3. romeo #2
Santino goes still. Every muscle in his body locks at once — shoulders, hands, spine — the kind of stillness I have only seen twice before, and both times someone ended up bleeding.
His eyes hold mine and what I see in them is not anger.
It is something older. Something that lives in the marrow of brothers who grew up in the same house of horrors and carved different wounds into different walls and never learned how to touch each other without leaving marks.
Pia's hand tightens on her own arm by the door.
The room holds its breath.
Pia's Hand
Pia moves.
She crosses the room in three steps — quiet, unhurried, the way you approach something volatile without flinching. Her hand finds Santino's forearm. She does not squeeze. She does not pull. She simply places her palm against the muscle locked beneath his sleeve and holds it there.
She does not speak. She does not have to. Her fingers say everything — I am here. Come back. This is not who you are going to be tonight.
I watch my brother's body respond to that touch the way a clenched fist responds to an open hand.
The stillness breaks in increments — shoulders first, then spine, then the hands that were flat on the desk curling inward, retreating from whatever they were about to do.
His eyes leave mine. He looks down at Pia's hand on his arm and something crosses his face that I am not supposed to see — a flash of need so raw it makes my ribs ache.
She saved him. Right now, in this room, she reached into whatever dark place my words shoved him toward and she pulled him back. I hate that it was necessary—I hate that I am the one who made it necessary. I hate that Santino found someone who can do that for him — I have no one.
He straightens. The discipline reassembles itself — vertebra by vertebra, the architecture of control rebuilt in real time. When he looks at me again his eyes are clear. Cold. The fracture is still visible underneath, a hairline crack I put there with eight words, but the surface holds.
"One more thing," he says. His voice is level again.
Scraped clean. "If the pact breaks, it is open war.
The Marchese control the eastern docks, three distribution networks, and a private militia that outnumbers Fabio's security team four to one.
They will come for the estate first. Then the businesses.
Then us — individually, systematically, until there is nothing left with the Rivas name attached to it. "
He pauses. Lets the math settle.
"Dante. Guido. Everyone under this roof. That is what you are gambling with, Romeo. Make sure you understand the stakes before you decide your pride is worth more than their lives."
He takes Pia's hand. Folds her fingers into his. Turns for the door.
He does not say goodbye. He does not look back. He walks out with the woman who keeps him human and the door clicks shut behind them and the sound is quieter than the cracked Knight hitting the desk but it lands harder.
The office is empty.
The marble Knight sits on the wood where Santino placed it. The fracture line runs through the horse's neck like a fault line waiting to slip. I stare at it. The overhead light catches the crack and throws a thin shadow across the grain.
My brother's footsteps fade down the hallway. Then Pia's, a half-beat behind. Then silence.
Alone with the Wreckage
I pick up the Knight.
It is heavier than it looks. Solid marble, cool against my palm, the kind of weight that tells you someone paid real money for the set.
Giovanni's set. The one he kept in the study on the walnut shelf beside the Scotch and the framed photograph of his father — the original King, the man who brought the family out of Palermo and planted it in American soil like a virus with ambition.
I turn the piece in my hand. The crack runs through the horse's neck with surgical precision.
Someone did this with a chisel and a steady hand.
Someone sat down and chose the Knight — the piece that moves in angles, the piece that leaps over obstacles, the piece that is always two squares from where you expect it — and split it open with deliberate care.
A message. A promise. A preview.
This is what we will do to you.
My thumb traces the fracture line. The marble is smooth on either side of the break and rough inside it — raw, exposed, the way bone looks when it snaps clean.
Giovanni arranged this pact the same year he broke Dante's wrist for dropping a glass at dinner.
The same month he locked Guido in the wine cellar for six hours because the boy cried during a thunderstorm.
The same season he sat across from his oldest son and told Santino that God was a useful fiction and priests were men too weak to hold a gun.
He signed the Marchese alliance with one hand and destroyed his children with the other and never once saw a contradiction. Marriages. Alliances. Deaths. All managed with the same cold efficiency — pieces on a board, moved and sacrificed according to a strategy only he could see.
And I am supposed to honor his word.
I am supposed to marry a stranger because a dead man promised my body to another family's daughter in exchange for territory and distribution rights along the eastern corridor.
The irony is a knife between my ribs. I opened the door that let the assassins rearrange Giovanni's security.
I made the call at seventeen that set the dominoes falling toward his death.
And now I am standing in the wreckage of his empire being told to fulfill his dying wishes as though I did not help make them his last.
I should laugh. The sound builds in my throat and dies there, strangled by something thicker. Guilt. Always guilt. The companion that never leaves, the passenger who rides shotgun through every meeting, every deal, every night in this office with the bottle and the monitors and the silence.
My thumb finds the fracture line again. Back and forth. The raw edge of the marble catching my skin.
Nova's face at the door last night. Her jacket zipped to her chin. Her voice steady while her hands trembled in her pockets.
This doesn't change anything.
Two wars closing in on me. One carved in marble and soaked in blood. The other made of a woman who looked me dead in the face and decided I was worth exactly three hundred dollars and not a cent more.
Both of them are going to destroy me.
The Clock and the Craving
Three weeks.
This number lives in my chest, beating like a second heart – constant and unyielding, ticking away towards an inevitable fate I can neither escape nor charm my way out of, nor conceal with alcohol, intimacy, or the practiced smile that has always shielded me from peril since I discovered that facing a monster with a grin can sometimes deter its attack.
I set the Knight on the desk. The marble clicks against the wood. I leave it there — upright, cracked, staring at the empty room with its broken neck like a headstone for a war that has not started yet.
Thirty days and I do not have an answer. I do not have a strategy. I do not have a single move on this board that does not end with someone I love bleeding out on Giovanni's legacy.
Santino is right. He is always right. That is the curse of having a brother who traded God for war and brought the same terrifying certainty to both — he sees the board clearly because he has already accepted what it costs.
He will sacrifice. He will endure. He will make the cold calculation and execute it without flinching because that is what the family requires.
I am not Santino.
I pick up my phone. The screen lights up.
I should call Fabio — the head of security who served Giovanni and tolerates me and whose loyalty is to the name, never to the man wearing it.
I should call Dante — my quiet brother on the eastern perimeter, watching, cataloguing, doing the work I have been avoiding.
I should open the war room files and start building a defense against a family that outnumbers us and outguns us and has just told us they are coming in thirty days to collect.
I open Nova's employee file instead.
Her photograph. Straight-on, stripped of stage makeup, daring the camera to waste her time. Her address — fourth floor, east side, the walk-up on Delancey with the broken elevator and the rusted fire escape.
I stare at it the way a drowning man stares at a light on the surface. Knowing it is too far. Swimming toward it anyway.
The war is real. The deadline is a fuse burning toward a detonation that will shatter every structure Giovanni built and every life sheltered inside it. My brothers. Pia. Guido. Fabio and his men. All of it balanced on thirty days and a decision I am not ready to make.
And the only thing Romeo Rivas wants right now — the only impulse cutting through the guilt and the dread and the ghost of a dead King whispering you are not enough — is to drive to that fourth-floor walk-up and knock on a door I promised I would never knock on, and find out if a woman who does not flinch can make the noise in my skull stop for one more night.
I pocket my keys.