“You stayed,” he said. He sounded less distant today, but no less flat. “I love you well for it, but if you’re found in my company here, you’ll be named as sodomites for certain. I am a pestilent friend; I poison all I touch. I beg you, go, and don’t return. Once I am safely married and lashed to the family plow, I can see you again. Not until then.”

“Mercutio—” Romeo looked at him with real worry on his earnest, handsome face. “You spoke of daggers as friends last night. Say you do not mean it, for the love we bear you.”

“A dagger is the only friend I cannot corrupt. Even my blood cannot defile good steel.” But Mercutio carefully shook his head, which must have hurt. “Fear not; I will not give him satisfaction in seeing me safely buried. No, I will gadfly him a while longer, the wretched man who frowns on perversion while he capers at murder. I will bring down the guilty; see if I do not. All the guilty, even should I pull down the temple on my head, like Samson.”

I wanted to be glad for him, to wish him success in that, but I was all too aware that the temple that he would be pulling down would be the palace of the Montagues. My sister and my grandmother had set this tragedy in motion, and the coming waves were sure to wash us to far distant shores.

It might be up to me to be sure those waves did not drown us all.

    
FROM THE DIARY OF MERCUTIO, HIDDEN BY HIS HAND

In only a week’s time, how quickly Tomasso has disappeared from the world. His body has not yet completed a feast for the worms, and yet no one remembers him. I am presentable enough to dine in the hall now. My father ignores me; he will keep his silence toward me to his dying day; I know that. No one remarks on my face, or my newly crooked nose. No one asks whether I am well. I am a ghost at the table, as dead to them as the boy they helped murder.

None of them knows his name.

None of them cares.

Damn all of them to hell.

•   •   •

It has been almost a month. The bruises are gone from my face, and the mirror shows me a new man—a stranger, with shadows in my eyes and a cruel tilt to my mouth. My father took the heart from me, and what remains is a cavern of roaring blood, and no pity left.