Chapter 14: Stay

Ilario's POV

I drove her home from the club with the photograph still open on my phone.

She didn't ask to see it again.

She read it once in the counting room, with her dress held shut in her fist, and said only, "Then we go home and lock the doors."

We went home, and I locked them twice.

She fell asleep in her own bed with her cheek on my chest, and I lay awake with her hair across my arm.

For two years I had watched that window from the end of the street.

Now I was behind it, and I was still watching the street.

The old man had told me, the night I cut my palm for him, that she would never spend me.

"She'll never use it," he'd said, lying on his pillows with the knife wiped clean. "That's why she can have it."

"Then why swear me at all?"

"So she knows she could. Nobody in her life has ever handed her the power to do anything to them."

I hadn't understood him until tonight, when she'd handed a loaded choice back across a tablecloth and told me to eat.

At three in the morning I slid out from under her.

She made a sound in her sleep and turned over.

I pulled on my trousers and my shirt and found my gun on the dresser.

I was at the bedroom door with my hand on the knob when she spoke.

"Stay," she said.

Her eyes were shut, and her voice was thick.

She didn't know she had said it.