Page 66 of Knight
He turns. His mouth opens and I see it — the reflex, the charm loading, the smooth deflection assembling behind his lips the way a gun assembles in the hands of someone who has done it a thousand times. I watch the machinery engage. I watch him reach for the version of an answer that protects me from the truth.
Then I watch him stop.
His mouth closes. His eyes meet mine and whatever he sees in my face — the same face that demandedtell me everythingover photographs of my siblings yesterday — kills the deflection before it reaches air.
"An assassin," he says. The word drops between us heavy as a spent casing. "A specialist. The kind you hire when you want something dismantled from the inside — infrastructure, security, people. She does not use armies. She uses information. She finds the cracks in a system and she widens them until the whole thing comes apart."
I hold his gaze. My arms are folded across my chest and I can feel my own heartbeat against my forearms, fast and hard.
"Emiliano Maritz." He says the name with the careful pronunciation of a man handling something toxic. "The most dangerous man in our world. A man who built empires andburned them and walked through the fire without flinching. When he heard the name Isadora, he went still. That is the only thing I need to tell you about what she is."
"And she is here. Working for the Marchese."
"Retained after the marriage voided the pact. The ultimatum was politics. Isadora is what happens after politics fails." He turns back toward the window and his reflection stares at me from the glass — transparent, ghosted, a version of Romeo layered over the city below. "She breached the Garfield safe house without triggering a single alarm. She extracted everything — weapons, cash, encrypted files. Forty-two thousand dollars and enough intelligence to map every operational asset we have on the east side. In one night."
"How?"
"Because someone inside is helping her. The Mole. The same breach that existed during my father's time. Fabio has been chasing it for years. He has never found it. And whoever it is has just given Isadora a key to every door we thought was locked."
The words settle into me the way bad diagnoses settle — slowly, irreversibly, each one rearranging the architecture of what I thought I understood about the ground beneath my feet.
I married into a family with an assassin aimed at its heart and a traitor breathing inside its walls. My siblings sleep in a penthouse that was breached three days ago by someone who walked through security like it was scenery.
Romeo is watching my face. Waiting for the fear to arrive. Waiting for the calculation that ends with me grabbing Tomás and Marisol and running back to Delancey where the dangers were small enough to carry.
I unfold my arms. Step closer to him. Close enough to see the exhaustion carved into the skin beneath his eyes.
"Then we find her before she finds us."
His green eyes search mine for the flinch. For the exit. For any trace of the woman who might choose safety over him.
He does not find it.
The Threat She Cannot Calculate
I sit at the kitchen counter with cold coffee in my hands and I try to do the thing that has kept me alive for two years.
I try to run the math.
On Delancey the math was brutal but legible. Rent: twelve hundred. Electric: eighty-seven. Tomás's shoes: forty on sale. Marisol's calculator: sixty. Every threat had a number and every number had a solution and the solution was always the same — more hours, more shifts, more tips counted by touch on a crosstown bus until the gap closed or the month ended, whichever came first.
I knew the dimensions of every danger because the dangers were built from money and time and the specific cruelty of a world that ignores people who cannot afford to be seen.
I cannot run this math.
Isadora has no number. No price tag. No line item I can subtract from a budget and solve by working harder. She is a woman without a face operating inside a system I married into six weeks ago, and the only thing I know about her is that she can walk through security protocols designed by men who havespent decades building walls — and she does it the way I walk through a broken elevator. With familiarity. With ease.
Tomás's cereal bowl is in the sink. The one I poured this morning while Fabio's voice reported a safe house stripped clean overnight. Forty-two thousand dollars in cash. Weapons. Encrypted files. Everything extracted without a single alarm sounding.
I set my coffee down and press both palms flat against the marble.
The safe house on Garfield is fourteen blocks from here. Fourteen blocks. The same distance between my old apartment on Delancey and the bodega where I bought Tomás's juice boxes. A distance I could walk in twenty minutes. A distance Isadora crossed in silence, gutting a fortified Rivas position the way a surgeon removes an organ — precise, bloodless, leaving the body alive but hollowed.
If she can reach a safe house fourteen blocks away without triggering a single sensor—
She can reach this penthouse.
She can reach the elevator. The hallway. The kitchen counter where my brother's cereal bowl sits with milk drying on the rim. The bedroom where Marisol checks the lock every night before she sleeps because a thirteen-year-old girl's hands remember what her mind is trying to forget.
