Page 6 of Rook

The check could wait. The gap could wait. One night. I would give my brother one night where nobody knocked on his door with coordinates and threat assessments and the weight of a war that followed him into every room. One night where his shoulders stayed down and his hands stayed open and the smile stayed.

One night.

Someone was counting on that.

Someone knew the gap. Someone knew I would find it. And someone knew that if they waited — if they manufactured the exact conditions under which the one person who would close that window chose mercy instead of vigilance — thirty seconds was enough.

Thirty seconds to get in. To get close. To put a needle in the neck of a boy who chose his brother's peace over his own survival.

The ribs pulse. Deep. Hot. And what I feel isn't the fracture.

It's Romeo's face when he sees the photograph.

Because there will be a photograph. That's how this works — I know the architecture even from the inside of it. A proof-of-life image sent to a phone that will ring in a penthouse kitchen where cereal bowls are still in the rack and Tomás's drawings are still on the fridge and my brother is about to learn that the night I gave him cost more than either of us can afford.

My throat closes. The chains bite into my wrists because I've pulled against them without deciding to — my body lurching toward a door that doesn't exist, toward a brother I can't reach, toward the version of last night where I picked up my keys and walked out and closed the gap and woke up this morning in my own bed instead of bolted to steel in a room that smells like old concrete and nothing else.

I breathe.

One breath. Hard. Into the ribs that scream and against the tide of something that is not trained and is not disciplined and is not anything Giovanni built into me. It is just fear. A nineteen-year-old boy's fear, sitting beneath the calm like water beneath ice, and the ice is thinner than anyone has ever known.

I swallow it. Press it down. Lock it behind the door where I keep everything that would make me useless in a room like this.

Romeo will come. Santino will hunt. They will find me. That is what this family does — we find each other. We drag each other out of the dark. I have to believe that the way I believe in gravity, without evidence, without choice, because the alternative is a concrete room that never opens and a brother who smiles on a couch and never knows why I didn't come home.

I would do it again.

That is the thing I cannot look at straight. The thing that sits in my chest beside the cracked ribs and burns hotter than any of them. I would close the diagnostic. I would let Romeo smile. I would let Tomás sleep on the carpet with a chess piece in his fist. I would carry the gap alone in the dark for another night and another and another because the alternative was stealing the one thing my brother has earned that Giovanni never gave him — a single, unguarded hour where love did not cost anything.

It cost me this room.

I would do it again.

I lift my chin.

Isadora is watching me. She has not moved. Has not shifted. But something behind her eyes has changed — a depth that wasn't there before, or maybe was always there and I am only now still enough to see it. She watched me flinch. She watched the chains go taut. She watched whatever just crossed my face — the boy, the fear, the brother — and she absorbed it with the practiced patience of a woman who has seen men break in chairs like this one and knows exactly which crack to press when the time comes.

I meet her eyes. Hold them. The fluorescent hum fills the space between us.

"You're comfortable," I say. My voice is steadier now. Raw, but mine. "That chair. This distance. You've sat across from men in chains before."

Nothing.

"You're not here to hurt me. If you were, you'd have done it while I was under. You're here to watch. To wait. To see what I do when the drug clears and the room gets real."

Her eyes hold mine. Dark. Still. A surface I cannot read because it was built to be unreadable by men who are better at this than I am.

"I know who trained you," I say.

The stillness shifts.

It is so small that anyone else would miss it — a fraction of tension across her shoulders, a tightening at the corner of her jaw that lasts less than a second before the composure seals back over it like water closing over a stone. But I am Giovanni Rivas's son. I was raised in a house where a misplaced breath at the dinner table could change the trajectory of an evening. I was trained to read the distance between what a person shows and what a person holds, and the distance in this woman is vast, and old, and holding something that my words just touched.

She felt that.

Good.

"Corsetti," I say. The name lands in the room like a lit match. "The way you sit — weight centered, hands visible, no weapon in reach because you don't need one. The distance you chose. Close enough to intervene. Far enough to assess without being inside the reaction. That's his training. I've read about it in files that were supposed to have been burned."