Page 6 of Knight
She has been retained by the Marchese family.
She is already moving.
FINAL NOTE FROM THE COMPILER
The Rivas family has survived the death of its King. It has survived open war, internal betrayal, exile, kidnapping, and the slow corrosion of secrets held too long.
What it has not yet survived is the truth.
The truth about who Giovanni was. What he built. What he destroyed to build it. What his sons inherited along with his empire — not just the power and the enemies and the weight of the name, but the specific damage he did to each of them simply by being their father.
That reckoning is coming.
It always was.
The only question that remains is whether the pieces still on this board will be standing when it arrives.
— End of File —
1
romeo
Broken Pieces
The King's Son in the Dark
Two in the morning and I am staring at a dead man's chess piece.
The photograph sits on my phone screen, brightness turned all the way down like that will make it easier to look at. A white marble Knight — cracked straight through the chest, the fractureline splitting the horse's neck from its base. Fourteen words beneath it in Santino's handwriting. Block letters. No greeting. No signature. Because my brother does not waste ink on things that do not matter, and these fourteen words matter more than anything he has said to me in two years.
The Marchese family considers the pact active. They are sending Valentina. You have three weeks.
Three days since that message landed on my phone. Three days since I have slept more than forty minutes at a stretch. Three days of this photograph burning a hole through my retinas every time I close my eyes.
I reach for the whiskey. Macallan 18. The bottle is half gone and I do not remember pouring most of it. The glass is heavy in my hand — the good crystal, the kind Giovanni kept in his office because he believed a man's liquor should feel like something before it touched his lips.
Giovanni.
The King. The shadow. The architect of every cage I sit inside.
He has been dead for two years and he still runs this family from the grave. His alliances. His debts. His arrangements — marriages traded like property deeds, children bartered like collateral, futures signed away in rooms full of cigar smoke and handshakes that meant more than any contract.
The Marchese pact is his. The arrangement that says the second Rivas son will marry a Marchese daughter to cement a territorial alliance that was supposed to prevent exactly the kind of war that is now three weeks from landing on my doorstep.
The second Rivas son.
That is me.
I drain the glass. The burn is good. Sharp. It scrapes down my throat and spreads through my chest like a small controlled fire, and for three seconds I feel something other than thelow hum of dread that has lived in my ribcage since Santino's message.
The back office of The River Club is the only room in this city where no one calls me sir. It is small. It smells like cleaning solution and stale beer and the faint chemical sweetness of the fog machines they use on the main floor. Two surveillance monitors mounted on the wall show the club emptying out — last stragglers finishing their drinks, the floor crew starting the wipe-down, the security team doing a final walk. I am supposed to be watching them. I am supposed to be managing this place, because this is what I do now. The visible head of the Rivas family. The face. The front.
The crown I never asked for, sitting on a head that does not deserve it.
Santino should be running this. Santino is smarter, colder, more disciplined — built for the throne the way Giovanni built him, bone by bone, blow by blow. But Santino shed his collar and stepped into the shadows and handed me the keys to the kingdom like it was a set of car keys and said,You are the face now, Romeo. Act like it.
So I act like it.
