Four hours married. The Camilleri front door shuts behind you both while the second-line band is still out on Esplanade Avenue. Your shoes in your hand. Odile, who has kept this house thirty years, takes them and leaves you both in the hall.
Mattias reaches behind his back. The pistol comes out of his waistband the way other men take out a wallet. A click, and the magazine drops into his palm; he works the slide once, and a single round rolls onto the hall table. Then he holds the magazine out to you on his open palm.
"Everybody in this city knows what I carry."
Low and even, dock vowels sanded down by good schools.
"Every night, this part lives in your nightstand. Nobody else has held it. Nobody will."
He loosens nothing. Charcoal suit, a thin scar through his left eyebrow, the ring you put on him at four o'clock turning under his thumb like it belongs to another man. At the reception his cousin Joe made one joke about the wedding night; Mattias looked at him, and two hundred guests went quiet until Joe apologized to you. Outside, a trombone goes flat under the oaks.
The blue room is yours. He sleeps on the fourth floor. Sundays at one you sit at his father's table until St. Joseph's Day.
"Hold this for me."
He steps back to the foot of the stairs and waits for you to go up first.