Page 35 of Knight
The Overheard Exchange
I excuse myself to find a bathroom and no one stops me.
The hallway is long and dim, the kind of corridor that belongs in a museum — dark wood paneling, framed photographs of people who look like Romeo but older, harder, arranged in generations of expensive clothing and dangerous smiles. My sneakers are silent against the runner carpet and I'mgrateful for that because three doors down, a voice stops me cold.
Romeo's.
Low. Heated. The charming register stripped away entirely and replaced by something raw — the voice of a man who is losing an argument he can't afford to lose.
"I'm not doing it, Santino. I don't give a fuck what he signed."
"What you give a fuck about is irrelevant." Santino's voice is ice poured over iron. Measured. Every syllable placed with the same surgical precision he used on me at dinner. "The Marchese family gave us thirty days. We are at twenty-three. If you don't honor the pact—"
"It's not my pact. It's his. He's dead. The deal died with him."
"Giovanni's word is this family's word. You know that. The Marchese don't care who's breathing and who isn't — they care about the signature. And that signature says you marry Valentina."
My hand finds the wall. I press my palm flat against the paneling and the wood is cold and I hold onto it because the floor feels less solid than it did ten seconds ago.
Valentina.
A woman's name. Spoken with the weight of a contract.
"I'll find another way," Romeo says, and his voice cracks at the seam — the same fracture I heard in his kitchen when he saidnobody lives hereand the whole performance of his life showed through the gap.
"There is no other way. You marry the Marchese daughter or they burn every bridge Giovanni built. Eastern corridor. The docks. The distribution networks. Fabio says their militia outnumbers ours four to one. This is arithmetic, Romeo. The math doesn't care about your feelings."
Silence. The kind that vibrates.
I should move. I should walk away and find the bathroom and wash my hands and look at myself in a mirror and figure out what the hell I'm doing in this house with this man.
Instead I stand in this hallway with my palm against a dead king's wall and I do the math myself.
There is an arranged marriage. A powerful family. A dead father's signature on a deal Romeo never agreed to. A woman named Valentina who was chosen for him before he ever walked into the back office of The River Club and looked at me like I was the first real thing he'd seen in years.
The arrangement. The money. The nights against his office door and on his penthouse couch — the way he held me afterward like I was something precious, something he was terrified of breaking.
I am the thing he is doing instead of the thing he is supposed to do.
The detour. The distraction. The girl from Delancey who counts tips by touch and dances for rent money while somewhere in this house a contract with a dead man's handwriting says Romeo Rivas belongs to someone else.
My hand slides off the wall.
I walk back toward the dining room on legs that feel borrowed from someone steadier than I am, and every step costs me something I didn't know I'd been spending.
The Choice She Should Not Make
I should leave.
The thought arrives clean and sharp the way survival instincts always do — the same voice that told me to drop out of college the week my mother disappeared, the same voice that told me to walk into The River Club the first time even though my hands were shaking so badly I couldn't fill out the application without pressing the pen into the paper hard enough to tear it.
That voice has kept me alive for two years. It has kept Marisol and Tomás fed and housed and enrolled in schools where teachers know their names. It has never been wrong.
It is telling me to walk out of this house, get into a cab, go back to Delancey where the dangers are the kind I already know how to survive — landlords who don't return calls, electric bills that stack up in kitchen drawers, nightmares at two in the morning that can be held and rocked back to sleep.
Those dangers are mine. I built my life around them. I know their shapes and their schedules and exactly how much they cost.
This — armed men and arranged marriages and a family that launders money through churches and buries enemies in graves that belong to other people — this will kill me. Maybe literally. And it won't stop at me. It will reach Tomás and Marisol because everything in my life eventually reaches them. They are the center of every calculation I make and I am standing in a house where people calculate in bullets.
