“Yes. That’s it, exactly.” He sounded dryly amused. “By the way, Don Corleone asked me to tell you that he expects to see you in his office tomorrow at ten o’clock sharp.” His voice changed, abruptly serious. “Please don’t shout at him. I think it’s another test, but I’m not sure what kind—whichever, it could be very dangerous. I don’t want to see you get hurt, Miriam. Or Helge, as he’ll call you. But you’re Miriam to me. Listen, for your own good, whatever he says, don’t refuse a direct order. He is much more dangerous than he looks, and if he thinks you’ll bite him, he may put family loyalty aside, because his real loyalty is to the Clan as a whole. You’re a close family member, but the Clan, by the law of families, comes first. Just sit tight and remember that you’ve got more leverage than you realize. He will want you to make a secure alliance, both to keep you safe—for the memory of his stepsister—and to shore up his own position. Failing that, he’ll be able to pretend to ignore you as long as you don’t disobey a direct order. Do you hear what I’m saying?”

“Yes.” Her heart pounded. “So it’s going to happen.”

“What?”

“Fucking Cinderella. Never mind. Roland, I am not stupid. I need some time to myself to think, that’s all. I’m angry with you in the abstract, not the particular. I don’t like being made to jump through hoops. I hear what you’re saying. Do you hear me?”

“Yes.” A pause. “I think I do. I’m angry too.”

“Oh, really?” she asked, half-sarcastically.

“Yes.” This time, a longer pause. “I like your sense of humor, but it’s going to get you into deep trouble if you don’t keep it under control. There are people here who will respond to sarcasm with a garotte. Trying to change the way the Clan works from the inside is hard.”

“Good-bye.” She hung up hastily and stood next to the phone for a long minute, heart thudding at her ribs, head throbbing in time to it. The smell of leather car seats was strong in her nose, the echo of his smile over lunch fixed in her mind’s eye. Duke’s orders, she thought. Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?

She managed to pull herself away from the telephone and walked back into her bedroom, to the dresser with the tiny Picturebook computer perched next to the stack of disks and the external DVD-ROM drive. She had software to install. She riffled through disks containing relief maps of North America, an electronic pharmacopoeia, and a multimedia history of the Medici families. She put them down next to the encyclopedia of medieval history and other textbooks that had seemed relevant.