Page 10 of Knight
The Knight stares up from my phone screen.
Santino sent it from the estate. He would have been sitting at the long table in the war room — the one Giovanni had imported from Palermo, dark walnut, scarred from decades of fists and glasses slammed against its surface. Santino would have set the broken chess piece on that table and photographed it under the overhead light, deliberate as a coroner cataloguing evidence.
Three weeks. Valentina Marchese. The pact Giovanni signed when I was fifteen and too busy trying to make him look at me to understand what he was trading.
My future. My name. My body in a marriage bed with a woman I have never met, producing heirs for an alliance between two families who would burn each other to the ground the moment the ink dried.
That is what is coming. That is the war carved into the crack in the Knight's chest.
And all I can think about is her face when she saidCongratulations.
The way her mouth moved around the word. The way she loaded it — every syllable carrying the weight of grocery bags up four flights and emergency rooms and a ten-year-old brother who cannot breathe. She took that word and turned it into a grenade and dropped it at my feet and walked away without watching it go off.
I press my palms against my eyes until I see color.
Five years of Giovanni's ghost. Five years of the phone call I made at seventeen, the door I opened, the security rotation that shifted. Five years of Santino's forgiveness sitting in my chest like a bullet that went through clean but left the scar tissue thick and numb. Five years of smiling through boardrooms and VIP sections and meetings with men who would kill me for sport, performing the version of Romeo Rivas that keeps this family alive.
All of it pressing down tonight. The Knight. The pact. The guilt that never sleeps even when I do.
And cutting through every bit of it — clean, surgical, unasked for — a woman in a hallway who looked me dead in the face and told me I was failing.
Forget her.
I pour whiskey into the glass before I remember the bottle is empty. I set it down.
Forget her. She is a dancer on your payroll. She is a name on a direct deposit. She is nobody in the context of what is coming — the Marchese war, the marriage, the empire that will eat you alive if you blink.
Forget her.
I cannot forget her.
The File He Should Not Open
The laptop is under the desk where I left it three hours ago.
I pull it out. Open it. The employee management portal loads slowly on the club's network — spinning wheel, blue progress bar, the kind of wait that should give a man enough time to ask himself what the hell he is doing.
I type her name into the search field.
Vasquez, Nova. Employee ID: 3847. Hired: eighteen months ago. Position: entertainer — main floor.
Her file photograph is a straight-on shot taken against the back wall of the dressing room. No smile. No performance. Just her face, stripped of stage makeup, staring into the camera like she is daring it to waste her time.
Age: twenty.
Twenty years old.
Emergency contact: herself. The field where most people list a parent, a partner, a friend — she typed her own name and her own phone number. Because there is no one else. There is no one behind her.
Address: east side. A walk-up on Delancey I know by reputation — the kind of building where the super has not fixed the hallway lights in two years and the fire escape is rusted through at the third-floor landing.
She mentioned a brother in the hallway.My ten-year-old brother.But the way she saidkids— plural — means there is more than one. Twenty years old, raising children that are not hers, dancing six nights a week in a club she should never have had to walk into.
I close the laptop.
The cracked Knight glows on my phone beside it. Santino's fourteen words. The Marchese pact. A war that is three weeks from blowing the doors off everything my family has built, and I am the one standing in front of it because that is what Giovanni's ghost demands — the second son, the charming one, the expendable one, the one who opened the door.
I open the laptop again.
