Page 43 of Knight
"I know."
"Tomás is asleep."
"I know." His voice cracks on the second word. A fracture so small anyone else would miss it. I don't miss anything. I haven't been able to afford missing things since I was eighteen years old.
He swallows and I watch his throat move. His hands are at his sides. Open. Empty. The Patek Philippe on his wrist catches the stove light from inside the apartment and throws a sliver of gold across his forearm where a pen stain used to be.
"Can I come in?" he asks, and the way he says it — quiet, stripped of every commanding syllable he's ever used to fill a room — tells me this is real. Whatever brought him here is the kind of thing that doesn't wait until morning.
I look at him for three more seconds. I count them because counting is how I make decisions — counting dollars, counting hours, counting the distance between danger and my siblings' bedroom doors.
Then I step aside.
He crosses my threshold and the door swells shut behind him.
Most of the Truth
He stands in my kitchen the same way he stood the afternoon he played Mario Kart with my brother — feet planted on the same cracked linoleum, shoulders too broad for the space between thecounter and the fridge. But that man was loose, laughing, sitting cross-legged on my carpet letting a ten-year-old drive him into the ocean.
This man hasn't laughed in hours. Maybe days.
I don't offer him coffee. I don't sit down. I lean against the counter across from him with my arms folded and I wait because whatever dragged Romeo Rivas across the city at midnight needs to come out of his mouth in his own time. Pushing him will get me the polished version. Waiting will get me something closer to the truth.
He starts talking.
His father — Giovanni, the King, the name I heard whispered through the Rivas estate like a prayer and a curse wrapped in the same breath — made a deal before he died. An alliance. A marriage pact with a family called Marchese. The terms: Romeo marries their daughter. A woman named Valentina. The deal was signed when he was fifteen years old and had no say in the matter.
"They sent an ultimatum today," he says. His voice is low, steady, the kind of steady that takes effort. "Thirty days. The clock's been running. If I don't honor the pact, the alliance dissolves. Every territory my father built collapses. Every ally we have turns their back and the Marchese bring a war we can't win to our front door."
I listen. I watch his hands — they're still at his sides, fingers open, and I notice the crescent marks in his palms where his nails dug in during the drive. Fresh. Red. He's been gripping something hard enough to draw blood and he doesn't even know it.
He tells me about the co-signatories. Three men from his father's inner circle who endorsed the ultimatum. He tells me about the eastern corridor — territory, distribution, a private militia that outnumbers his security team. He tells meabout his brother's cold arithmetic and his head of security's recommendation to comply. He builds the architecture of his world in my kitchen piece by piece and I take every piece and file it where I file everything — organized by cost, by risk, by what it means for the two children sleeping twenty feet from where we're standing.
He tells me most of it.
I hear what he leaves out.
There's a gap in the middle of the story — a crater he walks around with careful steps. He talks about his father's death the way you talk about a car accident you witnessed from across the street. Removed. Edited. The details scrubbed clean of whatever actually happened. And when he mentions the Marchese alliance, his voice changes — a tightening in his throat, a hesitation before certain words, the careful navigation of a man skirting the edge of something he's terrified to fall into.
He is telling me the truth. I believe that.
He is also holding something back. Something that lives in that gap, in the space between his father's death and this ultimatum, in the reason his hands are shaking again after being steady enough to drive here.
I could push. I could plant my feet on this cracked linoleum and demand the rest of it because I'm a woman who has survived on complete information and I know what it costs when someone gives you half.
I don't push.
Because the look on his face — the one he wore when he asked to come in, the one he's wearing now while he maps the destruction of his life across my kitchen counter — that look tells me the missing piece will cost him something enormous to give.
And he came here. To my door. At midnight.
Whatever he's holding back, he'll tell me when he's ready.
Or I'll take it from him when I'm ready.
The Question That Costs Him Everything
He runs out of architecture.
