Page 98 of Knight
I pull my hand away. Step back. Wipe my eyes with the heel of my palm before Tomás can see.
"Top shelf, baby. The one with the bear on the box."
"The honey one?"
"The honey one."
Tomás shuffles to the pantry. Romeo watches him go. The look on his face is the look of a man discovering that the thing he has been terrified of his entire life — love, family, the ordinary weight of people who need you and stay — is the thing that has been saving him all along.
I pick up my cold coffee. Take a sip. It tastes terrible.
I drink the whole thing.
19
romeo
War and Peace
The Brothers Move as One
Santino spreads the map across the walnut table and my father's ghost flinches.
I know this because the table does — a creak in the wood, the old grain settling under new weight, the same surface that held Giovanni's fists and his whiskey glasses and thirty years ofdecisions that turned men into numbers. Santino lays a phone facedown on the Marchese's eastern corridor. Slides a pen cap to mark the Fontana warehouse. Positions a coffee mug over the financial channel running through Bellini's shipping front.
Three targets. Three days. One sequence.
"We take the money first," Santino says. His finger traces the line from Bellini's port access to the Caruso intermediary accounts. "Without the financial channel, the Marchese lose their ability to fund a prolonged campaign. Fontana's warehouse is their staging ground — it dies second. The eastern corridor is the visible asset. We take it last because taking it first makes us look like thieves. Taking it last makes us look like victors."
He does not ask if I agree. He does not issue it as an order.
He waits.
The room holds his waiting. Fabio is standing by the door with his arms folded and his reading glasses pushed onto his forehead — the posture of a man who has been in this room for decades and is measuring whether the new voice at the table sounds enough like the old one to trust. Dante is against the far wall. Corner. Sightlines to the door, the window, Fabio's hands. His dark eyes track Santino's finger across the map the way a hawk tracks a field mouse — patient, focused, already three steps ahead of wherever the conversation thinks it is going.
I lean forward. Press my knuckles into the walnut.
"Bellini's accounts are routed through a Midtown brokerage that closes at four. If Fabio's team can verify the intermediary structure by tomorrow morning, we move on the financial channel Wednesday. Fontana's warehouse runs a skeleton crew after ten PM — that is our window Thursday. Eastern corridor cleanup happens Friday, daylight, visible."
The words come out of me in a language I have been speaking my whole life. But the accent is different. Giovanni barked. Giovanni demanded. Giovanni stood at this table andpointed at a map and the men in the room moved because the cost of staying still was worse than the cost of obeying.
I am asking them to move because the logic is sound.
Santino's eyes lift from the map. He looks at me for two seconds and in those two seconds I watch something recalibrate behind his expression — a measurement, the older brother assessing whether the younger one has earned the right to stand at this table and draw lines that will end careers and bank accounts and possibly lives.
He nods. One dip. Decisive.
"Wednesday," he confirms.
Fabio shifts his weight by the door. "I'll have the intermediary structure verified by six AM. The Bellini contact owes me from the Marchetti situation — he will fold without pressure."
"Good." I push off the table. My hands are steady. They have been steady for three days — since the morning I told Nova the worst thing I have ever done and she held my hands against a kitchen counter and saidI am sitting right here.
Steady is new. Steady is the thing that happened after the wall came down.
We move on Wednesday the way Santino designed it. His plan is layered — three contingencies for each target, extraction protocols, communication blackouts timed to the minute. He builds strategy the way a surgeon builds an operation. Precise. Cold. Every incision calculated to minimize damage while maximizing result.
I execute the way I have always executed — on instinct, reading the room, adjusting in real time when a Bellini guard shows up forty minutes early and the financial channel requires a second approach through a loading dock Santino's map did not account for. I improvise.
