Page 17 of Knight
I get dressed in the silence that follows.
He is leaning against the desk. Shirt untucked. Collar ruined. His hair wrecked from my hands and his breathing still ragged and he is watching me with an expression I cannot read — something between hunger and horror, like he just discovered a door inside himself he did not know existed and he cannot figure out how to close it.
I do not look at him while I dress. I find my bag where it fell by the chair. I pull the strap over my shoulder. I touch my mouth with the back of my hand and my lips are swollen and raw and I can still taste him — whiskey and salt and something dark underneath.
My hands are shaking.
I shove them into my pockets before he sees.
At the door I stop. One hand on the knob. I do not turn around because if I turn around he will see my face and my face will betray every word I am about to say.
"This doesn't change anything."
My voice holds. Barely.
I walk out. Down the hallway. Through the service entrance. Into the night air that hits my skin like cold water and I keep walking, one foot in front of the other, all the way to the bus stop on the corner.
I sit on the bench. The city moves around me. My hands are still trembling in my pockets.
Not from cold.
3
romeo
The Warning
The Brother Who Does Not Knock
The couch leather is cold against the back of my neck.
Same office. Same Macallan — new bottle, already opened, already half-poured. Same surveillance monitors cycling through the empty club floor. Two in the morning again,because apparently this is my life now — haunting my own building like a ghost who pays the electric bill.
But something is different tonight and I know exactly what it is.
My body is still humming. Low, constant, the frequency of a wire pulled tight and vibrating. Twenty-four hours since Nova Vasquez stood in this room and shattered every clinical word I put between us with one kiss that turned into a detonation. Twenty-four hours since she walked out and saidthis doesn't change anythingwhile her hands shook inside her pockets.
I can still taste her. The back of my mouth. Her skin. The sound she made when I pulled her hair — raw, startled, like something tearing open that had been sealed shut for years.
I am replaying it for the forty-seventh time when the door opens without a knock.
Only one person alive walks into a room I am in without knocking.
Santino fills the doorframe the way he fills every doorframe — completely, deliberately, his shoulders blocking the hallway light. Black clothes. Always black. The collar is gone but the uniform stayed and the man inside it got harder, leaner, carved down to the essential architecture of threat. His eyes sweep the room in a single pass — the bottle, the glass, the monitors, me on the couch — and I watch him catalogue every detail, file it, and arrive at a verdict before his second foot crosses the threshold.
Pia is a step behind him. She moves differently — quiet where he is declarative, warm where he radiates cold. Her hand rests on the small of his back, and I have seen enough to know what that hand does. It is a tether. An anchor line. Without it, Santino drifts toward a version of himself that looks too much like the man who raised us.
He does not sit. He walks to the desk. He reaches into his coat pocket and pulls something out and sets it on the woodsurface with a click that punches through the room like a round chambering.
The cracked Knight.
White marble. The fracture splitting the horse's neck clean from its base. I have been staring at the photograph for days. Seeing it in person is different. The crack is surgical. Precise. Someone took a chisel to this piece — it was not dropped, it was executed.
A message carved in stone.
I look up at my brother. He is standing over the desk with his hands flat on the surface, looking down at me with the patience of a man who has been awake for three days building a war while his younger brother has been drinking whiskey and fucking a dancer in the back office of a nightclub.
He does not say any of that. He does not have to. Santino has never needed words to make me feel the full weight of my own failures. His silence does the work.
