Pier Nine had been built for fish and abandoned for cargo, and it showed.

Sienna came down to the water on Thursday evening with the sun two hands above the horizon and the whole of Marenna Bay burning gold around her. The old boards groaned under her boots. Gulls turned in the wind. At the far end of the pier, where the planks gave out and the sea began, a rusted bollard stood like a sentry, and beside it, on the rail, with his back to her and his sleeves rolled to the elbow, a man was watching the light go.

She had known he would be early. She had known, with the instinct of someone who had already died once in his company, that he would be exactly where he said he would be, with no fuss and no excuses. Yet the sight of him stopped her where she stood, ten paces down the pier, with her heart going against her ribs like a fist on a door.

She made herself look at him the way she would have looked at a specimen.

He was taller than she remembered, or perhaps she had remembered him from the floor. Dark hair pushed back from his forehead, a few strands already loose in the sea wind. No jacket, only a white shirt open at the collar and a waistcoat the color of slate. His hands rested on the rail, the right one wearing a heavy gold signet ring that caught the last of the sun. He stood the way some men stand who have never in their lives had to hurry: weight easy on both feet, shoulders loose, utterly present. There was nothing in his posture to suggest a man waiting for a woman who had told him to come alone.

Nothing, except his hands. His knuckles were pale on the rail.

Fifty yards back at the pier's landward end, a black car sat with its engine off, and beside it leaned a very large man in a dark coat, arms folded, looking in every direction but hers. Marco, she presumed. The polite one. The one who wrote things down in a little notebook, as civil as a priest.

She had not asked him to stay back. Matteo, apparently, had made that decision all on his own.

She thought of turning around. The thought lasted exactly as long as it takes a wave to break. Then she put her hand in her coat pocket, found the cool cylinder of the test strips, and walked forward.

He heard her when she was five paces off. He did not startle. He straightened, slowly, as one would in front of a skittish animal, and turned, and for the first time in this life, Sienna looked into the face of Matteo Bellandi.

It struck her as a physical thing, a quick hard blow just under the ribs. Because it was the same face. Every line of it, the straight dark brows, the stubborn jaw, the mouth that looked as if it had learned not to smile and had not entirely forgotten how. But it was also not the face she had last seen. That one had been gray with poison and fear, stripped of everything. This one had been put together carefully, piece by piece, the way you dress for a funeral.

His eyes were very dark, and they went over her once, quickly, from her braid to her boots, as though he were counting. As though he were checking, with an anxiety he could not quite hide, that every part of her was still there.

Then they came to rest on her face, and he let out a breath so quiet she almost missed it, and said, "Miss Hale."

His voice was low and even. It was the voice of the ballroom, the voice of the man who had stopped an orchestra by crossing a floor. But there was something at the bottom of it she recognized and could not place, a note, a thread, the way a familiar song sounds different when you hear it from the next room.

"Mr. Bellandi." She was proud that her own voice held. "Thank you for coming."

"You asked." He said it as if that settled it.

A gull shrieked overhead and wheeled away. The pier moved gently under them with the swell. Neither of them spoke for several seconds, and in that silence Sienna understood two things at once. The first was that she had no idea how to begin. The second was that he did not either, and that he was good enough at hiding it that almost no one alive would have noticed.

On the rail beside him stood two paper cups with lids and steam curling from the sip holes. He picked one up and held it out.

"Coffee," he said. "I wasn't sure what you drank. I guessed."

She did not take it.

She did not mean to be rude. Her hand simply stayed in her pocket, closed around the strips, and the old, cold animal in her spine looked at that cup and said no. She had learned, in the last twelve hours of her second life, exactly what she was willing to put in her mouth, and she did not take it back for any man's courtesy, however sincere.

Matteo looked at her hand in her pocket. He looked at the cup. Then, instead of withdrawing it, or taking offense, or saying anything at all about suspicion, a small, odd, rueful smile touched one corner of his mouth.

"You'd rather test it first," he said.

The pier tilted.

Not literally. It was a sound old structure, and the swell was small. But something in Sienna dropped, as if she had stepped onto a stair that was not there. She stared at him. The coffee steamed. The sun gilded the side of his face.

It was not an accusation. It was said gently, almost fondly, like something he had said many times and been permitted to say. And it was, word for word, the thing she would have said herself.

"How," she said slowly, "do you know that?"

He did not hesitate, and that, in itself, was a kind of answer. His expression did not change. He lowered the cup an inch.

"Your father is proud of you," he said. "Marco spent twenty minutes at the shop last week and heard about nothing else. His daughter the toxicologist, who tests her tea. Who can tell you what's in a glass before you've finished the sentence." The smile deepened, faint and wry. "Marco reported it to me with great seriousness. He thought it was an excellent quality in a person."

It was a good answer. It was a smooth, plausible, perfectly shaped answer, and Sienna had spent six years learning to distrust anything that came out so neatly. It fitted her father to the life. It explained everything. It explained it a little too well.

She let it sit.

"It's a habit," she said at last, evenly. "I'm not insulting you."

"I know."

"I'd test it whoever handed it to me."

"I know that too." His gaze did not leave her face. "Please. Go ahead."

It took her a moment to realize he meant it. He was holding out the cup, lid already off, steam rising, as calmly as if he were offering her a chair. She stared at him. Then she drew a strip from her roll, dipped it, and held it up in the red light of the sinking sun.

Clean.

She tested the second cup as well, because it would have been foolish not to, and it was clean also. She did not apologize. When she looked up, he was watching her with an expression she could not read, something very quiet and very bright, as though she had done something wonderful and he had not expected to live to see it.

He handed her the cup. Their fingers did not touch. She was almost sure he arranged it so.

The coffee was black and very hot, with a faint edge of bitterness she liked. She drank, and watched the harbor, and found, to her annoyance, that her shoulders had come down an inch from her ears.

"You asked to meet," Matteo said. "Before you say what you came to say, there's something I should do. I should tell you plainly that you don't owe me a conversation. If this is about your father's account, you're free to walk away from it. It's not a debt you took on."

She lowered the cup. "That's a strange thing for a man to say who's holding the paper."

"Is it?"

"Last month a stranger told my father his debt had a buyer. This month a letter came with your crest on it." She held his gaze. "You'd think a man in your position would want me to feel I owed him a great deal."

Something flickered across his face, quick as a minnow under ice. "Names on paper interest me," he said. "Your father's account came across my desk. I read it. I wanted to understand what kind of man had signed it, and what kind of family he had left standing behind him." He paused. "It seemed to me that debt should be a chain between those who borrow and those who lend. It should not be a rope around a daughter's neck."

The wind turned. A strand of her hair slid out of its braid and blew across her mouth, and she brushed it aside without thinking. When her eyes lifted again, he had gone absolutely still, and he was looking at her hand, at the wisp of hair, at her cheek, with a hunger so naked and so swiftly hidden that she almost thought she had imagined it.

He took one step toward her. She felt it in her stomach: the bare shift of a man's weight, the narrowing of the distance, the loom of him blotting out part of the sun. Her breath stopped.

He stopped too. He stood very close, close enough that she could see the pulse in his throat and the fine tremor in the hand that held his cup. Close enough that if she had lifted her chin, there would have been almost nothing between them but a single inch of wind. And he did nothing. He did not touch her. He held himself so carefully that it seemed to cost him something, as though every instinct in his body were pulling in one direction and every ounce of his will were holding in the other.

She thought, with a dizzy sort of clarity: he is afraid of frightening me.

It was the most disorienting thing that had happened to her in two lives. Two weeks ago she would have said that she knew what Matteo Bellandi was, and what he wanted, and how to protect herself. Now a man who owned half the port stood a breath away from her, hands visibly unsteady, and was waiting for her permission to be near.

Seventy percent, she reminded herself fiercely. Seventy.

The number did not feel the way it had in the lab.

She stepped back first. She did it deliberately, one pace, and watched something in his face settle, something that might have been relief and might have been loss. He did not follow. He only inclined his head slightly, as if she had said a perfectly reasonable thing, and the distance reopened between them like a door he had been permitted to look through and was now being asked to leave.

"I'm sorry," he said quietly. "I didn't mean to crowd you."

"You didn't."

"I did. A little." The wry smile came back, faint and strained. "I'll do better."

Sienna looked out at the water so that she would not have to look at him. The sun had touched the horizon. The sea had turned from gold to the color of a bruise healing, purple and green and rose, and the cranes stood out against it like black cathedrals. It was extraordinarily beautiful. She hated that.

"Mr. Bellandi," she said.

"Matteo."

"Mr. Bellandi." She turned. "I'm going to say something that may sound ridiculous. I'd like you not to interrupt me until I've finished."

He inclined his head again, the same grave motion. "I'll listen."

She had rehearsed this on the tram. She had rehearsed it in the shower, over breakfast, in the mirror of the lab washroom, twenty different ways, in twenty different tones, and every version had sounded either like a plea or a threat. Now, standing on a rotting pier with the evening wind at her back, she discarded all of them.

"My father owes your family two hundred and forty thousand," she said. "He can't pay it. He'll never be able to pay it. In another month or two, someone will begin to make that very uncomfortable for him, and I won't let that happen. I think you know what I'm about to propose, because you're too clever not to. But I'd like to say it myself, in plain language, so that there are no misunderstandings later."

He waited. The wind pulled at his collar. Behind him, the last sliver of sun slid beneath the water.

"I want to talk about a marriage," Sienna said. "Mine. To you."

The words dropped into the evening and lay there.

She had expected shock. She had braced for a laugh, or a long, cold, assessing look, or the swift, smooth refusal of a man who had been offered a thing he did not want. She had even, in her darker moments on the tram, braced for something worse: the quiet satisfaction of a man whose plan had just fallen into place.

Matteo Bellandi did not look shocked. He did not look amused. He did not look triumphant.

He looked, for one unguarded second, as though somebody had set down a weight he had been carrying for a very long time. The tension went out of his shoulders in a rush, and his eyes closed, briefly, and opened again, and in them was something so raw and so unmistakably grateful that she nearly took a step back.

Then the mask came down, smooth and complete, and he was only a man with a good coat and an unreadable face, studying a proposition on a pier at sunset.

"Terms," he said. His voice was perfectly steady. "You'll have terms."

"Of course I'll have terms."

"I'd be disappointed if you didn't." Something that was almost warmth moved behind his eyes. "I'll want to read them."

"You haven't asked why." She heard her voice sharpen. "You haven't asked why a woman you've never met would walk up to you and propose. You haven't asked what I want from you, or what I'm afraid of, or what I'll do if you say no."

"No," he agreed.

"Why not?"

He was silent for a long moment. The first lamps were coming on along the harbor, tiny and yellow, one by one, like a slow handful of stars. The black car at the end of the pier had not moved. Marco had not so much as shifted his weight.

"Because," Matteo said at last, very gently, "you'll tell me when you're ready. And I'd rather hear it from you than guess."

It was not an answer. It was a deflection so graceful that she could almost have admired it. But she heard what was inside it, too: the plain refusal to ask her for anything she was not prepared to give. And she thought, with the part of her mind that never switched off, that a man who was planning her death would have asked a great many questions.

Or he would have known the answers already.

The thought was a cold finger down her back. She looked at him sharply, hunting for the crack, the slip, the tell. There was nothing. Only that steady dark gaze, patient as the sea.

"You're not surprised," she said.

"No."

"Why not?"

The smile that crossed his face then was small and strange, almost sad. "I've learned to take good fortune when it arrives," he said, "and not to examine it too closely, in case it changes its mind."

Good fortune.

She had just proposed to a man who held her father's life in a folder, and he called it good fortune.

Sienna drew a breath, held it, and let it out. The wind had grown cold. Across the water the lights of the far shore were coming on, thousands of them, a whole second city pricking out of the dusk. She could feel the pier shifting under her feet, the whole old structure rocking in the swell, and she thought of a night in a room at the top of a hill, and of a hand in hers, and of the single word shaped by pale lips.

Stay.

She did not know whether she was making the worst mistake of two lives. But she knew that the only way to learn the shape of the knife was to walk toward the hand that held it. And the hand in front of her, at this moment, was open, empty, and waiting.

"All right," she said. "Then I'd like to begin."

Matteo's eyes did not leave hers. Behind him, the last light bled out of the sky, and the lamps on the pier switched on, one after another, throwing his shadow long across the planks and laying it at her feet.

"When do you want to start?" he asked.