The terrace lights were off. I preferred it that way at night—the villa dark enough that the sea below was just a suggestion of movement, silver under a thin moon, and no one from the water road could see me standing there.

Behind me, ice shifted in a glass. Salvatore Greco had been with the family since before I could walk, and he drank the way he did everything else—slowly, deliberately, watching.

"You haven't touched your wine," Salvatore said.

"I don't feel like celebrating yet."

"Tomorrow you'll have a wife. That's not worth a glass?"

I didn't answer right away. I was looking at the photograph again—I'd been looking at it on and off for three weeks, since it arrived in a plain envelope with no return address, just her name written on the back in careful, foreign handwriting. Elena. A woman built for oil paintings, not conversation. Pearls. A mouth that gave nothing away.

"You don't trust the arrangement," Salvatore said. It wasn't a question.

"I don't trust anything I haven't chosen myself." I set the photograph face-down on the stone railing. "My father chose this. A dying man's wish. That's supposed to make it sacred."

"It makes it necessary. There's a difference." Salvatore came to stand beside me, following my gaze out toward the black water. "The Castellano name still means something, even in Buenos Aires. It buys you legitimacy the money can't."

"And what does she buy? A husband she's never met, in a country she's never seen, surrounded by men who'll put a knife in her the moment she becomes inconvenient." My voice was flat, unbothered—the voice of a man who had made peace with what his family was a long time ago. "I wonder if anyone asked her what she wanted."

"Since when do you care what a bride wants?"

I almost smiled. Almost. "I don't. I care what she knows. A woman who understands nothing is dangerous—she becomes something other people can use." I picked the photograph back up, studied the calm, unreadable face one more time. "A woman like this—this composure—it isn't nerves. It's practice. She's been taught her whole life not to let anyone see what she's thinking."

"You've decided all that from a photograph."

"I've decided all that from every woman I've ever met who was raised the way she was raised." I tucked the photograph into my breast pocket, over my heart, the way another man might carry a rosary. "Tomorrow I'll know if I'm right."

Salvatore studied me for a moment—the stillness in me, the careful control that had kept me alive through wars that killed better men. "And if you're wrong?"

I looked out at the dark water, toward the direction the boat would come from at dawn.

"Then I'll have married a stranger wearing a stranger's face," I said quietly. "It wouldn't be the first lie I've lived with."

I didn't know yet how right I was—or how wrong.