Page 3 of Knight
The board has shifted.
The pieces you last saw in certain positions are no longer there. The ones you thought were gone have not stayed gone. And the game that Giovanni set in motion the moment he chose power over everything else — the moment he built an empire on blood and called it a family — that game did not end with his death.
It never was going to.
Shadows do not die with the man who casts them.
They simply find new walls to move across.
Romeo Rivas is next.
My stepson. The Knight.
Reckless in the specific way men are reckless when they are running from something they cannot name. Charismatic in the way that men are charismatic when charm is the first armor they learned to wear. Carrying a guilt so heavy it has bent his spine slightly — though he would never let you see that. He has his father's pride. All three of them do.
He thinks the worst thing that can happen to him is being forced into a marriage arranged by a dead man's ambition.
He is wrong about that.
He thinks the board is complicated but manageable. That if he moves fast enough and recklessly enough he can jump over every obstacle before it becomes a wall.
He is wrong about that too.
What is coming for Romeo is not what he expects.
It never is, for Knights.
That is the nature of the piece — they move in shapes no one anticipates. They jump. They land somewhere the enemy did not think to protect. They create chaos not through force but through the sheer unpredictability of where they end up.
Romeo is about to meet the one thing his father's world never prepared any of them for.
Not an enemy.
Not a rival.
Not a war.
A woman who needs nothing from him.
And because she needs nothing —
She will cost him everything.
I have buried enough.
I have watched enough versions of the truth get dressed up and paraded through this world as history.
I was there.
I know what happened.
The rest is just what people tell themselves so they can sleep at night.
I stopped sleeping a long time ago.
— Zina
THE CLASSIFIED DOSSIER
