Page 95 of Pawn

“Yeah.” He exhales. Runs his hand through his hair. “That’s what I was afraid of.”

“Romeo—“

“Shut up. I’m not finished.” His voice drops. Nova hears the register from when the doors are closed, the empire is irrelevant, and the man underneath is speaking. “If someone did this with my daughter — if a boy from an enemy family appeared in her life, slept with her, brought her into a house I spent her entire life keeping her away from — I would burn their city.”

The sentence fills the hallway. Every syllable precise. Romeo is not threatening me. He is translating. Taking the volcanic fury coded inside Vittore’s diplomatic language and handing it to me in words I can carry into the room where I’ll face Emiliano.

“You hear what I’m saying?” Romeo pushes off the wall. One step closer. “His rage makes sense. I’m standing here with Nova eight weeks from delivery and a dead father’s ghost reaching for my baby through a medical trust — and even with all of that shit pressing on my chest, the thought of some kid touching my daughter twenty years from now makes me want to dismantle buildings. Emiliano isn’t crazy. He’s a father.”

“A father who locked her in a cage for twenty years.”

“A father who built the cage because he thought it was a shield.” Romeo’s jaw works. “Giovanni did the same thing. Different architecture, same fucking instinct — protect what you made by controlling what it touches. The difference is Emiliano loves Liana the way Giovanni never loved any of us. That’s what makes him more dangerous, not less.”

He stops. The hallway holds the silence between us the way hallways in this family always do — like a third body standing in the space, breathing.

“So when you talk to him — and you will have to talk to him — you walk in knowing that.” Romeo’s voice goes quiet. The dangerous quiet. The one that means the next words cost something. “You walk in knowing his fury is love. The same way yours is.”

I hold his eyes. My brother. The man who married Nova because he chose her, who dismantled Giovanni’s contract and rebuilt his empire on open doors instead of locked ones. Giovanni would have used this intelligence as leverage — Emiliano’s fury as a bargaining chip, a pressure point, a weapon filed away for the moment it could do maximum damage.

Romeo hands it to me as empathy.

“I’m not sending her back,” I say.

“I know you’re not.” Something moves across Romeo’s face — pride and terror braided together, the expression of a man watching his youngest brother step onto a square the board doesn’t let you retreat from. “That’s why I’m telling you what you’re walking into. So when he comes at you — and he will come at you — you don’t flinch. You stand there, and you see the father behind the fury. And you make him see the man behind the boy.”

He puts his hand on my shoulder. Two seconds. Then drops it, turns, and walks toward the bedroom where Nova is sleeping.

The Knight preparing the Pawn for the hardest square on the board.

The Strongest Heart Sits Down

Fabio’s estate. Forty minutes north. The room underground — poured concrete, one light, two chairs, ventilation humming like it’s trying to breathe for the men who can’t. The kind of room where confessions go to die, and the walls don’t give a fuck what you said because nobody’s ever coming down here to check.

I told Romeo I’d go alone. He didn’t argue. Santino did — arms crossed, scar white under the kitchen light, the Bishop’s jaw set in that specific way that means I should be the one in that chair. Dante said nothing. Dante doesn’t need to say anything when his eyes do the diagnostic, and his silence carries the verdict.

But Costa didn’t break for the blade. Didn’t break for the machine. Costa broke one hand — a twitch, a single fucking twitch — and dropped one sentence that none of them knew what to do with.

The question is not whom he mapped. The question is what he was building.

That sentence has been eating me alive for days.

Costa looks like death warmed over and served cold. Sixty pounds gone. Cheekbones sharp enough to cut glass. His hands sit on the table — the same hands that pressed a stethoscope to my chest when I was six, the same hands that filed intelligence on my family to a dead king for twenty fucking years while bringing cannoli to Sunday dinner and arguing with Santino about the Saints. The mole. The physician. The man who held my chin when I was nine and told me I had the strongest heart in this house.

And then sold us all out.

I pull the chair back. Metal on concrete — the sound ricochets off every wall. I sit.

“You look like shit, Costa.”

His eyes find mine. Something moves behind them — recognition, maybe. Fear, definitely. But beneath both, something I didn’t expect and wasn’t prepared for.

Relief.

The old man is relieved to see me.

“Guido.” My name, out of his mouth, sounds like a prayer he’s held for seven months. His voice is wrecked — gravel and rust and whatever’s left after you stop talking for half a year and the silence eats your throat raw.

“Don’t say my name like that.” I keep my voice flat. Zina’s register — the one I learned without knowing I was learning it. Direct. Stripped. No performance. “You don’t get to say my name like you’re glad to see me. Not after what you did.”