Page 26 of Knight
My phone lights up on the counter. The screen throws a white rectangle across the marble and I glance at it sideways, expecting Santino. Expecting Fabio. Expecting another problem dressed up as a question I don't have the answer to.
Nova.
Four words.
Marisol won't stop screaming.
My thumb hovers over the screen. I read it twice. Three times. The period at the end hits different than a question mark would. She isn't asking me for help. She's telling me what's happening because — fuck — because I told her to. Because somewhere between the arrangement and the apartment and the cracked joystick controller, I said something stupid likeif you need anythingand she actually remembered it.
Marisol. Thirteen years old. Sharp enough to cut glass with her stare. The sister who looked at me like I was a disease Nova brought home from work.
She's screaming in her sleep and Nova is handling it alone because Nova handles everything alone because that is the only setting she knows how to operate in.
I should text back. Something useful. Something that keeps me on this side of the line I drew.
Call me if you need anything else.
That's what a smart man would send. A man with boundaries. A man running a mafia empire with a thirty-day fuse strapped to his future.
I grab my keys off the counter.
I'm in the elevator before I finish the thought. I'm in the car before I can talk myself out of it. The engine turns over and I pull out of the garage too fast, tires chirping against concrete, the city opening up in front of me — empty streets, wet pavement, traffic lights cycling through colors for no one.
The arrangement was supposed to give me control. That was the whole point. A clean transaction. Cash for exclusivity. Her body and my money and a wall between us thick enough to keep everything else out.
Instead I'm doing seventy on the Eastside expressway at two in the morning because a woman I am paying to keep at arm's length sent four words and my body moved before my brain gave permission.
I run a red light on Delancey without slowing down.
This is a problem.
This is a fucking problem and I know it and I'm still driving.
The Apartment at Its Worst
The stairwell at two in the morning is a different animal than the one I memorized last time.
Third step still creaks. Banister gap still wide enough to swallow a kid's arm at the second landing. But the light on the fourth floor has died since I was here, and someone three floors down is screaming at someone else about money or drugs or both, their voices bouncing off concrete and peeling wallpaper until the whole building hums with it.
I take the stairs two at a time. My shoes — six hundred dollars of Italian leather that cost more than her monthly electric bill — sound obscene against these steps. Every footfall announces exactly what I am. A man who doesn't belong here. A man who came anyway.
The door swells against the frame when she opens it. She has to yank it with her hip, the same way I watched her do it from the stairwell the night I broke her rule. Except this time she's wearing an oversized shirt that hangs to her thighs, her hair loose and wild around her shoulders, and her eyes carry the specific kind of exhaustion that sleep will never fix.
She doesn't thank me for coming.
She doesn't ask why I'm here.
She steps aside and lets me in, and the silence between us is thick with everything she won't say and everything I can't.
Marisol is on the couch. Asleep now, curled into herself with the school hoodie pulled up over her ears and the television casting blue light across her face. Whatever nightmare tore through her has passed, leaving behind a thirteen-year-old girl who looks small, young. The sharpness in her face smoothed out by something she can only access when she's unconscious.
"She's been out for about ten minutes," Nova says, her voice scraped raw. She walks into the kitchen and leans against the counter with both hands gripping the edge. The stove light is on — always on, I've noticed — throwing a dim yellow glow over the laminate and the mismatched plates stacked in the dish rack.
I follow her. I shouldn't, but my feet keep making decisions my brain hasn't approved tonight.
This is the apartment without performance. Without the cleaned-up version she presented when I showed up uninvited with my jacket folded over her wobbly-leg chair. The dishes in the sink are real — three days' worth, maybe four. Laundry is folded on a kitchen chair but hasn't made it to drawers. The chore chart in colored markers is half-erased, the week incomplete. And on the counter, next to the permission slips held by the sunflower magnet she's moved from the fridge, there's a shutoff notice she didn't bother to hide this time.
Electric. Eighty-seven dollars past due.
