1
Zoe
It’s my engagement party tonight.
I’ve never been less excited to celebrate something.
My stepmother Daniela sends her team of specialists to ensure that I’m in peak form, so Rocco and his family can be sure they’re getting their money’s worth.
They come into my bedroom at three o’clock in the afternoon and spend the next four hours scrubbing, exfoliating, waxing, moisturizing, painting, and primping every square inch of my body.
The fighting starts immediately when I demand to know why they’re waxing my bikini line.
“It’s an engagement party,” I tell Daniela. “Not the wedding night. I don’t expect anyone to be checking under my skirt.”
I glare at my stepmother, who is already partway through her own exhausting preparations for the night ahead. She has a mud mask on her face and her hair up in rollers the size of soup cans. Far from looking ridiculous, it only makes her appear all the more imperious as the curlers encircle her head like a crown, and the mask obscures the few hints of emotion Daniela ever betrays. I can’t tell if Daniela actually lacks all human feeling or if she’s just very good at hiding it.
Daniela is only ten years older than me.
I was nine when my mother died, nine-and-a-half when my father remarried.
He used my mother up like an old sponge, putting her through fourteen pregnancies, ten miscarriages, two stillbirths, and the shameful arrival of me and my sister Catalina, none of which produced a male heir.
That last stillbirth was the death of her. She hemorrhaged on the gurney. The darkest part of me suspects that my father held back the doctor, allowing the life to drain out of my mother as punishment for the fact that even that final breathless baby was a girl.
My father went into a rage.
There was no comfort for Catalina and me, no time to mourn our mother. Instead he ordered flower girl dresses.
He was already making arrangements to marry Daniela, the youngest daughter of rival Galician clan chief. Her sisters had produced two sons each for their husbands, proof in my father’s eyes that Daniela would likewise be fertile and useful.
Daniela fell pregnant on the honeymoon, but an anatomy scan showed that the fetus was female yet again. My father forced her to abort it.
I only know this because I heard him shouting at her for hours, berating her into doing it. She was sick for several weeks after, pale and unable to walk from room to room without hunching over.
I don’t know how many more times she was coerced into repeating that process.
Eventually, my father stopped trusting in fate and turned to science.
They saw fertility specialists. Daniela went through several rounds of IVF, harvesting her eggs for the sole purpose of selecting the gender ahead of time.
None of these attempts were successful. Daniela bore no babies at all.
I’d feel bad for her. But the sympathy wouldn’t be returned.
Daniela hates me. She hates my sister, too.
Her loyalty is all to my father, no matter how he abuses her. She’s his constant spy, acting as jailor to Catalina and me and helping carry out all my father’s most insidious plans for us.
Like this engagement.
It was Daniela who brokered the deal with Rocco Prince and his family. She told Rocco’s mother that I was intelligent, studious, obedient, submissive. And of course, beautiful.
When I was only twelve years old, she sent the Princes photographs of me laying by the pool in my swimsuit.
The Princes’ first visit soon followed. Rocco was thirteen—just a year older than me—but I could already tell there was something very wrong with him.
He came out to the garden where I was sitting on a bench under the orange trees, reading The Witch of Blackbird Pond. I stood up when I saw him approach, smoothing down the white muslin skirt of the summer dress Daniela had selected for me.
Back then, I was innocent enough that I still had fantasies of a better life. I had seen movies like Sleeping Beauty and The Swan Princess where the prince and princess were betrothed by their parents, but their love was genuine.
So when I heard that Rocco was coming to see me, I imagined he might be handsome and sweet, and maybe we would write letters to each other like pen pals.
When he approached me in the garden, I was pleased to see that he was tall and dark-haired, slim and pale with the look of an artist.
“Hello,” I said. “I’m Zoe.”
He gave me an appraising look, not answering at first. Then he said, “Why are you reading?”
I thought it a strange question. Not, “What are you reading?” but “Why are you reading?”
“Are you trying to impress me?” he said.
I shook my head, confused and wrong-footed.
“I always read on Saturdays,” I said. “When there’s no school.”
I didn’t tell him there was nothing else to do at my house—Cat and I weren’t permitted to watch TV or play video games.
He picked my novel up off the bench, examined the cover, and contemptuously tossed it down again, losing my place. I was annoyed but tried not to show it. After all, he was my guest, and I was already aware that our futures were meant to entwine.
“You’re pretty,” he said, dispassionately, looking me over again. “Too tall, though.”
If that meant he wouldn’t want to marry me, I was already starting to think that might be a good thing.
“You live in Hamburg?” I asked, trying to hide my growing dislike.
“Yes,” Rocco said, with a toss of his dark hair that might have been pride or disdain—I couldn’t yet tell. “Have you ever been there?”
“No,” I said.
“I didn’t think so.”
I noticed little black flecks in the blue of his eyes, like someone had spattered his irises with ink.
“What’s that noise?” Rocco demanded.
A parrot was screeching in the orange tree, swooping low over our heads, and then returning to its branch.
“It’s annoyed because it has a nest full of babies up there,” I said. “It wants us to leave.”
Rocco reached inside his jacket and took out a pellet gun. It was small, only the size of a pistol. I assumed it was a toy gun, and I thought it was childish of him to carry it around.
He pointed it up at the small green parrot, following its flight path in his sights. I thought he was play-acting, trying to impress me. Then he squeezed the trigger. I heard a sharp puff of air. The parrot went silent, cut off mid-cry, dropping like a stone into the flowerbed.
I cried out and ran over to it.
I picked the parrot up out of the earth, seeing the small dark hole in its breast.
“Why did you do that?” I shrieked.
I was thinking of its babies up in the nest. Now that the parrot wasn’t squawking anymore, I could hear their faint cheeps.
Rocco stood next to me, looking down at the moss-colored bird. It looked pathetic in my hands, its wings folded and dusty.
“The chicks will wait and wait,” he said. “Then eventually they’ll starve.”
His voice was flat and expressionless.
I looked in his face. I saw no guilt or pity there. Just blankness.
Except for the tiny upward curl of his lips.
Those little black specks on his irises reminded me of mold. Like there was something rancid in him, rotting him away from the inside.