He Satisfies His Enemies—I Bury Them Chapter 05

He Satisfies His Enemies—I Bury Them Chapter 05

Dante didn’t leave Barcelona.

He checked into the Hotel Arts and stayed. Like a siege. Like a man who’d forgotten how to do anything

except wait.

I saw him everywhere-or maybe I was looking. At a café on La Rambla, reading a Spanish newspaper

he couldn’t understand. Walking the harbor at dusk, hands in his pockets, staring at the water like it owed

him answers.

Marta noticed him on day two.

“That man at the corner table,” she said, barely glancing up from her laptop. “He’s been there since this

morning. Expensive suit. Dangerous eyes. Yours?”

“He used to be.”

“Should I call someone?”

“He won’t cause trouble.”

“He looks like trouble was born inside him.”

She wasn’t wrong.

For ten days, he just existed in my periphery. No calls. No messages. No flowers or jewelry or any of the

blunt-force gestures men like Dante default to when they want something.

Just presence. Quiet, stubborn, maddening presence.

On day eleven, a package arrived at my office. Not wrapped in ribbon. No card. Just a plain brown box containing a first edition of “One Hundred Yours of Solitude”-in the original Spanish. García Márquez. My favorite author, a detail I’d mentioned once, three years ago, during a conversation Dante had apparently been sleeping through.

He hadn’t been sleeping.

Inside the front cover, his handwriting-messy, urgent, nothing like the polished signature on contract and kill orders:

“You told me once that Úrsula Iguarán was the strongest character in literature because she held

together a family of madmen without anyone noticing. I didn’t understand then. I understand now. –

I stared at those words until they blurred.

He’d remembered. The one literary conversation we’d ever had-a rainy Sunday, early in our marriage, when the power went out and we’d talked by candlelight for hours. I’d told him about Úrsula, the matriarch

who ran everything from the shadows while the men in her family destroyed themselves with wars and

obsessions.

“That’s you,” he’d said that night, half-joking.

“That’s every woman married to a powerful man,” I’d replied.

He’d laughed. Changed the subject. I thought he’d forgotten.

He hadn’t forgotten.

I put the book on my shelf. Not for him. Because it was beautiful, and I refused to let his memory

poison beautiful things.

Two weeks later, another delivery. A small painting-not expensive, not famous. A watercolor of the Barcelona harbor at sunset, done by a local artist. On the back: “Your new view. It suits you better than

Brooklyn ever did.”

He was paying attention. Not to what I owned or what I wore or what I could do for him. To who I was.

To what I saw when I looked at the world.

It infuriated me because it was working.

Not the gifts-I could buy my own art. What worked was the evidence that he’d finally learned to see me. That the man who’d spent three years looking through me was now studying me like I was the most important text he’d ever tried to read.

On a Wednesday evening, I crossed the street to his café.

He looked up. Didn’t smile. Didn’t perform surprise. Just watched me sit down with an expression that was equal parts hope and terror.

“The García Márquez was a nice touch,” I said.

“You kept it. I saw it through your office window.”

“You’re watching my office?”

“I’m watching you. I spent three years not watching you. I’m making up for lost time.”

“That’s not how it works.”

“I know. But it’s all I have.”

I studied him across the table. The gauntness was fading. He looked less like a man in freefall and

more like one who’d hit the ground and was learning to stand again.

“Your empire is collapsing,” I said.

“I know.”

“Volkov took the ports. The Colombians are moving into your territory. The FBI’s circling.”

“I know all of that.”

“And you’re sitting in Barcelona watching my window.”

He was quiet for a moment. “Some things matter more than territory.”

I didn’t believe him. Not yet.

“Stop sending gifts,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want to be courted by the man who broke me.”

“Then what do you want?”

I stood. “I want to be left alone.”

“Is that really what you want? Or is it what feels safe?”

1 walked away without answering.

Because he was right.

And I hated him for it.