Page 84 of Knight
I have the outline now. The shape of the wound. The name of the knife.
What I do with it next will determine whether this marriage survives contact with the truth.
The Decision Not to Confront
My feet are already turning toward the office door before I catch myself.
The impulse is clean and sharp — the same impulse that sent me into Marco's face at the club, the same impulse that made me sit at Romeo's kitchen table and demand he look at me when he said the words. I have earned this. I signed my name on a courthouse certificate and traded my identity for his and moved my siblings into a penthouse that gets breached by ghosts. I have been photographed. Threatened. Dragged into a war that smells like blood money and old grudges and the particular cruelty of men who settle debts with bodies instead of dollars.
I have a right to walk through that door and put my hand on his chest and say tell me about the Vescari and watch whatever is left of his performance collapse under the weight of being caught.
My hand is on the hallway wall. My pulse is in my fingers. The office door is twelve feet away and the truth is behind it.
I do not move.
Because I have watched this man's defenses long enough to know their blueprint. I know what happens when I push Romeo Rivas directly — I have done it twice and both times the same sequence fired. The charm loads first. The grin, the redirect, the joke designed to make me smile so the conversation pivots to ground he controls. If the charm fails, the wall goes up — faster, thicker, reinforced with the practiced speed of a man who has been sealing that particular door since he was seventeen years old.
And if I hit him with a half-heard conversation — fragments, names, a sentence spoken through wood that I was never meant to catch — he will give me a version. He is brilliant at versions. Smooth, partial, shaped with enough truth to feel honest and enough omission to keep the real thing locked behind the wall where I cannot reach it.
He will say something about the Vescari being a rival family. About Giovanni's enemies. About the complicated history of awar that started before I knew his name. He will frame it as context — background, strategy, the architecture of a conflict I married into. And every word will be technically accurate and none of it will be the thing I heard crack through his voice when he said I opened the fucking door.
I lean my shoulder into the wall and close my eyes.
I learned this lesson at eighteen. The week before my mother disappeared, I found a bus ticket in her jacket pocket — one way, dated three days out, her name printed in the passenger line. I confronted her. She smiled. She explained. She told me it was for a job interview in another city and she would be back by Friday and I believed her because the version was smooth and specific and delivered with the warm confidence of a woman who had been practicing the lie long enough to believe it herself.
She was gone by Wednesday. The version was a door she closed in my face while she walked out the back.
I will not make that mistake with Romeo.
I do not want his version. I do not want the smooth, partial truth he will assemble from scraps of honesty and years of practice. I want the real thing — the full weight, the full shape, the sentence he has never spoken to anyone who was not already inside the wound with him.
And that will not come from ambush. It will not come from a woman standing in a dark kitchen waving fragments of an overheard confession like evidence in a trial.
It will come from the right question. Asked to the right person. At the right time.
I open my eyes. The kitchen is dark around me. Through the wall I can hear the office door opening — Romeo's footsteps moving toward the bedroom, Santino's moving toward the elevator.
I stay where I am. I breathe. I let them pass without knowing I was here.
Tomorrow I find Guido.
Finding Guido
He is playing chess against himself when I walk in.
The board is set up on the kitchen counter where it lives now — between the coffee machine and the fruit bowl, pieces arranged on polished wood with the careful spacing of a museum exhibit. Guido moves a bishop three squares diagonally, pauses, then switches sides and studies the board from the opposite angle. His dark eyes — Zina's eyes, warmer than any of his brothers', carrying a watchfulness that comes from years of practicing invisibility — scan the pieces the way Santino scans a room. Looking for the weakness. Looking for the move that ends everything.
He looks up when I enter.
He does not smile. Guido rarely smiles — I have seen it happen three times since we moved in, and each time it was directed at Tomás, pulled from him by something my brother said that was too innocent to defend against. What he gives me instead is a softening. A shift behind his eyes that says I see you, I trust you, you are allowed in this space. It is more valuable than a smile from anyone else in this family.
I pour coffee. Take the stool across from him. Set the mug on the counter and wrap both hands around it because the warmthgives my fingers something to do while my mind assembles the question I have been building since last night.
Guido picks up a knight. The white one. He turns it in his fingers — the horse's head, the sharp angle of the base — then sets it on the board in the erratic L-shape that defines its movement. Two squares forward, one to the side. The piece that jumps over everything in its path. The piece that lands where the enemy did not think to defend.
I wonder if he chose it deliberately. If he knows I am here about Romeo and reached for the knight the way a man reaches for a loaded word in the middle of a careful sentence.
"What happened to Giovanni?"
