Page 85 of Knight
I do not ask how he died. I know how — a cobra in a gift box on his wedding night, the venom deciding everything before the body caught up. The Prologue gave me that. The Dossier confirmed it. The family's coded silences at dinner tables filled in the edges.
I ask what happened. The thing behind the death. The architecture of the wound that makes Romeo flinch when someone says the King's name and Santino steer conversations around the subject with the surgical precision of a man who has mapped the exact perimeter of his brother's breaking point.
Guido's hand stops on the knight.
His fingers stay on the piece — thumb and forefinger holding the horse's neck the way he held it the morning he taught Tomás. Always forward. Never back. His eyes lift to mine and what I see in them is a calculation I recognize because I run the same one every time someone asks me about my mother. How much do I say. How much does this person deserve. How much will the truth cost the person it belongs to.
He holds my gaze for a long time. Long enough for the coffee to stop steaming. Long enough for the morning light through thekitchen window to shift one shade brighter against the counter between us.
The chess board sits between us like a map of everything this family will not say out loud.
Guido's fingers release the knight. He sets it back on the board with a soft click that carries more weight than any word he has spoken since I met him.
"That's Romeo's to tell you."
His voice is quiet. Steady. The voice of an eighteen-year-old who has lived inside this family's wreckage long enough to understand that some truths belong to the people who carry them, and taking that away — even with good intentions — is its own kind of violence.
I hold his gaze and do not push. Yet.
What Guido Gives Her Instead
"I know it's his," I say. "But I need to understand what I'm walking into."
Guido's fingers drift to a pawn on the edge of the board. He does not pick it up. He touches the flat top with his thumb — a reflex, a grounding gesture, the way Tomás touches his rocket nightlight before he closes his eyes.
"You're not walking into anything, Nova. You're already in it." His voice carries the specific authority of someone who has earned the right to speak about being inside something you didnot choose. He was born into this. Carried across the threshold of the Rivas world at sixteen by a mother who loved him enough to fight a dead man's sons for a seat at the table. He did not ask for Giovanni's blood. He did not ask for the wars it started. He swallowed all of it because the alternative was disappearing — and Guido learned from Zina that disappearing is a weapon you aim at yourself.
"He flinches," I say. "Every time someone says Giovanni's name. His whole body locks and then the grin comes and he redirects. I've been watching it for weeks."
"I know."
"You've seen it too."
"Everyone has seen it. Santino manages around it. Dante reads it from across rooms. I watch it happen and I remember what my mother told me before she sent me back to them." He pauses. Moves the pawn forward one square. Always forward. "She said Romeo loved harder than any of them. That he would rather set himself on fire than watch someone he loved get burned."
The words land in my ribs. I grip my coffee mug tighter because my hands want to shake and I will not give them permission.
"Whatever he's carrying," Guido says, his dark eyes steady on the board, "he did it for me. And for Dante. I don't know the operational details. Santino has never told me and I have never asked because some doors stay closed until the person inside is ready to open them." He lifts his gaze back to mine. "But I know the shape of it. And the shape is a seventeen-year-old kid who watched his father do something unforgivable and decided the only way to stop it was to reach outside the family."
My breath catches. The kitchen holds the sound — a small hitch, barely audible, swallowed by the hum of the refrigerator and the distant tick of the security system behind the walls.
Giovanni did something. Romeo tried to stop it. And whatever Romeo did to stop it led to the night the King died.
"He deserves the chance to tell you himself," Guido says again. Quieter this time. The repetition is deliberate — he is placing the words on the counter between us the way he places chess pieces. With precision. With the understanding that where something sits on the board determines everything that follows.
I nod. "I know he does."
"Then ask him." Guido picks up his coffee. Takes a sip. Sets it down with the careful economy of movement I have watched Dante deploy — the Rivas inheritance of making every gesture count. "Ask him and stay long enough to hear the whole thing. He will try to give you a piece of it. A version. Something that sounds like the truth but has the worst parts sanded down."
"I know how he operates."
"Then don't let him." His eyes are fierce now — the warmth burned off by something harder, something that looks like the protective fury of a brother who understands that Romeo's silence is killing him and the only cure is a woman stubborn enough to sit through the hemorrhage. "He will tell you and then he will wait for you to leave. That's what he expects. That everyone leaves once they see what's underneath."
The words hit me with the force of a hand against my chest. Because I know that expectation. I have lived inside it. I watched my mother perform love for a week and vanish. I spent two years expecting every good thing to disappear because every good thing always had.
Romeo expects me to leave.
He has been expecting it since the night he proposed — since the courthouse, since the penthouse, since every time he reached for me in the dark and held on like a man clinging to something he already believes is temporary.
