Page 68 of Knight
13
romeo
Shadows
The Message From a Dead Man's Network
The message arrives at four in the morning through a channel that should not exist anymore.
I am in my office — the room Nova has learned means the conversation is closed — staring at Fabio's latest security audit on the laptop screen when the notification pulses in the corner.A private server. Encrypted. Routed through a relay protocol I have not seen since I was sixteen years old, sitting in Giovanni's study watching him decode handwritten dispatches from men whose names I was never allowed to learn.
The format is unmistakable. Old-world encryption — phrases nested inside phrases, word orders that function as keys, a linguistic architecture Giovanni designed because he trusted language more than technology. He believed code could be cracked by machines. He believed language could only be cracked by men who shared the same blood.
I pull the message apart the way he taught Santino, the way Santino taught me the year after Giovanni died because someone in this family had to carry the cipher and Santino was too busy shedding his collar to hold it himself.
Three layers. The outer shell is a restaurant recommendation — a place in Midtown, closed for renovation, the kind of detail that reads like spam to anyone who intercepts it. The second layer contains a time. Tomorrow. Noon. The third layer is a single phrase that locks every muscle in my body.
The queen's bishop moves in silence.
Emiliano.
Only one man alive would phrase it this way. Only one man has access to Giovanni's private network — the shadow infrastructure the King built beneath his empire, the channels that survived his death because they were designed to operate without him. Ghost protocols. Contingency architecture. The skeleton of a kingdom that keeps breathing long after the king stops.
Emiliano Maritz is reaching out to me through my dead father's bones.
I lean back in the chair. The Patek Philippe ticks against my wrist and the sound fills the dark office with Giovanni's steady, patient, relentless rhythm. My father's watch. My father'snetwork. My father's enemy using my father's tools to contact my father's son.
The irony tastes like the Macallan I have not poured tonight — sharp, expensive, burning on the way down.
I have spent two years avoiding Emiliano. Every Rivas brother has. He is the man who married Zina. The man who holds knowledge about the night Giovanni died that none of us want confirmed. The man who sat across from Giovanni in cigar lounges and blood-pact ceremonies and built an empire alongside the King before tearing it apart from underneath.
Every encounter with Emiliano feels like being measured for a coffin — his eyes scanning you with the clinical patience of a man deciding whether you are useful enough to preserve or expendable enough to bury.
But refusing his invitation is its own kind of answer. In this world, silence is a statement. Absence is a position. And a man who declines Emiliano Maritz's summons has just told the most dangerous operator in the underworld that he is either too afraid to face him or too stupid to recognize the value of what he is being offered.
I cannot afford either read.
I close the laptop. The screen goes dark and the office holds nothing but the hum of the security system and the distant sound of Tomás breathing through two walls.
My family sleeps. The Mole breathes inside our defenses. Isadora moves through the dark like a blade aimed at everything I am trying to hold together. And now a dead man's network is delivering invitations from the man who killed him.
I pull my phone from my pocket and text Santino two words.
He called.
The reply comes in eight seconds. Santino does not sleep either.
Go.
The Man Who Knew My Father
The restaurant smells like sawdust and plaster dust and the faint ghost of garlic that has soaked so deep into the brick walls no renovation will ever strip it clean.
Tables covered in white dust sheets. Chairs stacked along the far wall. Exposed wiring hanging from the ceiling where light fixtures have been pulled. The renovation is real — permits taped to the window, a dumpster visible through the back door — but the emptiness serves a purpose that has nothing to do with construction. This is a room designed to hold two men and no witnesses.
Emiliano Maritz is already seated.
One chair. Center of the room. Positioned beneath the only working overhead light so that his face is fully visible and everything behind him dissolves into shadow. The staging is deliberate — a man who controls what you see by controlling where the light falls.
