Page 25 of Rook

The cracker goes down at 5:48.

Saltine. Plain. Four bites standing at the counter in the dark before anyone else opens their eyes. I eat it the way I eat everything right now — fast, mechanical, a negotiation between my stomach and my willpower that willpower wins because willpower has won every negotiation my body has ever entered.

The nausea rolls in at 5:52. Right on schedule. A slow, greasy wave that starts in my gut and crawls up toward my throat like something alive. If I timed the cracker right, the wave crests and falls. If I missed the window, the next twenty minutes become a war I fight on my knees in the bathroom with the door locked and the fan running so nobody hears me retching at dawn in a penthouse that costs more per month than I made in a year at The River Club.

I timed it right. The wave falls.

My hand goes to my lower back. The shift — my body already making room for something the size of a raspberry that weighs less than a breath and heavier than everything else on this goddamn board. I catch myself. Straighten up. Because Romeo watches my body the way his dead father watched a room — with the obsessive attention of a man who will notice a quarter-inch change in how I stand before I notice it myself.

He already knows. The raspberry. Three weeks. The gas station bathroom with the buzzing fluorescent and the piss on the floor and the test I took standing up because there was nowhere to sit. I stood there with my jeans around my knees and my hands shaking and two pink lines staring up at me from a stick that cost nine dollars and I thought: I cannot afford this. Not the baby — the baby is math I will figure out because I always figure out the math. I cannot afford the fear. Fear is expensive. Fear costs you decisions. Fear makes you slow and soft and stupid and I have never been any of those things.

Romeo knows. I see it in the way his eyes drop to my stomach when he thinks I’m looking at the stove. We both know. Neither of us has said it out loud. Because saying it makes it a fact and facts become targets and in this house targets get people chained to chairs in concrete rooms.

Three weeks. A raspberry. A war.

My body is building a person. My husband is hunting for his brother. My sister is sleeping with her shoes on. My brother is sleeping with a chess piece.

I eat another cracker. Standing up. In the dark. The way I do everything.

Romeo is on his third call since I poured the cereal.

His voice is steady. Measured. The operational register he built during the Marchese war — low, specific, every word placed like a chess piece on a board where a wrong move gets someone killed. He gives coordinates to Fabio’s team. He uses words like perimeter and negative contact with the flat authority of a man who was born to run an empire and is running one from a kitchen counter next to a fruit bowl shaped like a turtle.

I hear the competence. His people hear the competence. That voice got a room full of dangerous men to stand down during a war. Romeo Rivas on the phone sounds like a man who has every answer and needs nothing from anyone.

I hear what the phone doesn’t transmit.

The tendons in his forearms. Taut. Cords standing beneath the skin like cables under tension — the body of a man gripping control so hard his muscles are paying the bill his voice refuses to send. His jaw working between sentences when he thinks I’m looking away. The small, rhythmic clench — the tell he’s never learned to manage because Romeo controls his voice and his face and his charm but his jaw belongs to his father and his father’s jaw did the same goddamn thing when the walls were closing in.

His eyes find me between calls. The scan. The involuntary check he’s been running on me since Knight. He scans me the way Fabio’s team scans the perimeter. Not because I’m a threat. Because I am the only thing in his world he cannot afford to lose and the scan is the closest thing to prayer a man like Romeo Rivas knows how to make.

He crosses the kitchen. Two strides. His mouth presses to the top of my head and holds. His lips are warm. His breath shakes against my hair — one tremor, fast, gone before a lesser woman would catch it. I catch it. I have been catching the things this man hides since the night he washed my dishes at two in the morning and drove home pretending he wasn’t already destroyed.

I put my hand flat on his chest. Two seconds. His heartbeat under my palm — faster than the voice on the phone suggests. His heart is running scared. His mouth is running calm. The distance between those two speeds is the distance between the man the world sees and the man I married.

I let go. He returns to the call.

Tomás pushes his chess piece three inches closer to his cereal bowl. The boy is watching everything. Understanding more than anyone in this room gives him credit for.

Costa walks through my front door at 10:14 AM carrying a medical bag and a smile and I watch him the way I watch every man who enters a room where my siblings sleep.

The family doctor. Mid-sixties. Warm hands. The kind of physician who remembers your kids’ names and makes you feel like he gives a shit whether you live or die. He’s been with the Rivas family since before Romeo’s voice dropped. He held Bella’s hand when the cancer ate her alive. He sat at her bedside and those boys — Santino, Romeo, Dante — they grew up watching a man ease their mother’s dying with steady hands. That kind of trust gets carved into bone.

“How’s everyone holding up?” Costa sets the bag on the counter. Black leather. Brass clasp. The contents visible — stethoscope, blood pressure cuff, pen light, a medication case with four vials arranged in a neat row. The neatness of a man who organizes his instruments the way some men organize their lies — precisely, with nothing out of place.

He checks Romeo’s blood pressure. Asks about sleep. The questions are appropriate. The concern looks genuine and maybe it is and maybe I’m a paranoid bitch who grew up reading men’s faces in a strip club because the ones who smiled sweetest were the ones who’d follow you to your car.

But I notice something.

Costa has come to this penthouse three times in five days.

Three. Fucking. Times.

Before Dante disappeared, Costa visited monthly. Quarterly if nobody was sick. That was the rhythm. Monthly to quarterly. The rhythm has tripled in less than a week. And Romeo didn’t ask for three visits. Romeo asked for one — a check-in, make sure the household’s holding. One visit. Costa turned one into three on his own initiative. Checking in. Making himself present. Making himself useful in a house where a crisis is running and information flows through every room like water through pipes.

I don’t accuse. I don’t know what it means. I grew up in rooms where jumping to conclusions got you hit and waiting to be sure kept you breathing.

I know a man who came quarterly is now coming every other day. A man with a medical bag full of vials and a smile that never wavers and hands that have held the trust of three boys since their mother died.