Is it prescience, Lord Gloria? Does some delighted shiver ripple down your spine at the moment I am writing this, because I am thinking of you and actually longing for you to be with me again? It's four in the morning, here. Close on to the Wolf's Hour and false dawn. I would like to think you are still out dancing somewhere, surrounded by admirers -- or even out committing your reprehensible thefts, surrounded by the beautiful things you love. I can even imagine you asleep in that strangely-narrow bed of yours.
You would be angelic while you sleep, my golden devil.
Because if it _is_ prescience, you would know it too, in your dreams. If we are linked, as you have repeatedly claimed. Because I want you to have only happy dreams this morning, I choose to believe this is just logic at work. Perhaps dreaming of me at all would hurt you, so I hope by God's grace that you have succeeded in shutting even my memory from your thoughts.
I want to believe this is only the focused deduction of a trained mind, looking clearly at the available information and all its ramifications. That is, after all, what I have done most of my adult life: find patterns in apparent chaos.
I am not superstitious.
Not credulous enough to believe in luck-charms. Crutches are for invalids and fools. A man placing his faith in talismans risks fatally destroying his morale, when he loses them. One's relationship to team-mates is similar. They are to be relied upon and trusted, but not -- in the final equation -- substituted for a man's own skill and cunning.
And yet, deeper than all my logic, I _know_ this new truth.
When did I know?
A month ago in Naples, the last night of our most recent mission. When you got into the wine and flirted a bit too much. As usual. And I responded, as usual, with a snarled insult and a blow that caught you too sharply on the cheek.
Yes. I knew _that instant_. Watched your decision flood into your eyes, where the theatrical tears were suddenly dry. I saw that damned pirate in you then, a shadow of your ancestry. Proud, stern, and resolute. I remember thinking how much more beautiful those expressions were on your face, than all your pouting artifice and frivolity. That if you would just pick less-public moments to approach me, and do so with less fanfare, I might love you.
I _could_ love a man who looked at me like _that_.
Isn't that ridiculous? My timing was classic Eberbach, perfectly and heroically too late. Late by twenty seconds that sped by while I hit you once too often, and you fell out of infatuation with me. By a month, in which I did not try to reach you, call you, _apologize_. Worst of all was the two-hour briefing in which I had to tell the Chief that Eroica would no longer accept NATO commissions. And why.
Logic says no other contract thief could match you. That your madcap rushes into danger masked a mind with a grasp of strategy as good, in its own way, as mine. That your efforts completed my team and made it perfect.
It was not pride that kept me from apologizing to you, my thief, or begging you to come back to me. I have swallowed that enough times in the past, to know the difference between hubris and this new, calm feeling that has frozen me for a month. If I thought it would make any difference other than hurt you more, right now, I would even have offered myself for your pleasure.
You were my talisman. I have lost you. The month of disbelief, despair, and painful acceptance has finally ended. Three hours from now, I will begin my last mission.