Page 119 of Knight
And I walk through my afternoon inside it without feeling the teeth.
The Hours That Build
One hour.
Dante is at the estate. That is where Dante goes — the west wing, the perimeter, the corners of rooms where the sightlines converge and a nineteen-year-old boy who moves like smoke can watch everything without being catalogued. I do not think about this. I assume it the way I assume the sun will track across the penthouse floor. Dante is where Dante always is.
Two hours.
I text him. Short. Operational. The kind of message I have sent a hundred times since the war started — a logistics question about the eastern corridor rotation Fabio wants confirmed before end of day.
The message delivers. Blue checkmark. Read receipt: off. Dante turned his read receipts off months ago because he said they gave people information he did not want them to have. At the time I laughed. Now I stare at the blue checkmark and wait for the typing indicator that will not appear.
He does not respond.
This is normal. Dante ignores texts the way he ignores most communication that does not demand his physical body in a specific location. He treats his phone as a tool for receiving information, rarely for transmitting it. Half the time I text him he answers six hours later with a single word. The other half he simply appears in a doorway and delivers the answer in person because Dante believes phones are for men who cannot be bothered to walk across a room.
I set my phone facedown. Return to the shipping manifest.
Three hours.
I call. The line rings four times and clicks to voicemail — Dante's voicemail, which is not a recorded greeting but three seconds of dead air followed by a tone, because Dante decided that anyone calling him already knows who they are calling and does not need to be told.
I hang up without leaving a message.
Something flickers. Faint. Buried beneath the routine of a Wednesday that has given me no reason to worry. A disturbance I cannot name — the kind that lives below thought, in the body, in the part of the nervous system Giovanni wired into his sons before they were old enough to understand what paranoia was for.
I check the time. The Patek Philippe is on the nightstand. I left it there this morning. I check my phone instead. Three-seventeen PM.
Four hours.
I call Fabio.
"When did you last see Dante?"
Fabio's pause is two seconds long. Two seconds is an eternity for a man who has spent thirty years answering questions about the Rivas family's whereabouts without hesitation.
"Last evening. He was at the estate reviewing the eastern perimeter logs. Left around nine. I assumed he was heading to the penthouse or to Guido's."
"He did not come to the penthouse."
Another pause. Shorter. The professional recalibrating.
"I'll check with the gate team and the overnight surveillance."
I hang up. The flicker is louder now. A pulse in my temple. I press my thumb against it and stand at the kitchen counter where Tomás's drawings rustle on the fridge from the draft andNova's napkin note saysYou're my favorite weirdoand the paring knife sits clean in its block.
Five hours.
Santino answers on the first ring.
"Have you heard from Dante today?"
His silence is different from Fabio's. Fabio's silence was professional delay — a man checking his mental files. Santino's silence is the silence of a man whose instincts have just activated. I can hear it in the quality of the air on the line — the held breath, the sharpening, the brother shifting from civilian to operative between one heartbeat and the next.
"When did you last hear from him?" Santino asks. The priest voice is gone. What replaces it is blade-cold.
"Yesterday."
