Page 48 of Knight
"Ask me again," I say against his throat.
He pulls back just enough to look at me. His eyes are soft now, the fear and desperation replaced by something warmer, steadier. His thumb traces the line of my jaw.
"Marry me," he says. "Tonight."
"Yes."
The word is simple. It doesn't need to be anything else. He kisses me—soft this time, gentle, his lips moving against mine like a promise he intends to keep. And in my kitchen at midnight, with my bare ass on the counter and his heart beating against mine, I believe him.
The building settles around us with its groaning pipes and its bleach-scrubbed stairwell… its broken elevator and its four flights of steps that a man in Italian leather shoes climbed twice for me. I pull him to my bedroom to stay the night.
When my eyes open again the kitchen stove light is still on and Romeo is lying behind me on a bed that's too small for him, his arm wrapped around my waist, his face pressed into the back of my neck. He's asleep. His breathing has finally gone even.
In the morning I will wake Tomás and Marisol. I will make eggs and pack lunches and write a napkin note and tell them nothing.
I will marry Romeo Rivas before lunch.
And the woman who held three lives together with bare hands and stripper's tips will walk into a world where the dangers arrive with blood on them.
I close my eyes. His arm tightens around me in his sleep.
I let it.
9
romeo
Husband
Twenty-Two Dollars
The courthouse smells like floor wax and recycled air and the stale coffee someone left on the clerk's desk three hours ago.
Fabio arranged the judge. Cash payment, sealed record, a signature from a man who has processed enough Rivas paperwork over the decades to know that silence is a jobrequirement and curiosity is a resignation letter. The judge is sixty, grey-haired, wearing glasses that sit crooked on his nose, and he looks at Nova and me with the professional disinterest of a man being paid to forget our faces before we leave the building.
No flowers. No family. No pews. No audience.
The room is small — wood-paneled walls, a desk, two chairs we don't sit in, and an American flag in the corner with a crease in the fabric that tells me it hasn't been unfolded since it was delivered. The overhead light buzzes at a frequency that drills into my molars.
Nova is standing beside me in a white dress with small blue flowers.
Twenty-two dollars. She bought it at a gas station on the drive over. I pulled into the lot for fuel and she walked inside without saying a word, came back seven minutes later holding a plastic bag, and changed in the bathroom while I stood at the pump watching the numbers climb and trying to figure out what was happening inside my chest.
I offered to take her somewhere. A boutique. A department store. Anywhere. She looked at me like I'd suggested we detour through hell and said — with the same directness she uses to tell me my coffee is terrible —I'm not getting married in jeans, Romeo. I'm also not getting married in a dress that costs more than my rent. Give me five minutes.
Five minutes.
She came out of that gas station bathroom in twenty-two dollars of cotton and she looked like she'd been painted into existence by someone who understood that beauty has nothing to do with price tags and everything to do with the woman wearing them. The dress hits just above her knees. Her hair is down — natural, wild, the curls she straightens for the stage freed for the first time I've seen in daylight. Her sneakers are white and old and she didn't apologize for them.
The judge opens a leather folder. He reads the words.
I expected this to feel like a contract. A legal maneuver executed in a room that smells like bureaucracy — sign, stamp, file, done. A chess move dressed in matrimonial language. I expected to stand here and feel the strategic satisfaction of a man who has voided the Marchese pact with a signature and bought his family time.
The judge saysdo you take this womanand the words enter my body like a language I've never heard before.
Something behind my sternum cracks open and I don't know what to do with whatever is spilling out. I look at Nova. She is looking at me. Her chin is lifted. Her brown eyes are clear and steady and holding mine with an intensity that tells me she meant every word she said in her kitchen last night.
You look at me and you mean something.
