Page 123 of Knight
He has been ready longer than any of us knew.
"We get him back."
From the phone on the counter, Santino's voice. Tight. Lethal. Already building — I can hear it in the rhythm of his breathing, the tactical architecture assembling between his exhales the way it assembled before the Marchese campaign, before the Vescari warehouse, before every operation where Santino Rivas transforms from a man into a machine designed to bring his brothers home alive.
"I'm pulling up now."
The elevator chimes. The doors open. Santino walks into my penthouse with Pia one step behind him and his eyes scanning the room the way they scan every room — exits, angles, threat assessment completed before his second foot crosses the threshold.
He looks at me. I look at him. The photograph sits on the counter between the cereal bowls and Nova's napkin note. Dante's blood on a screen next toYou're my favorite weirdo.
Giovanni would have closed the door. He would have retreated to his study with Fabio and built the response in private because the King trusted no one fully and shared nothing freely and operated on the principle that power lives in the hands of the man who holds the most information.
I do not close the door.
I open the room.
To my wife — who is already pulling a chair to the counter because she will be in this room for every decision that follows and the man she married knows better than to suggest otherwise. To Guido — who takes the stool beside the chess board and folds his hands the way he folds them before a game begins. To Santino — who leans against the counter with his arms crossed and his scar catching the kitchen light. To Pia — who stands at Santino's shoulder with the quiet composure of a woman who has survived the Rivas world and earned her place in its war rooms.
This is my family. Assembled from wreckage. Built from choice. Held together by the specific, stubborn, irrational refusal of six people to let the worst of their histories win.
Giovanni built on obedience.
I build on this.
Santino pulls his phone out. Lays it on the counter. "Fabio has the coordinates from the message. He's running them against satellite feeds and cross-referencing with known Marchese properties. We'll have a location analysis within the hour."
"The Marchese folded," I say. "This is beyond them."
"The Mole," Guido says. Two words. His first since he appeared in the hallway. They carry the weight of every chess game he has played, every silent observation he has catalogued, every hour he has spent watching this family from the edges and building conclusions his brothers have not yet reached.
Santino nods. "The Mole was never their asset. The Mole used them. The Marchese war was cover. The real operation was always Isadora, and the silence was never retreat."
I pull the photograph up on my phone one final time. My brother's face. His blood. The chains holding him to a chair in a room designed to give us nothing.
Somewhere in this city, in a room with no windows, Dante Rivas is bleeding. The brother who watches everyone. The brother who cleared paths through a war without anyone seeing him move. The brother Giovanni held by the throat when he was fifteen and I called the Vescari to save.
I set the phone facedown on the counter.
The cracked Knight chess piece is on my desk in the other room. The fractured marble horse that arrived on Santino's doorstep and started everything. I do not look at it. I do not need to.
I am no longer the broken piece.
I am the man who plays.
22
nova
What Comes Next
The Man He Became
Ihave watched every version of Romeo Rivas.
The charmer who stole my coffee on a Tuesday morning and grinned like the world owed him something. The boss who leaned against a strip club doorframe counting cash with a mouth that tasted like whiskey and expensive lies. The husbandwho slid a ring onto my finger in a courthouse that smelled like floor wax and looked at me like I had just pulled a pin from something he could not put back together. The man who sat on a kitchen stool and emptied five years of poison onto the counter between sugar packets and a paring knife and waited for me to walk out the door.
I catalogued them all. Filed them the way I file everything — by weight, by cost, by what each version revealed about the distance between who he performs and who he is.
