Page 34 of Rook

I don't let go.

And somewhere in the silence, in the space between her heartbeat and mine, the distance closes to something neither of us can measure anymore.

10

romeo

"Hunting"

Four days. Ninety-six hours of dead air and scrubbed concrete and my brother bleeding somewhere in this city while I drive through it like a man searching for a body he refuses to believe is a body.

I haven't slept. The coffee in the cupholder went cold two hours ago and I haven't touched it because my hands won't leave the wheel and my gut won't stop screaming and the Patek Philippe on my wrist is ticking the King's rhythm against my pulse like a countdown to something I can't name and can't stop.

Avenue 7. Industrial corridor south of the docks. Six AM and the streets are wet and grey and empty except for dockworkers whose cigarettes glow orange at the loading bays and one man driving too slow through a grid of warehouses because his youngest brother is chained to a chair somewhere in this district and the man cannot fucking find him.

I should have seen it.

I run that circuit every hour. The sedation — clinical-grade, dosed by someone who knew exactly how much it would take to drop a nineteen-year-old without leaving a mark. That's not street work. That's not Marchese money buying muscle off a list. That's a professional with training and access close enough to touch Dante without triggering an alarm.

And Dante saw the gap. Had his thumb on the phone that would have sealed the corridor in thirty seconds.

He put the phone away because I was smiling.

The real smile. The one that costs me and he catalogues it every time like a man counting eclipses. He sat on the opposite couch six feet from me and Nova's feet were in my lap and Tomás was asleep with the chess piece and the kitchen light was on and my brother — the sharpest mind in any room he enters — chose my one good night over his own safety.

The King would have locked the house. Would have deployed Fabio before the sensor cycle completed. Would have kept every door sealed and every window dark and Dante would still be eating breakfast instead of bleeding in a concrete room.

The King kept people safe by keeping them caged.

I chose the open model. Every door unlocked. Every voice heard. Trust as the foundation instead of fear. I chose it because the alternative was becoming the man whose watch I wear and whose jaw I clench when the anger runs out of places to hide.

The open model lost Dante.

My knuckles are white on the wheel. Warehouses slide past — corrugated steel, padlocked bays, the geography of a district designed for cargo and repurposed by men who need rooms where screaming stops at the walls. Somewhere in this grid. My gut says it. The instinct fires ahead of the evidence — sharp, animal, the alarm system Giovanni's violence installed in my nervous system before I understood what the alarm was for.

I can feel him. The way you feel a missing tooth — the absence louder than anything the mouth still holds.

I pull the phone. Dial Santino.

The city is a crime scene. I am going to tear it apart until it confesses.

Santino is already inside when I pull the bay door back.

He doesn't turn. The man who used to greet me with scripture and a jaw set tight enough to crack communion wafers is crouched beside a support column with his fingers pressed flat against the concrete floor, reading it the way a priest reads confession — by what the surface is trying to hide.

Pia is six feet to his left. Gun hand resting at her hip, weight on her back foot, eyes running a sweep that covers every angle Santino leaves open. They don't speak. They don't need to. Whatever frequency these two operate on was calibrated somewhere between a torture basement and a sanctuary in the pines, and the rest of us stay out of the signal path.

I step inside. The air hits first — bleach, sharp and chemical, burning the back of my throat beneath a layer of warehouse dust. The floor is wet in patches. Not water. Industrial solvent. The kind you buy in bulk when you need a crime scene to disappear and you know enough about forensics to understand that bleach alone doesn't cut it.

Someone cleaned this place the way Fabio cleans a scene. Which means someone in this operation has the same training Fabio has, or better, and that thought sits in my stomach like a swallowed blade.

"Third one." Pia's voice is flat. The economy of a woman who spent enough time chained in a vault to know what a holding room smells like after the holding is done. "Third property tied to the shell structure. Third floor scrubbed to the same standard."

Santino rises. His face gives nothing. The collar is gone but the discipline survived — fifteen years of kneeling before a God who demanded silence installed a patience in my brother that makes him the most terrifying man in every room he enters.

"They moved him." He says it without inflection. A diagnosis delivered at the temperature of the concrete beneath our feet.

"Or they're about to."