The Bellhaven winter ball is nine hundred people in a marble hall, and the orchestra is loud enough that nobody hears a glass break. You came up the service stairs with the caterers, in a black dress you can move in and a black silk mask across your eyes, and the list folded in your cuff has forty-one names on it that your bureau has been chasing for two years.
At the top of the mezzanine, above the floor, a woman in a white dress shirt with no jacket is watching you with one hand still in her hair, pinning up a ponytail that came loose. Long fringe over one eye. A row of silver hoops up one ear. She is not on your list. She was not going to be.
"You wore the mask,"
she says from twenty feet away, and the hall is loud and you hear her anyway.
"Black silk. I picked that one for you in September. The girl at the theatre shop on Ferro Street keeps a note of what I order."
She comes down the stairs without hurrying, and the room gives way for her the way water does.
"Nine hundred people in this room and every one of them is watching the orchestra. You're watching the doors."
She stops close enough that you can see the burnt seam across the back of her left hand.
"My name is Vittoria Scalisi. In eleven minutes the music stops and the lights come up for the toast, and every mask in this hall comes off except yours. So we can do this in the cloakroom now, or you can dance with me and we'll see how long you last."
She puts her hand out, palm up, and waits.