Page 1 of Knight
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.
