Page 25 of Knight
I close his door and sit on the hallway floor between their rooms. Back against the wall. Knees drawn up. The apartment is dark except for the blue glow under Tomás's door and the orange streetlight leaking through the living room curtains.
The routine is the same. Every night. Dishes, homework, bedtime, hallway. The ritual I built from wreckage when my mother vanished — the scaffolding that holds three lives vertical.
But the math is different tonight. For the first time in two years, the numbers in my bank account do not mock me. Rent is covered. The electric bill is paid. Tomorrow I will buy Tomás new shoes and Marisol a graphing calculator of her own and neither purchase will require me to choose which one of them gets to have the thing they need.
That should be the thing keeping me awake.
It is not.
What keeps me awake is Romeo on my carpet. Cross-legged, sleeves pushed up, pen stain on his forearm. Losing his thirdrace and looking at Tomás - like my brother was a language he had never heard before and desperately wanted to learn.
The image is lodged in my ribs like a fish hook. Every time I try to pull it loose it digs deeper.
I catch myself thinking about him. Abouthim— not the money sitting in my account, not the arrangement that put it there, not the body that pinned me against an office door while my hands clawed at his collar. About the man who sat on my floor and let a child beat him at a video game and looked up at me across twelve feet of poverty and saw me. The real me. The exhausted, terrified, stubborn-as-concrete me who has been holding the ceiling up with her bare hands since she was eighteen.
I hate myself for it.
Because I know what want does. I watched it dismantle my mother one piece at a time — wanting a man, wanting a life, wanting anything beyond the apartment and the kids and the grind. Want is the thing that made her put on lipstick on a Tuesday and kiss her children goodbye and walk out a door she never came back through.
Want is a luxury. Want is a virus. Want is the crack in the foundation that brings the whole building down.
And I am sitting in a dark hallway at midnight wanting Romeo Rivas with a ferocity that scares me more than any overdue electric bill ever could.
I press my skull against the wall. Close my eyes. My hands are shaking again.
I cannot afford this. I cannot affordhim— not the money, the man. The cost of wanting someone is the risk of losing them, and I have already lost everyone who was supposed to stay.
But Tomás smiled in his sleep tonight.
And I am already ruined.
5
romeo
Gasoline
The Text He Should Ignore
Two in the morning and I'm standing in my kitchen holding a glass of Macallan I poured twenty minutes ago and haven't touched.
The penthouse is quiet. It's always quiet. Fourteen months of quiet pressing against walls I've never bothered to fill with anything worth looking at.
The Marchese deadline sits in my chest like a fist. Twenty-seven days. Twenty-seven days before a dead man's signature drags me to an altar I'd rather set on fire. Santino's voice keeps cycling through my skull —thirty days, Romeo— that flat, measured tone he uses when he's already calculated three outcomes and none of them end well for me.
I set the glass down. Pick it up. Set it down again.
My father's watch ticks against my wrist. Patek Philippe. Left to me in the will like a leash disguised as an inheritance. Every second it counts is a second closer to becoming the man who wore it before me.
I should sleep. I should drink. I should do something other than stand in this kitchen replaying the way a ten-year-old boy in rocketship pajamas explained blue shells to me like I was the dumbest person he'd ever met.
Tomás. Laughing so hard his granola bar crumbled onto the carpet.
And Nova — twelve feet away in that doorway with her arms folded and her eyes doing the thing they do. The thing where she sees straight through every layer of bullshit I've spent twenty-two years perfecting and lands on whatever's underneath.
I told her it wouldn't happen again.
I meant it.
