“Smooth your rough tongue, my son, I asked only out of love,” Montague said. Romeo attacked his game bird with such single-minded ferocity I could only think that he wanted to pull something apart with his bare hands, and dinner was the least dangerous choice he might have. “Well, then, that’s clear enough. My dear? Shall we retire and leave our children to their amusements?”

He stood, and Lady Capulet stood obediently to leave with him; it was her place to go, whether she was hungry or not, sated or not. I wondered whether she had always been so content with that lot, so biddable. Surely not. Surely once, she had been young and afire with her own potential. Even girls dreamed of what they might do, did they not? I had no idea what they dreamed about, but I did not think it was a lifetime of being ordered, of walking behind, or enduring whatever was allotted to them without complaint.

Some women created their own worlds, like my grandmother. Some, like my mother, were trapped like flies in amber by their choices and lives. I had never been sure which of those extremes described my aunt.

We finished the dinner, Romeo and I, in apparent good spirits, dissembling as if our lives depended on it, which might have been the case. I had left stolen goods at Mercutio’s apartments. If he was of a mood to turn on me, it would be a simple thing—he had seen us there by the wood; I knew it. He knew we had watched Tomasso die, and done nothing.

I could not imagine that he did not hate us.

Try as I might, we did not, as it happened, avoid Veronica in the end. She and the insipid younger cousin trailed us back from the dining hall—it seemed a deliberate strategy—and I heard part of a whisper with Mercutio’s name, and that shrill, muffled giggle, and it broke the fragile hold I had on my own fury.

I rounded on her.

My sister, concentrating on her gossip, did not see me until it was too late to dodge. I grabbed her by the back of the neck and dragged her squealing around the corner, into a darkened alcove, while Romeo forced the cousin along down to the hall with a firm arm over her shoulders. “Enough,” I told Veronica in a voice that ought to have made her grateful she still breathed. “If I hear you say his name again—”

“You’ll what?” She struck my hand away from her, color burning hot in her cheeks. “Hit me, as you did Romeo? Beat me, as Mercutio’s father did him? Do you imagine anyone will allow you to touch me? I am an asset. You—what are you? An extra Montague, of little value. They can’t even sell you for a dowry.”

“They hanged the boy today, while Mercutio was forced to watch,” I said, keeping my voice low and vicious and intimate between us. “Someone dropped a whisper in the wrong ears, and I know it was you, Veronica. I know.”