Page 59 of Knight
"The breach signature matches the original. Same method. Same blind spot in the internal network. Whoever penetrated your father's system is still embedded and they just proved they can walk through my protocols whenever they choose."
Fabio's words land heavy. The Mole. The same ghost that haunted Giovanni's security before the cobra. The same invisible hand that bypassed every firewall and every guard rotation and every expensive piece of technology Fabio has installed in the years since. Still inside. Still breathing our air. Still watching.
"How did they access the penthouse?" Santino asks it like a surgeon asking where the bleeding started — clinical, precise, already three steps ahead of the answer.
"Service elevator. The maintenance corridor on fourteen has a junction that bypasses the residential security feed. Someone mapped it. Someone who knows this building's infrastructure better than my team does."
Santino absorbs this. Files it. Moves on. "The Marchese have declared. The breach is the declaration — they did not need to sign it. By entering Romeo's home and photographing his family, they have communicated that the eastern corridor alliance is dissolved and hostilities are active. The Shadow Network facilitated access, which means Giovanni's loyalists are now operating as Marchese assets."
He lays out the counter-strategy. Communication protocols. Extraction routes for Nova and the siblings. A rotation of twelve men he trusts positioned across three locations. Pia will coordinate the civilian logistics — the schools, the medical contacts, the domestic infrastructure that keeps children alive and fed while their guardians fight a war.
Every word is precise. Every layer is considered. Santino has been building this architecture since the day he shed his collar, quietly, methodically, the way he builds everything — with the patience of a man who learned to plan inside a confessional and execute inside a crypt.
I agree with all of it. Every protocol. Every contingency. Every cold calculation designed to keep the people I love breathing through whatever comes next.
But beneath the tactical surface — beneath the nods and the questions and the operational language I have learned to speak in rooms full of men who solve problems with ammunition — my blood is running at a temperature that strategy cannot reach.
Santino is talking about corridors and extraction routes.
I am thinking about Tomás's backpack. The rocket ship patch Nova sewed onto the front pocket with thread she bought at a dollar store because the original stitching came loose and she could not afford a new bag. I am thinking about how his mouth was open in that photograph — mid-sentence, talking to someone, trusting the sidewalk beneath his sneakers and the morning around him because his sister promised him the world was safe now.
Someone aimed a lens at that trust and clicked.
Santino is talking about communication blackouts and safe house rotations.
I am thinking about Marisol at the bus stop. Arms crossed. Hood up. Her eyes locked onto the camera with the stare of a girl who has been hunted before — by poverty, by abandonment, by every version of instability a child can survive — and recognized the shape of it immediately. She saw the threat. She catalogued it. She told no one because Marisol has learned that telling people rarely changes the math.
Someone photographed a thirteen-year-old girl who already carries more weight than most adults and added a target to her back.
"Romeo." Santino's voice cuts through. "Are you tracking this?"
"Every word." My voice is level. My fists are white beneath the counter where he cannot see them. "Run the extraction protocol. Move the civilians tonight. I want Fabio's team doubled on the eastern perimeter by morning."
Santino studies me. He knows what is running underneath — he can read me the way he reads scripture, searching for the verse that reveals whether the man in front of him is praying or loading a gun.
Both. The answer is both.
This stopped being about alliances the moment someone stood close enough to my family to smell the fabric softener on a ten-year-old's jacket.
This is personal.
Nova Sees the Photographs
She appears in the hallway barefoot with her hair loose and every nerve in her body already firing.
I know because I have watched this woman walk into enough rooms to understand the difference between Nova waking up and Nova arriving. Waking up is soft. Slow. Thestretch of her arms, the yawn she hides behind her wrist, the sleepy drag of her feet across the hardwood toward coffee.
This is arrival. Her eyes swept the penthouse before her second foot left the hallway — Santino at the counter with his phone, Pia in the kitchen pouring coffee with the steady hands of a woman who has done crisis mornings before, Dante at the window with his back to the glass and his arms folded like a gargoyle carved from something darker than stone. She catalogued all of it in the time it took her to cross the threshold. Three strangers in her home who were not there when she closed her eyes. Armed men. Maps. The particular electricity in the air that tells you the rules changed while you were sleeping.
Her eyes find mine and she does not ask.
She reads it off me the way Marisol reads her — instantly, completely, the genetic gift of women who survive by decoding the men in front of them faster than those men can assemble their lies.
I pick up the photographs. I walk to her. I hold them out.
She takes them from my hands and the transfer feels like handing someone a loaded weapon with the safety off.
The first photograph. Tomás. Her fingers tighten on the edge of the glossy paper — a contraction so small I would miss it if I were not watching her hands the way I watch everything about her, with an obsessive attention that used to be desire and is now something closer to worship.
