My Father Sold Me to His Oldest Enemy to Play House, and the Old Man Bought the Only Witness Against Him novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: The Forty-First Time
Aris's POV. She sets three terms at his table, Costa smiles, Eleni gives her a room, and Aris watches the christening video again; at five she lays her pistol on his dock and says not to ask her to use it.
Aris's POV
She set her terms at my supper table, in front of my nephew and my wife's mother, without taking off her coat.
"Three things," Thalia Mavrakis said.
I put down my fork.
"I keep the room you give me, and the lock goes on the inside," she said.
"Nobody introduces me as your wife until I say so," she said. "And I don't work for this house."
My nephew Costa smiled into his wine.
He sat where he always sits, in the chair with its back to the wall.
He turned the stem of his glass a quarter turn.
"She's direct," Costa said. "I like that in a Mavrakis."
"Costa," I said.
"Sorry, Uncle."
"The lock goes on the inside," I said to her. "The rest is yours to say or not say. Eat."
She looked at the food.
Then she looked at Eleni, who had cooked it.
Eleni is seventy-eight and has run my kitchen for forty years.
She put a plate in front of the girl herself.
"Eat, koritsi mou," Eleni said. "Nobody here will poison you. I would not waste a good lamb."
The girl ate.
She ate fast.
Her eyes went to the door every time it moved.
She sat with her back to the window and the whole room in front of her.
She had chosen the seat before she sat down.
I had not told her where to sit.
Nobody had.
After supper Eleni took her up to the room over the kitchen, the one with the thick door and the iron bolt.
I went down to the boathouse alone.
I keep a tablet in the loft there, in a drawer under the chart table.
I took it out and I propped it on the table and I touched the screen.
The christening hall came up in grey and white from the camera over the font.
I had watched it forty times.
The church sent me the footage because I give money to the roof.
The camera over the font records every baptism for the families.
Nobody at the church had watched this one.
On the screen a man in a dark jacket stood at the font with a baby in a white gown.
He was thin and he had not slept.
I had not seen his face in a year.
He was my son Dimitri's diving partner.
He was the only other man in the water the day my son died.
The dock said he drowned too and the sea never gave him back.
He was alive.
He was standing at a font in a hall full of Mavrakis people, holding his sister's baby.
Then a girl stood up from the back table.
She wore a long black coat, and she walked straight down the aisle between the chairs.
She was Petros Mavrakis's closer.
She had a pistol in her hand, low against her leg.
She stopped at the font and she looked at the man.
She looked at the baby.
I watched her set the pistol down on the rim of the font, carefully.
She turned her face toward the back table, where her father sat.
She said a single word to him.
The sound on the camera was thin, but I had played that word forty times and I knew it.
"No."
The man with the baby walked out the side door.
Nobody stopped him.
The girl stood at the font with her hands empty.
Her father looked at her across the hall, and she did not look away from him.
Then she picked up the pistol, put it in her coat, and walked out the front doors.
I switched the tablet off.
That made forty-one.
Ten days after that hall, Petros Mavrakis sent me the contract.
I signed it the day it came.
I told my people only that the marriage would close the water.
I turned the tablet face down on the table, because I heard the boards on the pier.
It was only Costa, with a bottle.
"Go to bed, Uncle," he said, easily. "I'll lock up."
"I'll do it."
"You always do."
He left the bottle on the table and went back up the lawn.
I did not drink it.
At two in the morning I went up the back stairs and stood outside her door.
She was awake.
I heard a chair scrape and settle against the wood.
She had wedged it under the handle, behind the bolt she had already thrown.
I stood in the passage in the dark with my bad knee aching and I did not knock.
I sat on the top stair until the window went grey.
Then I went down to the dock, because it was what I did every morning.
She was already there.
She stood at the end of the pier in her mother's coat.
The river steamed around the pilings.
She did not turn when I came out.
She held something in her right hand, low against her leg.
It was a black pistol.
She had held it just that way on the tablet.
She crouched and laid it on the plank between us, and slid it across with two fingers until it touched my boot.
"That's the one from the font," Thalia said. "The serial is on the frame. It's yours to keep."
She straightened.
Her face was empty and tired, and she met my eyes the way her father's men never could.
"Don't ask me to use it," she said.
← Chapter 1 · All chapters · Chapter 3 →
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend