Page 23 of Knight
The race starts. Romeo's kart hits the wall within four seconds. Tomás howls.
"You have tosteer."
"I am steering."
"You're driving into the ocean!"
Romeo drives into the ocean. Tomás laughs — the real laugh, the belly laugh, the one I have not heard in weeks because ten-year-old boys who have panic attacks on bathroom floors do not laugh like that very often anymore.
I watch from the counter with my arms still crossed and my chest doing something dangerous.
Romeo Rivas. Heir to the Rivas empire. Carrying a cracked chess piece and a dead father's war and a thirty-day countdown to something I do not fully understand yet. Sitting on my carpet with his sleeves pushed up and his two-hundred-dollar shoes tucked beneath him, losing at Mario Kart for the third consecutive race while my brother laughs until his face turns red.
He does not know how to do this. I can see it in every clumsy movement — the way he holds the controller, the way he flinches when Tomás grabs his arm to point at the screen, the way his smile keeps faltering like a muscle he forgot he had. He has no script for this. No charm to deploy. A ten-year-old in rocketship pajamas has stripped him down to parts and he is sitting in the wreckage trying to figure out which ones are real.
Tomás wins again. Throws both hands up. Romeo shakes his head and something crosses his mouth — a grin, genuine,unguarded, the first real one I have seen on him — and it hits me like a slap.
Stop it,I tell myself.Stop watching him like that.
I turn to the sink. Run the water. Wash a dish that is already clean.
What She Sees, What He Sees
I lean against the kitchen doorway with the dish towel over my shoulder and I watch them.
Tomás is explaining blue shells. Romeo is nodding like this is critical intelligence — brow furrowed, controller balanced on his knee, giving a ten-year-old's lecture on power-ups the same gravity he probably gives boardroom briefings. He is terrible at this game. Genuinely, embarrassingly terrible. And he keeps playing anyway, round after round, because my brother is smiling and Romeo Rivas does not know how to walk away from that.
I see the man behind the armor. Sitting on a carpet with a fraying edge, sleeves shoved past his elbows, ink from a pen stain on his right forearm that he probably does not know is there. Awkward. Uncertain. Stripped of the grin and the charm and the money and the name and left with nothing but a man who does not know how to be in a room with a child without performing — and is trying anyway. Failing beautifully. Losing every race and caring about the wrong ones.
He glances up.
Our eyes meet across the length of my apartment — twelve feet of worn carpet and second-hand furniture and a life I have held together with my bare hands for two years — and neither of us moves.
He sees it. I can tell by the way his face changes — the grin gone, the performance gone, everything gone except the raw thing underneath that I keep catching in glimpses. His eyes move from me to the kitchen behind me — the pot on the stove, the permission slips held to the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a sunflower, the chore chart I made with colored markers because Marisol responds to structure the way some kids respond to praise. The lunch bag on the counter. The dish rack full of mismatched plates. The thin scar on my wrist catching the overhead light as I hold the towel.
He sees the woman I became at eighteen when my mother walked out and left me holding every piece. The woman who gave up a scholarship and picked up a mop and then a pole and never once sat down on a hallway floor and cried about it where anyone could see.
And I see him. The boy who called the wrong number at seventeen trying to save his brother and opened a door that killed his father. The son who inherited a crown made of razor wire and wears it every day and smiles so hard his face must ache by midnight.
The look between us is not the look from the back office. No heat. No arrangement. No transaction.
It is the look of two people who have been carrying something too heavy for too long and just realized the other one knows exactly what that weight feels like.
Tomás hits him with a red shell. Romeo blinks. Looks at the screen. Looks at my brother's triumphant face.
"That," Romeo says, "was dishonorable."
Tomás grins. "That wasstrategy."
The moment breaks. The game resumes. I turn back to the kitchen.
But something has shifted under my ribs and I cannot push it back where it belongs.
The Rule She Reinforces
Romeo stands at the door with his jacket over his arm and I block the threshold with my shoulder against the frame.
Behind me, Tomás is in the bathroom brushing his teeth. I can hear the water running, the hum of whatever song he is inventing tonight. He has been humming since Romeo sat down on that carpet. An hour of Mario Kart and my brother sounds like a different kid.
