Page 74 of Knight
I stop pushing.
The direct approach hardened him. I watched the wall rebuild in real time — faster, thicker, reinforced with the practiced efficiency of a man who has been fortifying that particular door since he was seventeen. Hitting it head-on willonly give him something to brace against. Romeo performs best under pressure because pressure is the environment he trained in. Giovanni's study. Boardrooms full of men who kill for percentages. The back office of a strip club where he offered a woman a transaction and watched her take it apart with her eyes.
He knows how to fight. He does not know how to be watched.
So I watch.
Over the next three days I stop asking questions and start reading the architecture of what this family does not say. I sit at dinner tables and strategy meetings and quiet mornings in the penthouse kitchen, and I listen to the spaces between words the way I used to listen to the spaces between my mother's promises — because the truth always lived in the gaps.
Santino never mentions Giovanni's death in front of Romeo.
This is deliberate. These brothers argue about everything — territory, tactics, the proper way to handle the Marchese, whether consolidation is cowardice or strategy. They fight with the specific viciousness of men who love each other enough to draw blood with their words. But the one subject Santino avoids — carefully, surgically, the way a man avoids a wound he knows will not survive being touched — is the night the King died.
He talks about Giovanni's legacy. Giovanni's network. Giovanni's alliances. He references the empire the way a historian references a dead civilization — with clinical distance, as a structure to be studied rather than a man to be mourned. But the death itself — the cobra, the gift box, the wedding night — Santino steers around it with the precision of a man who has mapped the exact perimeter of his brother's breaking point and refuses to cross it.
That omission tells me everything. Santino knows. Whatever Romeo carries, Santino carries the knowledge of it —and his silence is protection, the older brother standing guard over a wound he cannot heal but will not let anyone else touch.
Dante is different.
Dante watches Romeo the way I watch Romeo — constantly, quietly, from the edges of rooms where his stillness makes him invisible. But when Giovanni's name surfaces in conversation, Dante's dark eyes shift to his brother with something I have been trying to name for days.
It is recognition. The look of someone who knows a secret is being carried because they have felt the weight of it pressing against their own walls. Dante does not know the specifics — I can see that in the way his gaze searches rather than confirms. But he senses the shape of it. He is waiting. Watching his brother the way you watch a load-bearing beam that has started to bow — with patience, with dread, with the understanding that when it breaks, everything above it comes down.
And Guido. The youngest. The one who plays chess on the kitchen counter with my brother and lets my sister braid his hair. Guido flinches at Giovanni's name too — a different flinch, younger, carrying the particular sting of a boy who was hurt by a man he never had the chance to know well enough to hate properly.
Four brothers. Four wounds. The same earthquake running beneath all of them.
Giovanni Rivas did not just die. He detonated. And his sons are still standing in the blast radius, measuring the cracks in each other's foundations, waiting to see which wall falls first.
I dry a plate at the kitchen sink and say nothing.
Whatever Romeo is hiding, it belongs to all of them.
The Way She Has Always Found Answers
I pour coffee at six-thirty and make my decision over the sound of the espresso machine grinding beans that cost more than my old weekly grocery budget.
I will find the truth. I will find it the way I have always found the things I needed — quietly, patiently, by standing in the margins where powerful people forget to perform.
My mother taught me this. She did not mean to. But in the two years I spent watching her unravel before she disappeared — the phone calls she took in the bathroom with the faucet running, the smiles that arrived a half-beat too late, the mornings when her mascara was already on at five AM because she had never taken it off from the night before — I learned that people broadcast their secrets constantly. They just broadcast them in frequencies most people are too busy to hear.
I hear everything.
I heard it on the floor of The River Club — which customers were dangerous and which were sad, which bouncers were reliable and which ones would look the other way for a twenty, which girls were dancing because they chose it and which ones were dancing because the alternative was worse. I read those rooms the way a pilot reads instruments — scanning, measuring, adjusting — because misreading a room on that floor could cost me a shift and misreading a room in my apartment could cost my siblings a meal.
The Rivas world operates on the same frequency. Higher stakes. Louder static. But the signal is identical — people hiding things in the spaces between their words, tucking their worst truths inside gestures so small they believe nobody is watching.
I am always watching.
Confronting Romeo again will give him a wall to push against. He is built for confrontation — raised in a house where every conversation was a contest and the winner was whoever controlled the room with the most convincing version of calm. I pushed. He hardened. The wall came up faster than I could breach it and now he is fortified against exactly the kind of direct assault I deployed.
I will not make that mistake again.
Instead, I will do what I did at the club when Marco was shorting my pay. I will watch the ledger. I will track the discrepancies. I will stand in the room with my arms folded and my mouth closed until the pattern becomes visible — because patterns always become visible if you are patient enough and quiet enough and willing to be underestimated.
Guido. The name surfaces in my mind with the particular clarity of a decision that has already been made and is only now announcing itself. He is the brother who offered my brother chess and my sister his patience. He is the one who looked at me across the kitchen counter with Zina's dark eyes and said something that has been sitting in my mind ever since:Romeo deserves the chance to say it himself.
Which means Guido knows what Romeo is carrying. He knows and he is waiting — the way I am waiting, the way Dante is waiting — for Romeo to break open or break down.
