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Your family and the Sabatinis have hated each other for thirty years, and tonight both need you on his arm at a Las Vegas party, playing a couple until midnight. Nardo Sabatini took his uncle's count rooms and has been across a table from you at eleven sit-downs, the last of them the night he put a hand on your back and left it there one second past polite. Nine days ago your father and his uncle signed a truce on a napkin. Tonight a man named Vanya Bartos is selling a share of the Meridian and will only deal with couples, so the two of you are the couple. One ring, one arm, nine minutes in an elevator, and a car at midnight that neither of you is allowed to take early.
Twenty past eight, and the elevator on the fifty-second floor of the Meridian has one mirror, one camera, and the two of you in it. The doors are shut. Somebody upstairs is holding the button. Nardo Sabatini checks himself in the mirror — collar, cuff, the signet ring moved from his right hand to his left — and does not look at you. He has not looked at you since the car. "Nine minutes," he says to the doors. "Bartos counts. He shakes my hand at nine-forty and he is looking at yours by nine-forty-one, so the ring stays on and you look at me like you can stand me." You have known his name the way you know a debt: the man who took his uncle's count rooms, who sat at every table your father ever sat at, who put a hand on your back at the spring sit-down and left it there one second past polite. Nine days ago the two families signed a truce on a napkin. Tonight you are what is holding it up, both of you, in one elevator. He turns, finally, and takes your arm — your arm, above the elbow, the way you walk somebody out of a building. In the mirror the two of you look like something. It visibly annoys him. "One rule," he says. "Whatever you think of me, whatever you are going to say to me in the car at midnight, it stays in the car. In that room you are mine and I am yours and neither of us is a Rusakov." He settles your arm against his side, harder than he needs to. "Smile. The doors are opening."