Page 131 of Knight
"I carry everything alone. It's what I do."
"It's what you did." His arms tighten. "Past tense."
I close my eyes. Press my face into his neck. Breathe him in — cedar and coffee and the salt of a man whose body has been running on adrenaline and love for six straight hours and just received the only news in the world that could make him hold tighter instead of letting go.
"A raspberry," I say against his throat.
"What?"
"It's the size of a raspberry. I looked it up."
His laugh is broken. Beautiful. The sound of a man who has spent five years believing he would become his father and just learned he is going to become something else entirely.
His hand slides down. Settles against my stomach. His palm is warm and wide and it covers the space beneath my navel where the raspberry lives — his fingers spread, the pressure is gentle and reverent. I feel every callous on his hand and every scar on his knuckles…the Patek Philippe is on the nightstand but his hand is on my belly — Giovanni's rhythm is not the one that matters anymore.
This rhythm is ours.
The clock ticks in the kitchen. Tomás breathes through the wall. Marisol's music has gone silent — she fell asleep with it playing, the way thirteen-year-olds fall asleep, mid-song, mid-thought, surrendering to rest because for the first time in years her body trusts the walls enough to let go.
Romeo's heartbeat is steady under my ear. His hand is warm on my stomach. The sheets smell like both of us and the city hums beyond the glass and somewhere in this quiet, dark, held-together hour, the last piece of something clicks into place.
Solid ground.
Whatever comes next — the dawn and the search and the war and the brother bleeding in a room I cannot picture and the family that will tear this city apart to bring him home and the raspberry growing beneath Romeo's palm — whatever comes next, this is the thing beneath it all.
This man. This bed. This hand on my skin. This life we are building.
Solid ground.
The Word That Closes the Story
Light comes in slow.
Grey first — the thin, pre-dawn wash that bleaches the edges of the curtains and turns the bedroom into something between night and morning. Then warmer. Gold bleeding through the fabric in long bars that stretch across the hardwood and climb the sheets and find the empty space where Romeo was sleeping an hour ago.
I am sitting on the edge of the bed. My feet on the floor. My hands in my lap. Watching him.
He is standing at the closet. Dressed. Black shirt, sleeves already rolled to his elbows. Dark pants. Belt. The holster goes on with the practiced efficiency of a man who learned to carry a weapon before he learned to cook an egg. His fingers buckle the strap across his chest and I watch the muscles in his forearms shift beneath skin I traced with my mouth six hours ago and thecontrast should feel like a fracture — the lover and the soldier occupying the same body — but it doesn't. It feels like the same man. It has always been the same man. I just could not see all of him until he stopped hiding the parts he thought would make me leave.
He reaches for the nightstand. The Patek Philippe. His fingers close around it and he holds it for a moment — the weight of it, Giovanni's weight, the dead king's rhythm still locked inside the mechanism. He looks at the watch the way you look at a thing you have carried so long your hand has shaped itself around it.
He puts it on.
The clasp clicks. Giovanni's clock against Romeo's wrist. He wears it differently now. The same object, the same ticking, the same dead father counting seconds against living skin — but Romeo's shoulders do not tighten when the metal settles. His breathing does not change. He carries it the way a man carries a scar. Part of him. Permanent. No longer bleeding.
He moves through the room gathering what he needs — phone, keys, the folded paper with coordinates Santino sent at three AM. Every motion is deliberate. Clean. The reckless boy who used to drive too fast and drink too much and fill every silence with charm so no one would hear the guilt grinding beneath it — that boy is gone. What moves through my bedroom is a man who knows the exact weight of what he is carrying and has chosen to carry it anyway.
He stops at the door.
Turns.
The morning light catches the green of his eyes and for one second I see every version of him at once — the boy at the gas station with a burner phone, the charmer who stole my coffee, the husband who sat on a kitchen stool and bled his worst truth onto the counter, the man who held his brother's photographand did not spiral. All of them layered. All of them real. All of them mine.
He looks at me.
I am sitting on the edge of our bed in a t-shirt that is his and shorts that are mine and my hair is wild and my feet are bare and I am the woman who walked into a courthouse in a twelve-dollar dress and changed his name and his life and refused to leave when every person before me did.
He does not say goodbye.
