Page 36 of Knight
I walk back into the main room.
Romeo is standing apart from his brothers near the window where the city lights throw his silhouette into sharp relief. Guidois still at the table with his chess set. Dante has moved to the doorway — blocking it or guarding it, impossible to tell. Santino is nowhere I can see, which means he's everywhere.
Romeo turns toward me and the mask is gone.
The charm, the loose confidence, the easy smile he wears like armor — all of it stripped away. He is looking at me the way I've seen drowning men look at the surface of the water. Raw. Desperate. His green eyes burning with something I recognize because I've felt it every night for two years — the terror of losing the one thing that makes the rest of it bearable.
He knows I heard.
Maybe he doesn't know the specifics. Maybe he doesn't know I stood in his dead father's hallway and listened to his brother lay out the arithmetic of his life. But he knows something has shifted. He can see it in the way I'm standing — my weight on my back foot, my bag gripped against my hip, my body already angled toward the door.
He is waiting for me to run.
Every smart decision I have ever made says I should.
My mother would have. My mother did. She saw the weight coming and she walked out the door and she never looked back and I have spent two years hating her for it while doing everything in my power to never be like her.
I am twenty years old and I have never once run from a hard thing.
I stayed when the lights got shut off. I stayed when Marisol screamed at me that I wasn't her mother. I stayed when Tomás had a panic attack on a bathroom floor and the therapist cost a hundred and eighty dollars I didn't have.
I stay. That is what I do. That is who I am.
Even when staying is the most dangerous choice on the table.
She Stays
I let go of my bag.
It drops against the back of the nearest chair with a dull thud that sounds louder than it should in this room full of men who measure silence for a living.
Then I walk.
Across the marble floor. Past Guido, who lifts his eyes from his chess board and tracks me with those warm, watchful irises. Past Dante in the doorway, whose gaze follows me with the patience of something carved from granite. Past the empty chair where Santino sat and the wine glasses and the remnants of a dinner that tasted like blood money and garlic.
I walk to Romeo.
He is standing at the window with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders braced like a man waiting for a verdict he's already decided will destroy him. The city burns behind the glass — a million lights belonging to a million people who will never stand in a room like this and have to choose between survival and the most dangerous thing they've ever wanted.
I stop beside him. Close enough that my arm brushes his. Close enough to smell cedar and sandalwood and the faint bite of whiskey on his breath.
I don't touch him. I don't speak. I don't turn my face toward his or offer a reassuring smile or do any of the things a smarterwoman would do to smooth over what I just heard in that hallway.
I just stand here.
It is the smallest gesture I have ever made and it is the largest commitment I have made since the morning I woke up to an empty apartment and a ten-year-old asking where Mommy went and I decided — in the space between his question and my answer — that I would stay.
Romeo's breath shifts. I hear it — a slow, shaking exhale that he swallows before it becomes something louder. His hand moves out of his pocket and finds mine. His fingers brush my knuckles. Barely there. The lightest touch — like he's afraid full contact will confirm I'm real and reality is the thing he trusts least.
I curl my fingers around his. Hold on.
His whole body changes. The brace in his shoulders drops half an inch. His chest expands with a breath that sounds like the first one he's taken all night.
I still don't know the full shape of what I've walked into. I don't know the names of his enemies or the terms of his dead father's contracts or how many bodies are buried in the foundation of the empire that paid for my brother's sneakers.
But I know what I heard in that hallway. A woman named Valentina. A marriage he is being crushed into. A family that trades daughters like currency and treats signatures as blood oaths that outlive the men who wrote them.
The woman they want him to marry is somewhere in this city tonight.
