Chapter 29: Five Terms

I did not call.

I read his note four times, and then I put on my coat and drove myself to the harbor.

A man who decides alone had asked me to call, and I wanted to see what he looked like when I didn't.

The hotel was old, with a brass lamp over the door.

The clerk saw my face and said nothing at all.

Room 12 was on the second floor, at the end of the corridor.

I knocked once.

Gaspare opened the door in his shirtsleeves, with no jacket and no gun.

He looked at me, and his hand tightened on the frame.

"You said I would have to call," I said.

"I did."

"I'm not calling. I'm here."

"Then come in."

"Not yet."

He stood aside anyway, and I stayed in the corridor.

"I have terms," I said.

"Say them."

"One. You tell me before you decide. Not after, not in a note, not in a safe. Before."

"Yes."

"Two. When you want me to stay, you ask. You say it as a question, and I get to answer it."

"Yes."

"Three. Nobody walks into a room and sells me again. Not for peace, not for a Family, not for my own good."

"Never."

"Four. No goodbyes. That one I kept, and so will you."

"No goodbyes," he said. "Not to a coffin. Not to you."

"Five." I stopped, because it was the one I had not planned.

"Five," he said.

"I get a say in the bed, too. You've waited at the edge of every room for me since the chair. I'm tired of being waited for."

His breath went out of him.

"Then what do you want?"

"You, on your knees, and you stay there until I say."

He looked at me for one long moment.

Then he went down, there in the doorway, on both knees on the worn carpet, with his hands open on his thighs.

I stepped inside and shut the door.

"Good," I said.

He lifted his head.

His grey eyes were the ones that had looked at me across the banquet hall.

"Take off your shirt."

He undid the buttons one at a time and let it drop.

There was an old scar on his ribs, and I put my hand flat on it.

His skin was hot.

"Hands behind you."

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