Page 42 of Knight
I look up at her window and the light behind the curtain is warm and yellow — the stove light she leaves on because it's the cheapest way to make the kitchen feel like someone's home.
What I'm about to ask will make her a Rivas.
It will make Tomás and Marisol the siblings of a mafia wife. It will put their names in files kept by men who use children the way generals use infantry — as positions to be held or sacrificed depending on the math. It will drag a woman who survives on tips and grit and the stubborn refusal to ask anyone for help into a war authored by a dead king and endorsed by men who consider her life a rounding error.
I should turn around.
I should drive back to the estate and call Fabio and tell him to set up the meeting with the Marchese patriarch and I should put on a suit and marry Valentina and let Nova go back to her shutoff notices and her rocket nightlights and her life where the worst thing that can happen is a shorted paycheck.
I should let her go.
I get out of the car.
The stairwell swallows me whole. Bleach and burned rice and damp. Third step creaks beneath my weight like an old friend greeting me on the way to my own execution. Second-floor banister gap. Third-floor landing where the fire escape is rusted through. Fourth floor. Dead light. Her door.
I knock.
The deadbolt sticks. It has always stuck — the super never fixed it because the super doesn't fix anything in this building unless a pipe bursts or a body drops. I hear her hip check the frame the way she always does, that sharp thud of bone against swollen wood.
The door opens.
She's standing in the doorway in a t-shirt and shorts, her hair loose around her shoulders, her eyes sharp with the particular alertness of a woman who is never fully off guard. The stove light behind her throws gold across one side of her face and the hallway's dead fluorescent leaves the other side in shadow and she is the most beautiful thing I have ever been afraid of.
"Romeo?"
I open my mouth.
Nothing comes out.
8
nova
The Proposal
The Man at the Door Who Isn't Pretending
The deadbolt fights me like it always does and when I wrench the door open I'm already annoyed — at the hour, at the humidity swelling the frame, at the fact that my body knew it was him before my eyes confirmed it. Something in the way heknocked. Three times. Hard. The knock of a man who drove here without deciding what to say when he arrived.
Romeo is standing in my hallway under the dead fluorescent light and he looks wrong.
The suit jacket is gone. His shirt is untucked, sleeves shoved past his elbows, and there's a crease across his chest where something has been pressing against him — a folded paper, maybe, held too tight for too long. His hair is wrecked from his hands running through it. His green eyes are wide and burning with something I can't name but I can feel — a heat that has nothing to do with want and everything to do with fear.
This is not the man who offered me a friends-with-benefits deal in a back office.
This is not the man who washed my dishes at two in the morning and pretended it meant nothing.
Whatever mask he normally wears — the charm, the loose smile, the confidence that drapes over him like expensive cologne — he left it somewhere between his car and my door. The person standing in front of me is raw, and the rawness makes him look younger than twenty-two. It makes him look like a man who has run out of options and driven to the one place his body remembers feeling safe.
My kitchen.
My threshold.
I pull the door wider but I don't step aside.
Behind me the apartment is dark except for the stove light and the blue glow leaking from under Tomás's door — the rocket nightlight, steady as a pulse. Marisol's light has been off since ten. She fell asleep on the couch again, school hoodie pulled over her ears, and I carried her to bed forty minutes ago. My arms still ache from the weight of a thirteen-year-old who sleeps like the dead because the alternative is nightmares.
"It's after midnight, Romeo."
