Page 73 of Knight
I have been standing outside it for weeks.
She Pushes
I choose the quiet hour.
Tomás asleep since nine — four minutes, rocket nightlight, blanket kicked to the floor. Marisol's light off since ten-thirty, her music playing low through the wall, the playlist she listens to when she is feeling safe enough to want something as frivolous as music. The penthouse holds their breathing like a chapel holds hymns.
Romeo is on the couch with his phone facedown on the cushion beside him. Macallan in his hand — the second pour, I can tell by the level in the bottle on the counter. His sleeves are rolled. The Patek Philippe catches lamplight. He looks tired in the way that sleep will never fix because whatever is eating him operates below the level where rest can reach.
I sit beside him. Close enough that our knees touch. Close enough that he cannot look at the skyline without turning his head away from me, and turning away would be an admission he is avoiding my eyes.
"Tell me about your father."
His mouth curves. The grin loads — fast, automatic, the same reflex I watched activate in his office the night he offered me the arrangement. A weapon that doubles as a shield.
"Giovanni Rivas." He takes a sip. Swallows. "King of the underworld. Terror of the dinner table. Made a hell of an osso buco, apparently. I never ate it. Santino said it was good."
A joke. Served warm. Designed to make me smile so the conversation pivots to something he can control.
I do not smile.
The silence between the joke and my response stretches. I let it stretch. I have learned that Romeo fills silences the way he fills rooms — with charm, with noise, with whatever performance keeps people from looking too closely at the empty spaces.
He tries again. Softer this time. The grin fading into something that looks almost sincere.
"He was complicated, Nova. Grief is — look, the past is the past. He died. We dealt with it. Every family has—"
"I'm not asking about grief."
His glass stops halfway to his mouth. The amber liquid catches the light and holds it.
"I'm asking about guilt."
One word. Five letters. I watch it cross the distance between us and land on him like a bullet finding the gap in a vest.
The smile dies. His entire face changes — the performance evacuating so fast it leaves his features slack, exposed, the architecture stripped down to the studs. His green eyes go flat. The pupils contract. For one second — one raw, unguarded, devastating second — I am looking at the man who lives behind every grin and every joke and every poured glass of eighteen-year-old Scotch.
He is terrified.
Then the wall rebuilds. I can see it happening in real time — the muscles in his face reorganizing, the charm flickering back online like a generator kicking in after a power failure. Faster than the last time I got close. More reinforced. The bricks going up with the speed of a man who has been rebuilding this wall since he was seventeen and has gotten very, very good at it.
"It's late." His voice is scraped thin. He sets the glass on the table. Stands. Walks to the window.
His back to me. His hands in his pockets. The city burning below him in a million lights and he stares at every one of them because every one of them is easier to face than the womansitting on his couch who just named the thing he carries like a tumor in his chest.
I stay on the couch. My hands are in my lap. My pulse is steady because I have spent my entire life watching people choose doors over me and I have learned to keep my heart rate level while it happens.
He chose the window. He chose the skyline. He chose the same silence he has been choosing since the first time I asked about Giovanni in the hallway weeks ago.
But I heard the answer before he closed the door.
Guilt. He flinched at the word the way Tomás flinches at thunder — involuntary, full-body, the reflex of a boy who has been hurt by that particular sound so many times his nervous system responds before his mind can intervene.
Whatever Romeo did — whatever happened the night his father died — guilt is the name of it.
And he would rather stare at a city than look at the woman who knows.
The Silences She Reads
