Page 67 of Knight
The connection lands in my chest like a fist closing around my lungs.
I walked into this world to give my siblings safety. I traded a gas station wedding dress and my name and my body and every boundary I spent two years building — and the world responded by sending a ghost who walks through walls to stand fourteen blocks from my siblings.
The panic should come now. This is the moment in a different woman's story where she grabs her siblings and runs.Back to Delancey. Back to the broken elevator and the shutoff notices and the split sneakers. Back to dangers she can hold in her hands and count.
The panic does not come.
What comes instead is a heat so clean it burns the fear right out of my blood. Fury — pure, maternal, the kind that does not shake or scream or waste itself on tears. The kind that sits in a woman's bones and turns her into something the world was not prepared to meet.
Someone is hunting my family inside a house I was promised was safe.
I press my palms harder into the marble until my knuckles ache.
They have no idea who they are hunting with.
What Nova Decides in the Dark
Midnight. The penthouse breathes around me in its expensive silence.
Romeo's arm is draped across my waist. His breathing is deep — the real kind, the kind that only started happening after the night he confessed about the Vescari and I pressed my hand against his chest and told him I was staying. He sleeps heavier now. Trusts the dark in a way he did not before me.
He thinks I am sleeping too.
I am staring at the ceiling.
The security system hums behind the walls. Two guards outside the elevator — fresh shift, changed at six. Tomás is breathing through the wall to my left, slow and rhythmic, the rocket nightlight throwing its familiar blue glow beneath his door. Marisol's room is silent on my right. She checked the lock three times tonight. I heard each click through the plaster.
Three times. She used to check it once.
I lie in the dark and I run calculations that have nothing to do with the numbers that governed my life for two years. I am not counting dollars or measuring the distance between payday and the electric bill. I am measuring something else entirely — the distance between the woman I was when I walked into this penthouse in a gas station wedding dress and the woman I need to become to keep my brother and sister alive inside it.
I married Romeo to give Tomás and Marisol safety. I signed my name on a courthouse certificate and traded Nova Vasquez for Nova Rivas because the math worked and the math was all I had.
The math is broken now.
Photographs of my siblings taken from close enough to count the stitches on a backpack. A black envelope that materialized inside a secured penthouse like a magic trick designed to prove that every lock in this building is decorative. A safe house gutted fourteen blocks from where my brother sleeps. A name — Isadora — that turned the most dangerous men I have ever met into something I recognized instantly.
Afraid. They were afraid.
And beneath all of it, running like a wire through every wall of this family — the Mole. The invisible hand. The traitor who has been inside the Rivas infrastructure since before Giovanni died, feeding information to people who use it like a blade.
I do not know who Isadora is. I do not know what the Mole looks like or where they sit at the table or whether they havewatched me pour cereal for my brother and reported the brand to someone who files it under leverage.
I do not know the full shape of what Romeo carries about his father. The flinch when someone says Giovanni's name. The gap in every story he tells me about the night the King died. I have been collecting pieces for weeks and the picture they are forming is heavy with guilt and silence and a truth he is terrified to hand me.
I know all of this. I have catalogued every fragment the way I catalogue everything — by weight, by cost, by how close it sits to the two children who are my reason for breathing.
And I know one more thing.
I am done standing in hallways.
I have spent weeks pressing my back against walls, listening through doors, catching fragments of conversations that men hold in rooms they close to me. I have been the wife who waits. The woman who absorbs information through plaster and makes her decisions in the dark.
Whatever comes next — the war, the ghost, the traitor inside the walls — I will be in the room when it is decided. I will sit at the table where the maps are spread and the names are spoken and the math is done in bullets instead of dollars. I will learn this language the way I learned the language of the club — fast, without flinching, because my children's lives depend on my fluency.
I close my eyes. Romeo's heartbeat pulses against my spine.
My hands are beneath the blanket. They are fists.
