Knight (Shattered Pieces #4)

PROLOGUE

Zina:

WHAT THEY BURIED

They got the story wrong.

Not all of it. Not every detail. But the parts that matter — the parts that echo through this family like a wound that never fully closed — those they got wrong.

And I have spent enough time in the quiet of my exile watching the lies settle into the shape of truth to know that if I don't speak now, they never will.

So here is what actually happened.

Giovanni Rivas did not die by a bullet.

There was no blade. No clean, professional hit ordered from a distance by careful hands that wanted to stay dry.

I know because I was in the room.

I know because I was the one who found him on his knees, his hand cradling the bite, his eyes searching for mine with that last desperate human need to understand — why — even as the venom was already deciding everything for him.

A King Cobra does not negotiate. It does not miss. It strikes once, and what follows is just the body catching up to what has already been decided.

That is how he died.

Not with a bullet.

Not with a blade.

With a snake hidden inside a gift box. Black silk. A careful bow. A card written in beautiful cursive that made his heart warm before it stopped.

His wedding night.

Someone made sure that story never left the room.

Someone took the truth — specific, witnessed, undeniable — and replaced it with something cleaner.

Something that could have been anyone. Something that didn't point so precisely at the one person who knew Giovanni well enough to know exactly how to reach him.

I am not going to tell you who rewrote it.

You already know.

What I want you to understand is why it was rewritten.

Because a king who dies by a cobra on his wedding night — killed through something that looked like love, on the most protected night of his life, inside his own walls — that death tells a story.

A very specific story about access. About patience.

About someone who had been planning this for a very long time and knew exactly which door to walk through.

That story was dangerous.

So they buried it.

And they replaced it with a bullet. Or a blade. Depending on who was telling it and what they needed the truth to be that day.

I have heard every version.

I sat in my exile and I listened to the story travel across water, arriving in pieces. A rumor here. A whisper there. The official record and the unofficial one. All of them dressed up in the language of certainty. All of them wrong in the ways that mattered.

Men rewrite history the way they redecorate a room — moving the furniture until the bloodstains are covered and the space feels livable again.

I stopped redecorating a long time ago.

They got other things wrong too.

My son.

They will tell you he was small. Young. A child lost in the machinery of a world too violent for him. They will place him younger than he was — softer, more fragile — and some of that was deliberate.

Some of that was me.

When your son carries the blood of the most powerful man in the city, you learn quickly that visibility is a liability. You learn to make him seem less. Less formed. Less threatening. Less worth the effort of reaching for when you want to wound his mother.

I kept him young on paper long after he had outgrown it.

It was the only armor I could give him when I had nothing else.

But let me be clear about who Guido actually was when this story began.

Sixteen years old. Broad-shouldered. Strong-jawed. His father's face wearing his mother's eyes. Not a child who needed protecting from the truth — a young man who had been surviving the truth his entire life and never once asked to be shielded from it.

He was never small in the ways that mattered.

He was never soft.

He simply learned early that the wisest thing a person can be in a room full of dangerous men is the one nobody is watching.

His father would have understood that.

If his father had lived long enough to know him.

And then there is the question of where Guido went.

People assume we stayed together. That our exile was permanent. That Signora Bianca and her quiet son remained undisturbed in their coastal town, watching the sea and waiting for a war that had nothing to do with them anymore.

For a time that was true.

But exile has a cost that no one prepares you for. It is not the smallness of the life. Not the distance from everything you were. Not even the loneliness — though the loneliness is its own kind of weight.

The cost is watching your child outgrow the protection you built for him.

There came a moment — and I knew it before he did — when staying with me meant staying invisible.

When my protection had quietly become its own kind of cage.

When his brothers were fighting a war that was also his inheritance and he was sitting on a porch playing chess with driftwood, getting sharper and more restless with every passing week.

I made a decision.

Mothers in this world do not get the luxury of easy decisions.

I sent him back to his brothers.

Not because I stopped protecting him. Because I finally understood that protection sometimes looks like releasing the thing you love most and trusting it to find its own footing in a world that has never once made it easy.

He went back.

To the church. To the rectory. To the chaos of three men who shared his blood and his wounds and had no idea what to do with either.

He was not a child when he arrived.

He was not treated as one.

Not by me. Never by me. Not by this world — which has never once offered any of Giovanni's sons the mercy of being allowed to stay young.

There are other threads I could pull.

Other versions of events I could correct. Other stories that traveled across water and arrived wrong and settled into the shape of truth simply because no one with the actual knowledge was willing to speak.

But I have learned — over years of surviving in the silence of my own exile — that full disclosure is its own kind of violence in this world. You do not lay everything bare. You give people enough to find the door themselves.

What I will tell you is this.

The board has shifted.

The pieces you last saw in certain positions are no longer there.

The ones you thought were gone have not stayed gone.

And the game that Giovanni set in motion the moment he chose power over everything else — the moment he built an empire on blood and called it a family — that game did not end with his death.

It never was going to.

Shadows do not die with the man who casts them.

They simply find new walls to move across.

Romeo Rivas is next.

My stepson. The Knight.

Reckless in the specific way men are reckless when they are running from something they cannot name.

Charismatic in the way that men are charismatic when charm is the first armor they learned to wear.

Carrying a guilt so heavy it has bent his spine slightly — though he would never let you see that.

He has his father's pride. All three of them do.

He thinks the worst thing that can happen to him is being forced into a marriage arranged by a dead man's ambition.

He is wrong about that.

He thinks the board is complicated but manageable. That if he moves fast enough and recklessly enough he can jump over every obstacle before it becomes a wall.

He is wrong about that too.

What is coming for Romeo is not what he expects.

It never is, for Knights.

That is the nature of the piece — they move in shapes no one anticipates. They jump. They land somewhere the enemy did not think to protect. They create chaos not through force but through the sheer unpredictability of where they end up.

Romeo is about to meet the one thing his father's world never prepared any of them for.

Not an enemy.

Not a rival.

Not a war.

A woman who needs nothing from him.

And because she needs nothing —

She will cost him everything.

I have buried enough.

I have watched enough versions of the truth get dressed up and paraded through this world as history.

I was there.

I know what happened.

The rest is just what people tell themselves so they can sleep at night.

I stopped sleeping a long time ago.

— Zina