Page 75 of Knight
I will go to Guido. I will ask the right question at the right time. And I will carry whatever he gives me back to my husband and lay it on the kitchen counter between us and give Romeo one final chance to tell me with his own mouth.
Because I did not marry a performance.
I married the man behind it.
And I intend to meet him.
The Fight That Becomes Something Else
He comes to bed at midnight smelling like cedar and Macallan and the particular exhaustion of a man who has spent the last three hours on the phone with Fabio running security scenarios for a war that has no edges.
The mattress shifts when he lies down. His hand crosses the sheets and finds my hip. His fingers curve over the bone, warm, familiar, the muscle memory of a man who has learned exactly where to touch me in the dark.
I pull away.
His hand hovers. I can feel the heat of it against my skin — an inch of empty air between his fingers and my body that carries more weight than any distance I have measured in this penthouse.
"Nova." My name in the dark. Low. Careful. The voice he uses when he senses the ground shifting beneath him.
"I can't." I roll onto my back. The ceiling is a grey void above me. "I can't be touched by someone who is hiding from me."
"I'm not hiding—"
"You are." I keep my voice level. Flat. The voice I use when I am telling Marisol something she does not want to hear — calm on the surface, immovable underneath. "You talk to me about the Marchese and Isadora and the eastern corridor. You give me the war because the war is the thing you are willing to share. Butthe thing you carry about your father — the thing that makes you flinch every time someone says his name — you lock that door and you smile at me through the keyhole and you expect me to pretend I cannot see it."
"You don't know what you're asking."
"I am asking you to trust me."
He sits up. The sheets fall away from his chest and the Patek Philippe catches a sliver of city light through the curtains. His breathing has changed — faster, shallower, the rhythm of a man whose body is preparing for a fight his mind has been dreading.
"I trust you, Nova. I married you. I brought your family into my home. I gave you everything—"
"You gave me everything except the truth."
The word detonates between us. His mouth opens. Closes. His hands grip the edge of the mattress and I can hear the fabric straining beneath his fingers.
"This is bullshit." His voice drops to a register I have heard him use with Santino — heated, defensive, the raw anger of a man who knows he is cornered and chooses fury over surrender. "You want me to rip myself open in this bed and bleed out whatever you think is in there so you can feel like you have the full picture? That's what trust means to you?"
"Trust means you stop performing for the woman who sleeps beside you every night."
"I am not performing—"
"You are always performing, Romeo." My voice cracks on his name. I did not plan for it to crack. The fracture surprises us both — him because he has never heard me lose control of my voice, me because I have spent twenty years making sure no one ever does.
The argument rips open. The words come faster — his defensive, mine surgical. We are fighting about trust and walls and the distance between the man who reaches for me in thedark and the man who walks to the window when I say the word guilt. We are fighting about two people who agreed to no feelings in a back office and are drowning in them and the only thing still keeping one of them from the other is whatever he sealed behind that door at seventeen.
His eyes are burning. My chest is heaving. The penthouse holds the echo of everything we just said and the silence where the one thing he will not say still lives.
The Collision That Solves Nothing
The argument does not end.
It shifts.
One second his voice is a blade and the next his mouth is on mine and the transition happens so fast I cannot track which one of us closed the distance. His hands are in my hair, gripping at the root the way he did the first time in the back office — hard, possessive, the grip of a man trying to hold onto something that is slipping through his fingers. My fists are against his chest, pushing and pulling, pinching at the same time because my body cannot decide if it wants to fight him or devour him and the answer might be both.
He tastes like whiskey and fury and the specific heat of a man who knows he is losing an argument he cannot win with words so he is trying to win it with his mouth. His teeth scrapemy lower lip. His tongue demands entry. I give it—then take it back, biting down.
