Page 56 of Knight
I don't.
I have been watching Romeo Rivas for weeks. I know his choreography the way I know my own stage routines — every gesture mapped, every transition memorized, every flourish catalogued by a woman whose survival depends on reading the men in front of her with perfect accuracy. I know when his smile is genuine and when it's scaffolding. I know when his laugh reaches his eyes and when it stops at his teeth. I know the difference between the voice he uses with his brothers and the voice he uses with me in the dark after the children are asleep.
That flinch was none of those things.
That flinch was involuntary. A nerve struck so deep his body reacted before his performance could intercept it. The King's name hit something inside Romeo that lives below the charm, below the arrogance, below every polished layer he's spenttwenty-two years building — and whatever it hit, the pain was fast enough to break through.
His brothers didn't react. Which means they've seen it before. Which means they know what lives beneath that flinch and have collectively agreed to let it stay buried.
I pick up my wine glass and take a sip. I smile at something Tomás says about his chess strategy. I pass the bread to Marisol and touch her shoulder when she takes it.
I do all of this while filing what I just saw in the place where I keep the things Romeo hasn't told me. The closed-door phone calls. The cracked Knight. The gap in the story he talked around the night he proposed. The way he saidhe diedabout his father with the flatness of a man reciting a line he's rehearsed so many times the words have lost their meaning.
The file is getting thick.
Whatever Romeo carries when someone says that name — it is heavier than grief. Grief softens over time. It loosens its grip. It lets you breathe between the waves.
This is something that tightens.
The Question That Opens the Wound
The penthouse goes dark in stages.
Tomás first — four minutes, same as every night since we moved in, the rocket nightlight clicking on and his breathing going deep before I've finished pulling the blanket to his chin.Marisol takes longer. I read to her. She pretends she doesn't need it. I pretend I don't know she's pretending. The ritual holds.
When both doors are closed I walk to the hallway. The same stretch of hardwood where Romeo sat on the floor and listened to me read through the wall. Where he almost said a word he swallowed back. Where something in him loosened one fraction and I watched it happen from ten feet away.
I lean against the wall and wait.
He comes in twenty minutes later. Keys on the counter. Shoes kicked off by the door. He rounds the corner and finds me standing in the dim hallway like a woman who has been sharpening a question for hours and has decided tonight is the night she uses it.
"Hey," he says. The charm flickers on — automatic, habitual, the way a streetlight buzzes to life at dusk.
I don't return the smile.
"What happened to your father?"
The streetlight dies.
I've seen Romeo without his mask before. I've seen the man underneath the performance — in his kitchen at two AM, on his office couch, in my doorway the night he proposed. I've seen the charm drop and the vulnerability bleed through the cracks.
This is different.
This is evacuation. Every muscle in his face goes slack. His green eyes lose their heat, their mischief, their constant scanning motion — and what replaces it is something young and exposed and absolutely terrified. He looks twenty-two for the first time since I've known him. He looks like a boy who has been waiting for this question the way a prisoner waits for sentencing.
"He died," he says.
His voice is flat. Rehearsed. A line delivered so many times the words have worn smooth as river stones.
"That's not what I'm asking."
His throat works. I watch the swallow travel down his neck and his hands curl at his sides and unclench and curl again — a rhythm I've seen him repeat when the distance between what he wants to say and what he allows himself to say becomes physically unbearable.
He looks at me. Holds my gaze. I can see the decision happening behind his eyes — two doors, one marked truth and one marked escape, and his body leaning toward both while his mind screams at him to pick.
He picks escape.
"Not tonight." His voice is barely a whisper. He walks past me. Close enough that his arm brushes mine. Close enough that I feel the heat of his skin and the tremor running through it.
