Page 18 of Knight
Pia stands near the door. Arms folded. Watching us both.
"When were you planning to call me back?" Santino says.
His voice is level. Controlled. The voice of a man who left the priesthood and took every ounce of that discipline with him into the dark.
"I've been busy."
"You've been hiding."
The word lands like a palm strike to the sternum. I feel it in my ribs.
"Sit down, Santino."
"I'll stand."
He pushes the cracked Knight an inch closer to me. The marble scrapes against the wood — a small, ugly sound that crawls up the back of my skull.
"We need to talk about what this means," he says. "And you are going to listen."
The Board Laid Bare
Santino talks the way he used to deliver sermons — measured, inevitable, each sentence building on the last until the conclusion is inescapable and you realize you were convicted before he opened his mouth.
"The Marchese consider Giovanni's pact binding. His word. His signature. His blood promise that the second Rivas son would marry into their family to cement the territorial alliance along the eastern corridor." He taps the cracked Knight once with his index finger. "This piece arrived three days ago through a channel only Giovanni's inner circle knew existed. That means someone inside our infrastructure delivered it. That means the Marchese have access we have not accounted for."
I keep my face level. My stomach is turning but my face is level because that is the one skill Giovanni actually taught me — how to sit in a room full of grenades and look bored.
"The Shadow Network is active," he continues. "Giovanni's posthumous loyalists — the men who swore oaths to him personally, outside the family structure. They have been quiet for two years. They are no longer quiet. Three of Fabio's perimeter contacts reported movement last week. Safe houses being accessed with codes that should have been burned after Giovanni's death."
He lets that land. He is good at letting things land. The priest trained him in silence the way the King trained him in violence, and the combination is devastating.
"Your silence has been read as weakness, Romeo. Three days without a response to this" — he touches the Knight again — "tells every player on the board that the visible head of the Rivas family received a declaration of war and did nothing. That is not neutrality. That is blood in the water."
Each sentence is a blade and I feel them all — clean, precise cuts along the ribs where it hurts worst and heals slowest. He is right. I know he is right. I have known he was right since the photograph landed in my phone and I poured the first glass of Macallan instead of picking up the phone.
But knowing Santino is right and admitting it to his face are two different acts of surrender, and I have never been good at either.
"Fabio has been running threat assessments," Santino says. "Dante has been watching the eastern perimeter. Guido has been cataloguing every chess piece Giovanni owned, cross-referencing the marble against known Marchese artisan sources. Everyone in this family has been working." He pauses. The silence fills with everything he is choosing not to say. "Everyone except you."
Pia shifts her weight by the door. I catch it in my peripheral — a small movement, a readiness. She knows what is coming. She has watched Santino deliver verdicts before and she knows the defendant always swings back.
My brother stares at me across the desk with eyes that have forgiven me for the worst thing I have ever done and still cannot trust me to handle the consequences.
"Three weeks," he says. "That is the Marchese deadline. Honor the pact or the alliance dissolves into open war. This is not a negotiation, Romeo. This is a countdown."
The cracked Knight sits between us. The fracture line catches the overhead light.
Less than thirty days.
The Eruption
"No."
The word comes out of me like a detonation — low, final, loaded with five years of swallowing every order a dead man left behind.
"I am not marrying a woman I have never met because Giovanni signed a piece of paper in a room I was never invited into. I am not honoring a pact made by a man who traded his sons like livestock. And I am not spending the next thirty days auditioning for the role of obedient second son for a father who never once looked at me long enough to see anything worth keeping."
Santino's expression does not change. That is the worst part. He absorbs the eruption the way stone absorbs rain — takes it, holds it, gives nothing back.
