Chapter Four: Dinner with the Don
Elle would spend the first ten minutes of Saturday's dinner convinced the entire evening was going to end in either bloodshed or spontaneous combustion, and the following two hours slowly, disbelievingly realizing that her family might actually, somehow, manage not to ruin this — right up until the very last few minutes, when something far older than any of them decided to remind her that peace, in this particular house, was never something to be taken entirely for granted.
That was seven o'clock exactly. First, there was the doorbell.
Jasper stood on the front step in a button-down shirt that looked freshly ironed, clutching a bouquet of grocery store flowers with the white-knuckled grip of a man facing a firing squad, and Elle felt an entirely unhelpful surge of affection at the sight of him trying so visibly, earnestly hard.
"You came," she said, opening the door wider.
"I said I would." Jasper glanced past her into the house's grand entryway, marble floors and a chandelier that had cost more than most people's cars, and swallowed visibly. "You undersold the house situation, by the way. This is not a real estate family's house. This is a real estate family's house's much wealthier, more intimidating cousin."
"Told you it was a lot."
"You said a lot. This is genuinely a different scale of a lot."
He handed her the flowers, ears going faintly pink, and Elle led him through the entryway toward the dining room, where the sound of at least four separate conversations, none of them quiet, suggested the family had already assembled in full, terrifying force.
The dining room, when they entered it, looked deceptively ordinary — a long table set with more silverware than any one meal reasonably required, candles flickering in tall brass holders, a spread of food that could have fed twice their number comfortably. It was the people seated around it who made the whole scene considerably less reassuring: Vincent at the head of the table, composed and watchful; Dante beside him, already wearing the particular expression of a man preparing to enjoy himself enormously at someone else's expense; Marco standing rather than sitting, arms crossed near the doorway like a sentry who hadn't quite agreed to the whole civilian-dinner-party premise; and no fewer than six other family members Elle hadn't specifically warned Jasper about, ranging from an elderly great-aunt with sharp, assessing eyes to Sofia, who immediately abandoned her seat to inspect the newcomer with the frank, unfiltered curiosity only an eight-year-old could manage.
"Are you Elle's boyfriend?" Sofia asked, before anyone had even finished with introductions.
"Sofia." Elle's voice came out strangled.
"What? It's a valid question." Sofia planted her hands on her hips, entirely unbothered by the mounting adult tension around her. "Uncle Dante has a whole folder. I saw it. It had a picture and everything."
"The folder is retired," Elle said again, with as much finality as she could muster, though the damage was clearly already done, several family members trading amused glances down the length of the table.
"I'm Jasper," Jasper said, crouching slightly to address the question at Sofia's actual eye level, apparently deciding that meeting the interrogation head-on was the least terrifying available strategy. "And I'm not sure yet. We're still figuring that part out."
He's handling this better than I am. Elle watched, with a mixture of horror and reluctant admiration, as Jasper straightened and extended a hand toward Vincent with only a barely visible tremor, greeting the most feared man in the entire city with the same polite composure he'd probably use on any friend's father.
"Mr. Castellano. Thank you for having me."
Vincent studied the offered hand for a long moment before accepting it, his grip, Elle knew from long experience, considerably firmer than strictly necessary. "Jasper Reed. I understand you play soccer."
"I did, freshman year. I wasn't very good at it."
"The file said you were adequate."
"There's a file?" Jasper's composure cracked slightly, glancing toward Elle with wide, alarmed eyes.
"There was a file," Elle said quickly, shooting Dante a look sharp enough to cut glass. "It's been retired. Permanently."
"Retired," Dante echoed, settling back into his chair with visible amusement, "is a strong word for 'currently sitting in my desk drawer.'"
Dinner proceeded from there with the particular, precarious energy of a controlled demolition, every course arriving alongside at least one question pointed enough to make Elle's stomach clench with secondhand nerves. Marco, breaking his silent sentry duty only twice, asked Jasper with flat, unreadable directness what his intentions were, a question so bluntly old-fashioned that Jasper actually laughed before catching himself and answering seriously — I like her. I think she's funny and weird in a good way and genuinely the most interesting person at that whole school. That's the entire intention, I promise, nothing more complicated than that. The great-aunt, whose name Elle still wasn't entirely certain of after sixteen years, asked pointed questions about his family's finances that made Elle want to sink directly through the floor, though Jasper answered those too, calm and unbothered, describing his parents' hardware store with clear, unembarrassed pride.
"Five employees," he added, when the great-aunt pressed further, apparently satisfied rather than offended by her directness. "My dad's hoping to open a second location next year, if the numbers work out. It's not glamorous, but it's honest work, and he genuinely loves it, which I think counts for a lot."
The great-aunt studied him a moment longer, something in her sharp, assessing expression finally softening by some small but noticeable degree. "Honest work," she repeated, nodding slowly, as though he'd passed some private test Elle hadn't even known was being administered. "There is not enough of that these days."
It was Dante who finally, mercifully, redirected the conversation somewhere gentler, asking Jasper about the terrible bird doodles Elle had apparently mentioned once in passing, and watching, with visible delight, as Jasper immediately produced a small sketchbook from his jacket pocket to show off increasingly elaborate drawings of increasingly implausible birds, several members of the family leaning in with genuine, surprised interest.
"This one has seventeen feathers on each wing," Sofia observed with great seriousness, studying a particularly ambitious sketch of what Jasper had labeled, optimistically, a Majestic Trash Pigeon. "That's a lot of feathers to count."
"I have a lot of free time during boring lectures," Jasper admitted. "Mr. Halloran's mitochondria unit alone probably accounts for forty birds."
Elle watched her family — her strange, dangerous, deeply protective family — slowly, gradually thaw around the boy sitting at their table, and felt something in her own chest ease along with them, the tight, anxious knot she'd been carrying since the doorbell rang finally starting to loosen.
It was near the end of the meal, dessert plates mostly cleared, conversation drifted into something easier and considerably less interrogative, that Elle noticed the candles.
All six of them, set in their tall brass holders down the center of the table, had begun flickering in perfect, eerie unison, their flames bending sideways as though caught in a wind that didn't exist anywhere else in the closed, still room. Elle felt it before she consciously registered the visual — a cold, unfamiliar prickle along her arms, the particular sensation her magic made when something ancient and half-forgotten brushed too close to the surface of the world.
She wasn't the only one who noticed. Vincent's entire posture changed in an instant, shoulders squaring, the easy warmth of moments before vanishing so completely it was as though it had never existed at all. Dante's hand had gone, with the swift, practiced speed of long habit, toward something Elle couldn't quite see beneath the table's edge. Even Marco, still positioned near the doorway, had gone rigid and alert, eyes scanning the room with sudden, sharp focus.
The great-aunt, Elle noticed, had gone very still as well, her sharp eyes fixed not on the candles themselves but on Elle, watching her with an expression that looked almost like recognition, like she'd seen this particular kind of cold precede something once before, a long time ago, and had never quite forgotten the shape of it.
"Papa?" Elle's voice came out smaller than she intended.
"It's nothing," Vincent said, too quickly, too smoothly, the exact tone he used when he very much wanted something to be nothing and was not remotely certain that it was. "A draft. The old windows in this house."
The candles stopped flickering as abruptly as they'd started, flames settling back into ordinary, upright stillness, and the room's tension, though not fully gone, eased enough that conversation slowly, cautiously resumed around them. Jasper, Elle noticed with a fresh spike of anxiety, was watching the whole exchange with open, unmistakable curiosity, the particular attentive expression of someone who noticed things — who had told her, on their very first day, that he noticed things — filing this one carefully away alongside whatever else he'd already quietly observed about her strange, guarded family.
"Everything okay?" he asked quietly, leaning slightly toward her while the rest of the table's attention drifted elsewhere.
"Old house. Old windows. Like Papa said." Elle forced a smile, hoping it looked more natural than it felt. "This place is basically held together with charm and stubbornness at this point."
Jasper didn't look entirely convinced, but he let it go, mercifully, turning his attention back to a question Dante was asking about college plans, and Elle spent the rest of the meal with her own attention split uneasily between the ordinary warmth of watching her family genuinely enjoy this boy's company and the cold, unshakable certainty that whatever had just moved through that room, her father's careful dismissal notwithstanding, had been anything but a draft.
She walked Jasper out afterward, both of them lingering on the front step in the cool evening air while, inside, she could hear the muffled sound of her family already dissecting the entire evening with the kind of enthusiasm reserved for people who took gossip very seriously.
"That went better than I expected," Jasper said, hands shoved in his pockets, smiling despite everything, breath fogging faintly in the cool evening air. "Terrifying. But better than expected."
"You survived Uncle Marco's intention interrogation. That's basically a family legend in the making."
"Worth it." He held her gaze a moment longer than strictly necessary, something warm and a little nervous passing between them in the porch light. "I meant what I said in there, by the way. About why I like you."
"I know." Elle felt her own smile turn soft and unguarded despite the cold knot still sitting low in her stomach from the candles. "Thank you. For coming. For not running away screaming the second Uncle Marco started with the questions."
"Takes more than an intimidating uncle to scare me off." Jasper grinned, backing slowly toward the sidewalk where his mom's car waited. "See you Monday, Elle Castellano."
She watched him go, warmth and unease tangled together in her chest in equal measure, and it was only once his car had fully disappeared around the corner that she turned back toward the house and found her father waiting silently in the doorway, his expression unreadable in the porch's dim light.
"Papa. What actually happened with the candles?"
Vincent was quiet for a long moment, weighing something Elle couldn't quite read behind his careful, guarded eyes.
"We should speak inside," he said finally. "There is something about the curse I have not yet told you, and I believe, given tonight, that the time for waiting has run out."
Elle followed him back into the house, the warmth of the evening's earlier, easier laughter already feeling like something that had happened to a different family entirely, her mind circling anxiously back to the candles, to the great-aunt's strange, recognizing stare, to the specific, unmistakable cold that had brushed against her magic like something old finally beginning to stir awake after a very long, patient sleep.