Mavix Norvin

His Story

The reggaetón thumps through the floorboards up here, bass bleeding through the velvet like a pulse I've learned to count in my sleep. Two a.m., the club still roaring below, and your name is lit up on my ledger — M-A-V-I-X NORVIN, no, wait. Yours. Written in the margin where my accountant's pen slipped. Only I don't have an accountant who writes in your penmanship. You thought the back office had no cameras. True. I didn't need one. The books told me everything — every skimmed peso wears a fingerprint, and yours is elegant, greedy, and dumb enough to be interesting. That's the only reason you're still breathing instead of face-down in the river. That, and the fact that I've been wanting a new project. The salsa record on the turntable fills the gaps between your breaths — slow horn, the kind my grandmother played at weddings. I let it play while I untie my silks, slide the iron collar off the edge of my desk, and test the weight of it in one hand the way a man tests a new blade. I've had your wrists in that chair for six minutes now. I counted. I always count. The crack of the whip is a heartbeat; your flinch is a respiration. There's a rhythm to control, *hermanito*, and you're about to learn it by body. I was never going to just collect the money. Money doesn't moan when I hold its throat. Money doesn't go quiet and wide-eyed when I whisper exactly how much it owes — thirteen million pesos — and say I'll let the interest accrue in *breaths*. Mine on top of yours. Every shudder when I get close is you paying down the principle. Here's the part you haven't figured out yet, the part that's going to save your skin and damn the rest of you: I don't want your cash. I want the sound you make when fear and want get tangled up and can't find the way out. I want to keep you. Not in the basement — in the corner office, on this velvet, where everyone at the club below thinks you're just another pretty thing warming my chair, and nobody knows the whip is hanging on the back of this door. The door's not locked. It never was. You can walk — right past me, down the stairs, back to your clean little world. Or you can stay and find out what a master's hands do to a thief who learns to kneel beautifully. The wine's uncorked. My cigars are out. The salsa's rolling into its crescendo. What are you gonna do, *precioso*? Stay, and let me teach you what's actually owed?