Page 120 of Knight
"I spoke with him Monday evening. He said he was running a secondary check on the Marchese withdrawal — making sure the perimeter watchers had actually cleared out."
"On his own?"
"He always works on his own."
The sentence hangs on the line. Both of us hearing it. Both of us understanding what it means — that the thing that made Dante extraordinary is the same thing that made him vulnerable. The brother who needed no one. The weapon who moved alone. The nineteen-year-old who cleared paths through a war without backup because backup would have slowed him down.
"I'll be at the penthouse in twenty minutes," Santino says.
The line goes dead.
Six hours.
I am pacing. The penthouse floor absorbs my footsteps the way it absorbs everything — silently, expensively, the hardwood built to muffle the sound of a man walking back and forth acrosstwelve feet of kitchen while the thing he was afraid of takes shape in the air around him.
Nova is standing at the counter. She has not asked. She has been watching me for the last forty minutes — tracking my path from the window to the fridge to the phone to the window, reading the pattern the way she reads every pattern, with the surgical precision of a woman who learned before middle school that the truth lives in the body before it reaches the mouth.
She knows something is wrong. She knows because my hand keeps reaching for my phone and finding nothing. Because my stride has shortened from pacing to circling. Because the man she married — the man who told her everything, who opened the last door, who saidI love youin a kitchen full of morning light — is pulling away from her and back into the machine that runs on adrenaline and dread.
She does not ask. She waits. She gives me the room to find the words because she has learned that pushing me toward them makes me build walls and waiting makes me tear them down.
Six hours and Dante Rivas — the brother who watches everyone, the statue who moves once and devastatingly, the boy Giovanni held by the throat and Romeo called the Vescari to save — has vanished.
The Photograph
Santino's voice tells me before his words do.
I answer the phone and the man on the other end is the man from the warehouse. The man who killed Carlo Vescari with his bare hands. The man who shed a priest's collar and walked out of God's house with blood under his fingernails and the specific calm of someone who has accepted what he is and will never waste another breath pretending otherwise.
Cold. Clinical. Every syllable stripped of the brother underneath and replaced by the blade.
"Sit down."
"Tell me."
"Romeo. Sit down."
"Fucking tell me, Santino."
His breathing is controlled. Measured. The rhythm he learned in confessionals where other men's sins poured over him and his only job was to hold the weight without cracking the booth. He is using that rhythm now — against me, for me — and the fact that he needs it tells me everything the words have not yet said.
"I received a message. Unknown sender. Coordinates and an image file."
"Send it."
"Listen to me first—"
"Send it now."
The line holds for two seconds. Then my phone vibrates against my ear. I pull it away. The screen shows a message from Santino. A photograph.
I open it.
The kitchen disappears.
The refrigerator hum. The drawings on the fridge. Nova's napkin note. The draft that rustles the paper. The cereal bowls in the rack. The chess board mid-game on the counter. The sound of Marisol's homework and Tomás's laughter and everyordinary, beautiful, earned piece of the life I built in this penthouse — all of it falls away like scenery torn from a stage.
Dante.
