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"I can keep going. I've been getting to know you for a long time. Your left hand's been in your lap since you sat down, and you're a surgeon. You don't hide a hand unless you don't want me looking at it. Shall I look at it?"

She puts her hand on the table. It's stopped shaking, but she's pale, and she seems very tense. Either someone threatened to kill a member of her family or she’s getting her period, which can’t be right because I track her cycle.

"You are relentless," she spits out in a low tone.

"I am thorough. I could say it's why you married me." I lean in and drop the joking, because she needs to see I'm not playing. "Manon. Somebody is going to tell me what happened between here and that bathroom, and it can be you, in your own words, or it can be the security footage, the waiter, or whoever else I have to hunt down tonight. You know me. You know I'll get what I want. Save me the trouble, and I promise I'll sit here like a gentleman."

She's quiet for a moment. Then she sets down her glass. "Promise me something first."

"Promise you what."

"That you won't do anything. Not here, tonight, with these people watching." She finally looks at me, and her eyes are hard and steady even though the rest of her isn't. "I mean it, Laszlo. There are many witnesses here and my name is attached to yours now. Promise me you'll sit in that chair and do absolutely nothing."

"I promise I won't do anything in this room." It's a very specific promise, and she's a very clever woman so she won’t push it. The loophole is inevitable.

She glances over at the man with the yacht, who's back at his table now, snapping his fingers at the waiter and loudly ordering a bottle of something expensive.

"He was waiting for me when I came out of the bathroom," she says. "I said excuse me, and he stepped in front of me and wouldn't move, just smirked at me. Then he put his hand flat on the wall so I couldn't get past."

She turns her glass a quarter-turn on the table and keeps her eyes on it. My blood pressure is surely climbing and she hasn't even gotten to the worst of it.

"He put his hand on the back of my neck." She stops to take a breath, and in my pocket my fingers find the knife I keep there just because. The blade eases open under my thumb. "He squeezed hard and held it so I couldn't turn my head. Then he leaned right in against my ear and said⁠—"

She swallows. For a second I don't think she's going to get it out, and part of me hopes she won't because I can already feel what it's going to do to me.

"He said, 'I know whose woman you are, and I know he's paying for it because a filthy whore like you doesn't end up on Novak's arm for free. But I'll double whatever he gives you. I want you under my table with my cock in your mouth while he sits there and watches. And you'll do it, or I'll find you on your own some night and open your throat for making me wait.'"

She says it all in one flat breath, staring at the tablecloth, and when she's finished she swallows hard. She looks faintly sick, like she can't believe those words just came out of her own mouth at a dinner table. I’m impressed at her memory of every word he said. But a threat like that is worth remembering, isn’t it?

"That's what he said," she says quietly. "Word for word. I have a good memory. Lucky me." There she goes, echoing my thoughts.

I take a slow drink of my wine.

On the outside I make sure I look like a man enjoying his dinner. But in my head I'm fantasizing about cutting off the hand that touched the back of my wife's neck, and then his throat, since he's so keen on throats. He offered to open hers, so the least I can do is return the favor. I'm counting the four steps between me and his table, working out that I could be finished before his wineglass hits the floor.

The only thing keeping me in this seat is that I gave her my word, and I've been trying to be a man who keeps his word to her, which is frankly the worst possible night for that principle to kick in. Because I want to stand up, walk to his table, and put his face through it until it comes out the other side like something fed through a meat grinder. I want this more than I've wanted anything ever. I'm sitting here with a switchblade in my pocket, smiling at my wife, eating a very expensive dinner I can no longer taste. I’m being good. Being so fucking good for not reacting.

And here's the part I'm grateful for. This idiot spent twenty solid minutes earlier telling his dinner companions precisely where he keeps his boat. He drew me a map to the thing he loves most in the world without my asking a single question. Some men you have to work for. This one gift-wrapped himself.

All my adult life I have managed not to want to kill anyone over dinner. Six months married to this woman and it's a weekly event. I've buried men who did less to my blood pressure than she does sitting there eating bread and speaking words.

"Say something," she says. "You've gone quiet. You're never quiet. It's frightening."

"I'm being calm," I tell her. "You asked me to be calm, so I'm being calm. This is what it looks like. I don't recommend it, it's agony, but you'll notice I'm doing it."

"Laszlo."

"I'm having my dinner like a normal husband whose wife has had a perfectly normal evening." I put a forkful of something in my mouth, chew and swallow, and I couldn't tell you what it was if you held a gun to me. Seems I've lost the ability to taste anything over the sound of my own pulse. "See? Relaxed. I'm so relaxed I might fall asleep in this…” I look down at my plate. “In the risotto."

That gets the smallest breath of a laugh out of her, which is all I wanted, and I'm about to press my luck when a shadow falls across the table.

"Laszlo."

Constantine, my brother, and of all the nights to run into me, he picks this one.

He's got a woman with him, which is enough to make me look twice, because Constantine hasn't brought a woman anywhere in years. No place decent people frequent, anyway. For the longest, Aunt Rosaria has been telling the family he'll die alone, and he's made it his life’s mission to prove her right out of spite. Yet here he is with his hand at the small of someone's back, looking like he'd rather be somewhere else, which is how Constantine looks most of the time.

"Brother." I stand and shake hands with him.