Chapter 7 #2
I know what that need costs. I've watched it cost a cobra and a coffin and a family split into pieces that are still trying to find their way back together.
I'm choosing it anyway.
I put the Knight in my pocket next to the Marchese letter and grab my keys.
The Cost He Is Choosing
The hallway between my office and the garage is forty feet long and I spend every step of it lying to myself.
This is strategy. This is the smart play. This is a legal maneuver that voids a contract and buys the family time.
By the time I reach the garage door I've run out of bullshit.
The strategy is real. A judge won't enforce a marriage pact against a man who is already married. The logic holds up in every courtroom and every backroom sit-down from here to Palermo. Santino will see the architecture of it. Even Fabio will have to acknowledge the elegance.
But I know what's driving this. And it isn't elegance.
Giovanni married Zina because he couldn't let her go.
He dressed it in strategy — legitimize Guido, consolidate the household, control the narrative.
Beautiful logic. Impeccable reasoning. And underneath all of it, a man so consumed by a woman that he rewrote his entire empire around keeping her close.
It ended with a snake in a gift box and a king dying on his knees believing the woman he loved had murdered him.
I am my father's son.
The thought scrapes through me like glass dragged across bone. I grip the car keys hard enough that the teeth bite into my palm and the pain is grounding in a way I desperately need right now because my mind is spinning too fast and the brakes don't work.
This is what Giovanni felt. This specific momentum — the certainty that moves faster than caution, the hunger that rewrites risk assessments in real time, the absolute fucking conviction that she is worth whatever comes next. He felt this for Zina. And it killed him.
I know the cost.
But the alternative. The alternative.
Marry Valentina Marchese. Stand at an altar in a suit that costs more than Nova's annual rent and say vows to a woman picked out by a man I helped put in the ground.
Honor the word of the King — the same king who had Dante by the throat with his feet off the floor while I watched from the doorway and decided to call the Vescari because someone had to do something and I was seventeen and stupid and desperate and the only option I could see was the one that opened every wrong door.
I honored his word once. I honored it by trying to save my brothers from him. And it got him killed.
Honoring it again — with my body, my name, my future — while Nova goes back to her fourth-floor walk-up and her shutoff notices and her life where I was just another man who showed up and disappeared — that is a circle of hell built specifically for me. Custom fitted. Engraved with the Rivas crest.
I will burn in a lot of places for a lot of things.
That particular fire I refuse.
The garage is cold. My car sits under the overhead light like a confession waiting to happen. I slide behind the wheel and the letter crinkles against my chest — the Marchese ultimatum pressing into my ribs like a second skeleton.
What I'm about to do will make Nova a target.
Her siblings become leverage. Her name gets entered into a ledger kept by men who settle debts with funerals.
I am about to drag a twenty-year-old woman who counts tips by touch into the most violent game in this city and the only thing I can offer her in return is a man who doesn't deserve her and a war she never asked for.
I turn the engine over.
The King's watch ticks against my wrist.
I pull out of the garage and aim the car toward Delancey.
The Call He Makes First
I'm on the expressway when I pull my phone from my pocket and hit Santino's name.
He answers on the second ring. Midnight and the man answers on the second ring because Santino Rivas has not slept through a phone call since the night the King died. None of us have.
"I'm going to marry her."
The words come out flat. Calm. Like I'm ordering a drink instead of detonating my entire life.
Silence.
The expressway hums beneath my tires. A truck passes on my left throwing orange light across the dashboard. The city skyline sits ahead of me like a jaw full of lit teeth and I drive straight into it while my brother processes what I just said.
Five seconds. Ten. Fifteen.
I don't fill the gap. He needs the silence and I owe him that much because what I'm telling him isn't a question.
It's a notification. I'm not calling for permission.
I'm calling because Santino is the only person on this earth who will understand exactly what this costs and exactly why I'm paying it anyway.
He chose Pia over the collar. Over God. Over the identity he'd built for a decade. He shed everything he was to keep the woman he wanted. If anyone in this family has the right to hear this first, it's him.
"Tonight?" His voice is stripped down to its studs. Pure function.
"Tonight."
More silence. I can hear him breathing — measured, controlled, the discipline of a man who trained himself to stay calm while the world burned around him.
"You understand what happens when they find out."
It is a statement shaped like a question and I answer it the only way I can.
"Yes."
"The Marchese will consider it a declaration. Caruso, Bellini, Fontana — they will fall in line behind the Marchese. The Shadow Network will view it as a direct violation of Giovanni's authority. You will have enemies on every side and the only allies you'll have left are the people in this house."
"I know."
"You understand I cannot protect you from this." His voice drops lower, and beneath the tactical precision I hear something raw — something that sounds like the older brother who used to stand between me and Giovanni's fist when I was twelve and too stupid to keep my mouth shut.
"I'm not asking you to protect me, Santino."
Another silence. Longer this time. The city is getting closer, the buildings taller, the streets narrowing as I exit toward the east side. Toward Delancey. Toward her.
Then — quieter. Almost human beneath the armor he's welded onto his bones.
"Make sure she knows what she is agreeing to." A breath. "All of it, Romeo. Every piece. If you ask her to do this without telling her the full cost, you are Giovanni. Do you hear me? You are him."
The words land in my chest like a fist wrapped in truth.
"I hear you."
"Then go."
The line goes dead.
I set the phone on the passenger seat and wrap both hands around the wheel. The leather is warm from my grip and my knuckles are white against it and I realize — with a jolt of something I can't name — that my hands are steady.
For three weeks they've been shaking. At the club. In meetings. Pouring whiskey at two in the morning. A tremor I couldn't kill no matter how much I drank or how fast I drove or how many hours I spent burning myself out in the gym.
Steady now.
The most reckless decision of my life and my body has gone quiet. Like the shaking was never fear. It was indecision. And now… the decision has been made.
I take the Delancey exit.
The Drive to Her Door
The city changes beneath my tires.
Past The River Club where the bass bleeds through the walls and the neon throws sick color across the wet pavement.
Past the Rivas territory line where every bouncer and bartender and corner dealer knows my face and steps aside when I walk through.
Past the blocks where my name carries weight, where a phone call from me can open doors or close throats or rearrange a man's evening in ways he will never recover from.
Into the east side. Where my name means nothing.
Where the streetlights are spaced further apart and half of them are dead and the buildings lean against each other like drunks holding each other upright.
Where Nova Vasquez climbs four flights every night carrying whatever's left of herself after six hours on a stage and counts the money that keeps three lives stitched together by a thread she refuses to let anyone else hold.
I park across the street from her building.
Fourth floor. Lights on.
She's awake.
My chest is a war zone. The Marchese letter pressed against my ribs. The cracked Knight in my pocket. Santino's voice in my skull — if you ask her without telling her the full cost, you are Giovanni — and the watch on my wrist ticking like a detonator that's already been armed.
I look up at her window and the light behind the curtain is warm and yellow — the stove light she leaves on because it's the cheapest way to make the kitchen feel like someone's home.
What I'm about to ask will make her a Rivas.
It will make Tomás and Marisol the siblings of a mafia wife.
It will put their names in files kept by men who use children the way generals use infantry — as positions to be held or sacrificed depending on the math.
It will drag a woman who survives on tips and grit and the stubborn refusal to ask anyone for help into a war authored by a dead king and endorsed by men who consider her life a rounding error.
I should turn around.
I should drive back to the estate and call Fabio and tell him to set up the meeting with the Marchese patriarch and I should put on a suit and marry Valentina and let Nova go back to her shutoff notices and her rocket nightlights and her life where the worst thing that can happen is a shorted paycheck.
I should let her go.
I get out of the car.
The stairwell swallows me whole. Bleach and burned rice and damp. Third step creaks beneath my weight like an old friend greeting me on the way to my own execution. Second-floor banister gap. Third-floor landing where the fire escape is rusted through. Fourth floor. Dead light. Her door.
I knock.
The deadbolt sticks. It has always stuck — the super never fixed it because the super doesn't fix anything in this building unless a pipe bursts or a body drops. I hear her hip check the frame the way she always does, that sharp thud of bone against swollen wood.
The door opens.
She's standing in the doorway in a t-shirt and shorts, her hair loose around her shoulders, her eyes sharp with the particular alertness of a woman who is never fully off guard.
The stove light behind her throws gold across one side of her face and the hallway's dead fluorescent leaves the other side in shadow and she is the most beautiful thing I have ever been afraid of.
"Romeo?"
I open my mouth.
Nothing comes out.