn’t know how she manages to snap his self-restraint the way she does, in a way no one else really could save for Faron Vasiliev. She knows his weak spots, knows how to drive the knife where it hurts or pull him by the Achille’s heel. There’s a terrible, inexplicable familiarity in the thirty-two years they’ve known each other, stretching between them like shadows cast by a red, waning sun. It’s funny — he can’t remember the first time he met her, or the slow bloom of their friendship in those hazy childhood summers. 

Sometimes beginnings are like that: unexpected and subtle, until they’ve crept up on you before you even realize it.

Endings, too.

Grace tosses her glossy hair over her shoulder with a smile that’s all brutal confidence and blood-stained lips. Everett wonders when she got so comfortable in that new skin of hers. “I’ve had worse,” he remarks drily, carding a hand through his messy waves after he picks himself up off the floor. He fixes Grace with a long, scrutinizing look — the red lacing her arm, the marks that’ll turn to bruises the following morning, the awkward slant of her hips, likely because he’d slammed her against the kitchen floor two minutes prior. “You have, too. But it’ll do, unless Don Montague is looking for a medical report.”

His eyes scan over the porcelain shards scattered over the floor and the overturned console in the adjacent corridor. A brief, sour swoop flips his stomach, considering how meticulous Catia is about her home with all her aesthetic sensibilities and an interior decorator certification framed somewhere in her study room.

“I’m going to check on Catia and Brielle,” he announces, ducking out of the kitchen as Grace cleans her arm up. It takes five minutes, fifty reassurances, and quite a bit of pushing Catia’s fretful hands away from the bruise blooming on his jaw before he finally returns. Whatever energy he had after having to fight Grace has all but dissipated by then, a hollowed-out sense to the way he reaches under the curtains to slide open the window before he pulls a cigarette from his coat pocket.

Everett pinches it between his lips, flame flaring in his green eyes as he flicks his lighter on for a split second. “And you accused me of using this as an excuse to punch you.”

I’ve had worse, he says, and Grace is inclined to agree. It’s probably the least injuries she’s received in months, but it’s enough to get their point across. “The only medical report Don Montague’s ever getting on me is the coroner’s report once I’ve finally kicked it,” she replies idly, “and that won’t be for a good long while.” Her teeth are probably still bloodied when she grins at him, and she tries not to take it to heart when he quickly looks away.

Everett escapes to the living room, and Grace tries to tune out the conversation that he strikes up, Catia’s worried tones. She eyes the broken plate on the ground with a sigh. It is, technically, her mess, but she doesn’t know where Catia keeps a broom. She’s managed to get all the larger pieces off the floor and into the trash by the time he returns, standing awkwardly over the fragments she’d kicked into a haphazard pile as he opens the kitchen window. 

“Yes, well,” she says, falling into place beside him, “I don’t need an excuse to punch you. This just happened to be a convenient time.” She pilfers the lit cigarette from his lips, taking a quick drag to mark it as hers before he can take it back. It’s an easy action, almost instinct, born of years of shared smoke breaks after family meals, sharing cigarettes and lights back and forth until the taste of Everett’s preferred cigarettes were as familiar to her as her own. Grace exhales out the window, mindful of how Everett’s opened it for this express purpose, and allows herself to really look at him - the weary set of his shoulders, the bruise darkening his jaw. He looks older than when she last saw him, a tiredness etched into his bones that wasn’t there a few months before. Something settles uncomfortably in her chest, post-fight adrenaline curdling in her stomach, and she takes a harsh drag of her cigarette to push it away.

She wonders how it is that Grace isn’t dead yet. Wonders why the woman hasn’t been shot, loitering outside of established Capulet headquarters, or at least taken captive by an appropriately ambitious soldier or captain. Most of all she wonders how quickly people are forgotten; Grace or Goneril, enemy or ally, Montague or ex-Capulet.

Is this how soon Cosimo’s more recent legacy will be replaced as well? The terrible diluted with the good, diluted further into memory as his daughter rises in his place?

Privately, she hopes for it. It’s a good night for hope; riding on the tidal wave of her recent political success. And although victory is far from the only sentiment she feels, moreso gingerly mixed-in alongside feelings more bittersweet — The Underboss is feeling lighter in spirit than she has in a long time. All year, to be more accurate. Perhaps it’s that sentiment which keeps the far-more characteristic contempt at bay as she locks eyes with Grace Daly and tilts her head in acknowledgment.  

“Bold… Tell me, Daly — Does that boldness extend to buying me a drink?”

She might not have had celebration on her mind upon leaving Headquarters tonight, but finding a once-friend, twice-adversary in her path bearing praise tugs too much at Vivianne’s curiosity to be ignored. She’s too cautious to accept the Montague’s compliments at face value, or maybe it’s too cynical. But she’s not above testing the waters. And without Cosimo to have her head for it, there’s no one left in Capulet territory who’d dare stop her if she fancies a taste of the top shelf with an enemy tonight. A brief intermission, she reminds herself, wondering what it is that Grace is really doing here. “Dai, let’s see if I remember your favourite Capulet bar… If you’re lucky, maybe I’ll even convince them not to spit in your drink.”

There is something in Vivianne’s considering gaze that makes Grace feel as if she should be smote there on the spot, struck down by the assuredness that rolls off her in waves. She is a woman come fully into her power, following the logical path of destiny that she has fought tooth and nail for - and something in Grace hungers, a familiar flame that hollows her from the inside. Their paths have been so tightly wound to this point - what other conclusion is she to come to but the one that arrives now, stealing up upon her until this very moment: that this path of king-killing is a path she, too, should take, following Vivianne once more like a shadow follows its owner?

“More than one, I think,” she offers, as if the last time they saw each other Grace hadn’t contemplated the ease with which she could kill Vivianne. As if they were back in each other’s confidences at the end of it all, when Vivianne held herself at arm’s length only for propriety. She falls into step beside Vivianne with a laugh, hands still free of her pockets, still empty. “As if they wouldn’t spit in it anyway, were I still a Capulet.” She’s not one to shy away from a fight, an unfortunate feature that’s gotten her ejected from altogether too many bars in the city. “It’s almost custom, now. But maybe your illustrious presence will help me avoid it.”

Her feet find their way almost without her brain’s input, muscle memory of the streets of Capulet-controlled Verona still ingrained deep. She doubted she’d forget exactly how long it took to get from her apartment to the Cathedral, to the Phoenix and Turtle, as long as she lived. It was strange comfort that it was no longer unusual for her to make those trips, now that they had changed hands. Now that she had helped rip them away from those she once called friend.

“I’ll be honest, I didn’t think la principessa would break so easily with her father, but you always have been good at what you do. I’m half convinced you could get anyone to do what you wanted, if only they gave you the time.” I wont, the edge in her smile says, but you can try. 

Grace: I'm not stupid, Everett, and I'm not blind. But at that point, I didn't care. If I'd been given this order a year ago, I probably would have done it without blinking.

Grace: It wasn't about a promotion, it was about me. It - [ Her frustration chokes her. He's not going to understand, and she's too tired to try. ] It's just fucking pointless, now.

Grace: I don't want to argue with you. It's a good plan. Nothing else matters.

Everett: If you knew, why do that to her?

Everett: You don't get over that in a day. Not when you've known someone for thirty-two years. [ A beat. It's not about Catia anymore. ]

Everett: [ He sighs, the sound washing over the phone. ] Va bene. We'll talk logistics and set a date once I let Brielle know.