Blood and Vows.

Chapter 33 — The Man at the Door

The city fell against the windows in squares of gold and brake-light red. Sebastian’s apartment sat above the noise and pretended not to hear it. A decanter caught the light and returned it as a thin stripe on the wall. The chessboard from another night waited mid-argument, a white knight stranded in the center like pride that had gone too far to retreat.

Alex stood with her hand on the counter, steadying herself between breaths. The bandage under her shirt tugged when she moved, a reminder stitched in gauze. Even cleaned and in borrowed clothes, she still carried the cellar on her skin.

“You keep the temperature in here two degrees lower than comfort,” she said, because complaining kept the room from noticing she was tired.

“It discourages guests from staying,” Sebastian answered, loosening the top button of his shirt. “And makes scotch honest.”

“Or,” she said, “it’s because you like to watch people pretend they aren’t cold.”

“That too.”

She took the glass he offered and didn’t drink. The whiskey smelled like apology and something older. Across the room, Leila’s door stayed shut; Dr. Alvarez had ordered quiet with the force of a woman who expected to be obeyed.

“You going to tell me the plan,” Alex asked, “or do I have to read it off your cheekbones.”

He looked at her, amused despite himself. “You think my face keeps minutes?”

“It keeps secrets,” she said. “Badly.”

“Then read this one,” he said. “We go to dinner with a man who wants me leashed to his family and pretend to eat. I make promises about weather. I leave before dessert so he spends the night wondering whether he said yes or I did.”

“And in between,” she said, “we talk about gardenias.”

He lifted a brow.

“Martin,” she said. “Florist. Elena. White. Don’t worry, I’ll try not to bleed on the bouquet.”

“That would be considerate,” he said. He poured himself a finger of scotch and let it sit untouched. “You shouldn’t be on your feet.”

“You shouldn’t be in love with your enemies,” she said, too quickly.

He didn’t flinch. “I’m in love with leverage,” he said. “My enemies are rarely interesting enough to earn the other thing.”

She set the glass down. “And me?”

“Don’t audition for categories you don’t want to live in,” he said gently.

The silence that followed was not empty; it was crowded with things neither planned to say.

A soft vibration rolled across the air like a coin on glass. Martin’s text pinged once on Sebastian’s phone on the counter: He’s here. Elevator. Then a second message: He brought company. Two.

Sebastian slid the phone into his pocket. He didn’t change expression, but the room felt shorter. “Bedroom,” he said to Alex, low and quick. “Now.”

“Who—”

“Fernando.”

The name was a switch. Heat under her ribs turned to ice. “No.”

“He won’t search,” Sebastian said. “He’ll posture. But I will not risk posture becoming sport.” He took her elbow and for one heartbeat allowed himself the intimacy of pressure. “Go.”

She moved on the adrenaline of orders, crossing the floor with the careful speed of someone whose body is an argument. In his bedroom the lights were already dim. The closet doors were paneled and innocent. She slipped inside among tailored shirts and the smell of cedar and oranges—the same clean oil he used on his hands. The hangers clinked once like breaking teeth. She eased the door almost shut, leaving a sliver for air.

From the main room she heard the elevator door open, the short hiss of a latch, Martin’s voice pitched flat in greeting, and a second voice, bright, amused, a knife wrapped in velvet.

“Your concierge loves me,” Fernando announced.

“I pay him not to,” Sebastian said.

Alex pressed her back to the closet wall and forced her breath through her nose, slow. Through the c***k she could see a blade of the living room: a slice of rug, a sliver of the chessboard, a narrow view of Sebastian’s shoulder as he turned. She had spent hours imagining killing a man; hiding from him felt worse.

“Sit,” Sebastian said.

“No,” Fernando said, delighted. “I like to loom. It makes the furniture nervous.”

“Try to impress the furniture somewhere else,” Sebastian replied.

The door clicked shut. Shoes moved on the hardwood—the careless confidence of a man who chose posture as a weapon. The scuff stopped near the chess table. Alex could see the arc of Fernando’s hand as he picked up the stranded knight and made it caper between two fingers, a child with a toy he intended to break.

“You used to play this better,” he said.

“I still do,” Sebastian said. “I just no longer pretend every game ends on the board.”

A soft chuckle. “I brought you a story,” Fernando said, and the room turned attentive against Alex’s skin. “Two, actually. One for the part of you that enjoys theater, and one for the part that enjoys obedience.”

“Make it fast,” Sebastian said.

“First,” Fernando said, setting the knight down wrong on purpose. “Congratulations. You’re getting engaged.”

The air in the closet thinned. Alex’s stomach turned in on itself. She didn’t move.

Sebastian didn’t either. “To whom.”

Fernando widened his arms as if awarding a prize. “Elena Salmo. She has a profile a donor would sponsor and eyes like a girl who thinks money is a metaphor. Her father is prepared to be generous with the dowry.” He savored the word like sugar. “Generosity buys such lovely silence.”

There was a click from the counter: Sebastian setting his glass down harder than planned. “An arrangement,” he said.

“A marriage,” Fernando corrected happily. “A contract with a cake. You sign, we stop pretending two houses want different things. We celebrate Thursday. You wear a suit. Try to look like you like her.”

“And if I decline,” Sebastian asked.

Fernando looked wounded. “Why hurt the girl.”

A beat. Then Sebastian: “It’s pity you’re selling? I thought it would be fear.”

“I’m not selling,” Fernando said. “I’m informing. It’s sweet, how you think you still buy things.”

On the other side of the door Alex closed her eyes, steeling herself against the shape of the future the words tried to draw. She hadn’t come here for him. She hadn’t come here for this. But jealousy is a chemical, not a decision.

“Second story,” Fernando said, voice brightening. “A memory, because romance requires those.”

“Spare me,” Sebastian said.

“Impossible,” Fernando said. “I saw her today, you know. The little agent who can’t decide if she likes knives more than truth. I had almost forgotten the sound she makes when she tries not to ask for mercy.” He sighed like a satisfied cat. “I used to practice the sound with her every night when she pretended to be in love. Remember? Your little friend with the badge and the ring? She wore that ring like a promise and me like a habit.”

Alex’s breath stalled. In the c***k’s triangle of view, Sebastian’s hand tightened on the back of a chair; the knuckles went white.

“I don’t remember,” Sebastian said, and it would have been flippant if his voice had not turned to steel.

“Let me help,” Fernando said cheerfully, drifting closer to the bedroom as if scenting something delicious. “She used to arch like—”

“Careful,” Sebastian said.

Fernando smiled into the air. “Careful is boring. Want to hear how long she kept her cover? Weeks. She made future-plans in a voice that could have convinced God, and then she took off the dress and practiced not crying when I told her the kind of man I was. You should have seen her the first time I ordered—”

The sound Sebastian made wasn’t loud. It was the absence of patience, a chord cut mid-string. “Stop.”

Fernando laughed. “Or what? Will you break a glass? Throw a bishop? Give me a speech about respect?” He looked past Sebastian toward the bedroom hallway with a predator’s idle curiosity. “Where’s your shadow, by the way? The tall knife with the bad temper. I brought her a new set of fingers, but the delivery guy got confused.”

“Leila is sleeping,” Sebastian said, voice level with effort. “And if you have finished confusing information with entertainment—”

“Not yet,” Fernando said. He turned fully toward the bedroom hall. The angle gave Alex a sliver of his face—jawline lifted, eyes bright with that childlike cruelty she had seen in too many men who never learned the cost of consequence. “Tell me something,” he said, lighter. “The girl—your girl—does she know about the wedding? Or are you going to let her find out with everyone else. I’m torn. Surprise can be so festive.”

Sebastian stepped between him and the hall, not dramatic, just there. The move said ten things. The most important was No further.

“Get to your point,” he said.

“My point is a ring,” Fernando said. “On Elena’s hand. On your finger. On the papers that make you polite. And my consolation prize: a front-row seat.” He tilted his head. “And maybe, if I’m lucky, an encore with the agent who pretends she didn’t love me when she begged me not to stop.”

It was a rehearsed cruelty, and he delivered it with a comedian’s timing. Alex’s fingers clenched into the coat that brushed her hip. She could smell cedar and the shadow of Sebastian’s cologne. She could feel her own pulse in her mouth.

Sebastian stayed very still. He had learned stillness as a weapon. The line of his shoulders altered by degrees only men who had bled with him would see. “If you say her name,” he said quietly, “I will forget that this is my apartment and that you have lived long enough to be boring.”

Fernando’s smile never faltered. “Which name do you prefer? The one she wore to work, or the one she wore when she—”

Something moved—a small thing, the squeak of a hanger shifting in the closet because Alex’s shoulder had brushed it. The sound was nothing, a mouse in the wall. It sliced the room open.

Fernando’s head c****d. A predator hearing grass part. “Company,” he murmured.

“Bedroom,” Sebastian said, as if bored. “Mine.”

“Are we shy now?” Fernando took one step toward the hall.

Sebastian’s hand closed around his forearm with a speed that belonged in clip reels and autopsies. “No further,” he said again, lower. “You brought an audience; leave without one.”

The false good humor dropped an inch. Then Fernando recovered, turned his arm in Sebastian’s grip and admired the strength as if appraising a tool. “I forgot how much I enjoy it when you remember to be interesting,” he said. He glanced at the chessboard. “You should resign this one. The knight is a liability.”

“Or a trap,” Sebastian said.

“Not this time.” Fernando shook his arm free as if shrugging off a joke. He smoothed his sleeve, flashed an apology at himself in the reflection of the window, and reclaimed his grin. “Thursday at eight,” he said. “Don’t be late. Brides get nervous when grooms run.”

He sauntered to the door and, without looking back, added almost lazily, “And tell your agent that if she wants to finish our conversation, I still remember all her favorite words.”

The door clicked. The elevator whispered its approval. The apartment enlarged itself again by a fraction, the way rooms do when danger stops pretending to be a guest.

Sebastian didn’t move for three breaths. Then he went to the panel and keyed in a code that turned the entire floor deaf to microphones and curious cameras. Only after the lights on the panel had turned green did he speak.

“You can come out,” he said, without turning.

The closet door edged wider. Alex slipped through, pale and furious. The world swayed once, not from fear now but from the reserves she’d spent not kicking down a door and ending a man.

“You let him,” she said.

“Let him what,” Sebastian asked, voice even.

“Tell you what I was,” she said. “Tell me what I was.” She swallowed, and the swallow hurt. “He didn’t love me. He hated that I didn’t break the way he thought I would. He hated that I kept a piece of myself even when he bought the rest. And you stood there and… you let him say it like it was his story.”

“He wanted me to hit him,” Sebastian said calmly. “So he could bleed on my carpet and call it your fault.”

She laughed—one harsh syllable, not humor. “You always have reasons.”

“I always have costs,” he corrected. “And I prefer to pay the right ones.”

She put a hand on the bedpost and leaned, more to prevent herself from crossing the room than to hold herself up. “You’re getting married.”

He met her gaze. “I am being offered a cage with a ribbon.”

“Will you climb in.”

“I will decorate the outside,” he said. “Then I will sell the ribbon.”

Her mouth twisted. “There’s a girl in the middle of that plan.”

“There’s a family,” he said. “Which is worse.”

For a moment neither spoke. The city kept being a city. A car horn made a joke three floors down; nobody laughed.

“I could have killed him,” Alex said, quiet now. It was not a threat. It was a confession of something she didn’t want.

“You will,” Sebastian said, equally quiet. “If I aim you and say now.”

“I’m not a weapon,” she said.

“You’re not a victim,” he returned. “The label in between changes hourly.”

She shook her head and stepped away from the post, testing whether her legs were hers. “Why Elena?”

“Because her father wants a photograph,” he said. “Because my mother wants applause. Because Fernando wants to watch.”

“And you?”

“I want an hour,” he said. “A quiet one. To think.”

“Try ten minutes,” she said. “We don’t own hours.”

“Not yet.”

The bedroom felt too small. She crossed to the window and set her palms against the cool glass because pressure sometimes convinces nerves they have a point. Her reflection looked like a ghost someone had tried to remember and failed.

“Did you enjoy the story,” she asked without turning. “About me.”

“No,” he said.

“You sounded bored.”

“I was editing,” he said. “In my head.”

“Edit this,” she said. “If you marry Elena, you give your mother a ring too.”

“I know,” he said softly.

She exhaled, a thin sound. “Do you care if I heard what he said?”

“I care that he said it,” Sebastian answered. “I care that you were in a closet in my house because men like him don’t know when to stop playing with knives. And I care that your hands aren’t shaking.”

“They are,” she said, and showed him. The tremor was small, a stutter in the air between them. “They always do after I don’t do a thing I wanted.”

He stepped forward, then stopped. “Painkillers?”

“Later.”

“Now,” he said.

A noise behind them announced Martin, but he stayed in the doorway like a man who knows when the room is speaking. “Driver downstairs,” he said. “Salmo confirmed. Gardenias doubled. Alvarez texted—Leila’s stable.”

“Good,” Sebastian said. “Give me five.”

Martin’s eyes flicked to Alex and away. “Copy.”

He left. The door sighed with relief.

“Your brother,” Alex said, because every topic was safer than the one that throbbed under the others. “Does he know.”

“Ernesto knows everything if you set it to music,” Sebastian said. “He hums secrets.”

“Is he part of this.”

“He is a part,” Sebastian said. “Not necessarily the one you worry about.”

She turned then, worn out of anger for the minute. “What do you want from me right now.”

“Truth,” he said. “In a version I can use.”

She surprised herself by nodding. “Fine. Here’s one: if you go to dinner, don’t let him announce it. If Salmo says the word engagement first, you’re explaining your life to his money forever.”

“I know,” he said.

“Another,” she added, because momentum makes honesty easier. “If Elena looks at you like you’re a solution, you’re already a problem. Make her think you’re a question.”

“That I can do,” he said.

“And this,” she said, stepping closer until the air picked up what their bodies didn’t. “Don’t let my name be something men throw at your feet to see what you do. If you won’t protect me, protect the plan. He uses me to measure you.”

“I noticed,” he said. “And I didn’t move.”

“You moved,” she said. “You just did it without your hands.”

He almost smiled. “Will you be here when I get back.”

“I don’t know,” she said, honest in the only way left. “I might decide I like closets.”

“You don’t,” he said. “You like doors. To count. To open.”

“Sometimes to lock,” she said.

“Sometimes to shoot through,” he said.

They stood in the middle of a room that had inherited too many promises. He reached for his jacket from the chair back and shrugged it on. The move turned him back into the man the city expected at eight: composed, expensive, dangerous in a way you only learn by paying for it. He adjusted his cuffs, then looked up.

“If I don’t come back,” he said, conversational.

“You’ll come back,” she said, and despised that she sounded like she believed it.

“If I don’t,” he said again, “Samantha has the map. Stevens has the soup. Martin knows what to burn. Leila will wake up angry. Use all of it.”

“I will,” she said.

He nodded once, the smallest bow a man like him is allowed. At the door he paused. “Alex.”

“What.”

“I didn’t let him tell my story,” he said. “And I won’t let him tell yours.”

“Then go write something better,” she said. “And make it expensive.”

He left. The elevator hummed, then hid its opinion.

Alone, Alex crossed to the closet and put her palm flat against the inside of the door, the wood still warm from her body. She didn’t cry. She didn’t plan. She watched the city pretending to be a calendar and counted slowly to thirty, then twice more for luck.

When the number ran out, she opened a drawer and found a gun she hadn’t known she was looking for. It fit her hand like a sentence with a period. She checked the magazine by habit and told herself out loud what she had been thinking like prayer since she crawled out of a cellar: “I am not an assignment.”

The night did not argue.

Downstairs, a driver opened a door for a man who smiled like weather. Across town a florist tied a white ribbon the color of pretense. In a villa under glass, a woman in silk rehearsed the word Thursday until it sounded like law.

And in a room twenty floors above a city that never stopped bargaining, a woman sat in the cold and waited to decide which door she would open when the next knock came.