Page 7 of Knight
I sit in back offices at two in the morning. I sign payroll. I take meetings with men who would slit my throat for a percentage point and smile at them across restaurant tables while my knee bounces under the cloth. I wear Giovanni's watch — the Patek Philippe he left me in a will I never wanted to read — and every time I glance at my wrist I see his hands instead of mine.
My phone lights up. I look down. The Knight stares back.
Cracked through the chest.
I should call Santino. I should have called him three days ago. I should be sitting in the war room at the estate with my brothers, planning strategy, running scenarios, doing the workthat the head of this family is supposed to do when a rival clan sends a broken chess piece as a declaration.
Instead I am here. In this office. With this whiskey. Because here I am just the guy who owns the club. Here the bass still pulses through the walls even at closing time, and the vibration in the floor reminds me that the world is still turning and that not every room I enter has to feel like a funeral.
Five years.
Five years since I picked up a phone and called the Vescari family. I was seventeen. I was terrified. Giovanni had Dante by the throat in the study — literally, his hand around my little brother's neck, feet off the floor — and I stood in the hallway and listened to Dante choke and did nothing.
That night I made the call. I told myself it was protection. I told myself I was saving my brothers from a monster. And maybe I was. But what I actually did was open a door. And the people who walked through that door changed Giovanni's security rotation on the night the King Cobra came for him.
I did not pull the trigger. I did not hold the blade. I opened the door.
And the King died.
Santino knows. He found out in the aftermath — pieced it together the way Santino pieces everything together, coldly, precisely, like a man stitching a wound in his own stomach without anesthesia. He forgave me. Said the words. Meant them, I think.
But I have not forgiven myself. And the ghost of Giovanni sits in every chair I pull up to, every boardroom I walk into, every mirror I pass. His green eyes staring back at me from my own face. His voice in the back of my skull saying what he always said when I performed for his attention and never got it.
You are not enough, Romeo. You never will be.
I pour another glass. My hand is steady. It is always steady. That is the trick — the body performs even when the mind is on fire. Smile. Pour. Nod. Sign the check. Shake the hand. Be the charming one. Be the one they underestimate. Be the one nobody watches too closely because the grin is so goddamn convincing they forget to look behind it.
The surveillance monitor flickers. The floor is almost clear. I should lock up. I should go home — to the penthouse that still feels like a hotel room because I have not hung a single thing on the walls in the fourteen months I have lived there. I should sleep.
I pick up my phone instead. The Knight. The crack. The fourteen words.
Three weeks.
A war is coming and I am sitting in the dark nursing whiskey and staring at a photograph of a broken chess piece, and somewhere in this building a woman is about to scream at my floor manager over three hundred dollars, and that scream is going to change everything.
I just do not know it yet.
The Voice in the Hallway
Her voice reaches me before anything else does.
It cuts through the bass still thumping from the main floor — through the walls, through the whiskey haze, through thefourteen words burning a hole in my phone screen. A woman's voice, and it is not raised. That is the thing. She is not yelling. She is carving.
Every word deliberate. Every syllable aimed.
I set the glass down and listen.
"Three hundred dollars, Marco. You shorted me three hundred dollars because I missed a Tuesday shift to take my ten-year-old brother to the emergency room. He couldn't breathe. He was on the floor of his school bathroom thinking he was dying. And you docked me for it."
Marco's response is low, mumbled, the voice of a man trying to make a problem go away quietly. I know the tone. I have heard him use it on dancers before — placating, dismissive, the verbal equivalent of patting someone on the head.
It does not work on this woman.
"I am not asking you to explain the policy. I am telling you that you stole from me. Three hundred dollars. That is my brother's shoes. That is the electric bill I am already late on. You took food out of a child's mouth because I kept him alive instead of showing up to swing on a pole for your Tuesday night regulars."
Something detonates in my chest. Low and hot.
I am on my feet before I register the decision. The whiskey glass sits abandoned on the desk. The cracked Knight glows on my phone behind me. I am already moving toward the hallway and I do not have a reason. I have a hundred employees. Half of them have grievances on any given night. I do not walk into hallway arguments at two in the morning.
