Page 44 of Knight
The alliances, the territory, the timeline — all of it laid out on my kitchen counter like a blueprint for a building that's about to collapse. He's given me the structure. Now he's standing in the rubble of his own explanation with nowhere left to hide.
"Nova."
The way he says my name makes my ribs ache. Two syllables and each one sounds like it was pulled out of him with pliers.
"Marry me."
The kitchen goes silent. The refrigerator hums. The stove light buzzes at a frequency I've never noticed before. Somewhere below us a pipe groans inside the wall and the building settles another millimeter into its own decay.
"Tonight," he says. "Marry me tonight."
I stare at him. My arms are still folded. My back is still pressed against the counter. My feet are planted on linoleum I've mopped a thousand times and I do not move because if I move right now I will either hit him or kiss him and I'm not prepared to find out which.
He keeps talking. The words come faster — clipped, urgent, stripped of every smooth syllable I've heard from him since the night he fixed my pay with a single text message.
"My name. My protection. Your siblings — funded, guarded, taken care of. For life. A marriage voids the Marchese pact — legally, permanently. They can't enforce an arrangement when the groom already has a wife."
His throat works when he swallows. I watch the muscles move beneath his skin and I think about how different this is from the back office. That night he leaned against his desk and offered me a transaction with the confidence of a man who had never been told no by anyone who mattered. His voice was smooth. His body was controlled. He knew what he wanted and he knew he would get it.
This man is shaking.
His hands are at his sides — open, empty, the same way they were in the doorway — and his fingers are trembling with a vibration I can see from three feet away. He is asking me to marry him in my kitchen where the shutoff notice is still in the drawer and the coffee can above the fridge holds eight hundred dollars that used to be the only safety net my family had.
He is asking. And the asking is costing him something I can see in real time — in the way his shoulders have dropped, in the way his breathing has gone shallow, in the way his green eyes are locked onto mine with an intensity that has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with a man who is terrified I'm about to say no.
He's calling this a solution.
He's calling it strategy.
But the way his voice cracked ontonight— the way his whole body leaned toward me when he said it, like gravity had shifted and I was the only direction left — that crack told me something his words didn't.
He needs me.
He's wrapping it in politics and legal logic and alliance warfare.
But underneath all of it, standing in my kitchen at midnight, Romeo Rivas just told me he needs me.
And he has no idea he said it.
The Math That Finally Works
I pull the chair out from the kitchen table and sit down.
Romeo stays standing. Good. I need him above me right now — I need to look up at something while I think because if I look sideways I'll see the shutoff notice and if I look down I'll see my own hands and they'll be shaking the way his are and I can't afford that. I need my hands still. I need my brain louder than my blood.
I run the numbers.
Marry him. Marisol gets health insurance. A therapist — a real one, licensed, the kind that costs a hundred and eighty dollars a session instead of the free crisis line I've been praying she'll never need. A school that doesn't require her to borrow calculators from girls named Dakota. A bedroom with a lock on the door and walls thick enough to hold her nightmares inside instead of letting them bleed into every room of a four-hundred-square-foot apartment.
Tomás gets shoes that fit. Both of them. A doctor who can actually figure out why a ten-year-old's heart races so fast he collapses on bathroom floors. A nightlight that isn't from thedollar store. A bed in a room where the ceiling doesn't leak when it rains.
I do the math the way I've done it every night for two years — sitting in the dark hallway between their doors with a calculator app and a list of numbers that never balanced. Rent. Electric. Food. Transportation. School supplies. The ER bill I'm still paying forty dollars a month on. The therapist referral I taped to my bathroom mirror as a reminder of something I couldn't give them.
Marry him and those numbers disappear. Every single one of them. Replaced by a last name that means power and a bank account that doesn't require me to count fives by touch at one in the morning on a crosstown bus.
The cost.
I looked at that cost three days ago in his family's dining room. Armed men in hallways. Brothers who speak in code. A dead father whose name is still giving orders from the grave. A world where marriage is a political weapon and children are leverage and the woman who sits at the head of the table does so knowing that the silverware and the men holding it are equally capable of drawing blood.
