Page 62 of Rook

Twenty years of erasure — the manufactured body in Trieste, the name pulled from every record, the death certificate filed with a bought coroner — undone in a single frame.

The ghost steps into the light.

A woman who survived by being invisible choosing to be seen. She's done hiding. Done being what Giovanni's erasure forced her to become. Standing on the Rivas perimeter letting the grid see her face and the grid can do whatever the hell it wants with it.

I watch her do it and I don't file the moment away. I hold it. The way you hold something you will never set down.

"You ready?" I ask.

She looks at me. The porch light catches the burn scars at her collar and turns them silver.

"I've been ready for twenty years."

We walk the last blocks side by side. Equals. Two people approaching a house that belongs to one of us and will have to learn to hold both.

The Rivas house appears through the trees. Kitchen lights. The warm amber glow of Nova's ground — coffee always on, the surface that holds whether the world is standing or falling.

I stop at the front door.

Isadora stops beside me.

I reach for her hand. The gesture is deliberate — not the limited touch of the concrete room, not the desperate grip after combat. A choice. Made under the porch light where my family can see it. My split knuckles lace through her steady fingers.

The door opens.

Romeo.

Three steps from the threshold. Green eyes carrying every hour of the search — every dead-end warehouse, every scrubbed floor, every empty call. His gaze hits me first. Not security. The need of a brother confirming another brother is breathing.

He sees the bruises. The knuckles. The ribs I'm guarding with every breath.

Then his eyes drop to our hands.

His brother. Holding the hand of the woman who took him.

Romeo's jaw works. The green goes dark. Rage and relief and the devastating weight of a man whose open-door promise is about to face the only test that could break it.

Three seconds.

He steps aside.

The hallway stretches behind him. Warm. Lit. Mugs on the counter. Kettle steaming.

I step through. Isadora beside me. Our hands still joined.

The door closes behind us.

The Rook is home.

17

romeo

"The Door Opens"

Fabio's line buzzes and my gut knows before his voice reaches my ear.

I'm standing in the kitchen holding a mug that went cold an hour ago. The Patek Philippe ticks against my wrist — my father's rhythm, the dead man's tempo permanent in my blood. Tomás's stick-figure sun watches from the fridge. Seven wild yellow rays drawn with a marker that bled through the paper. I haven't moved it. The sun is a compass. The compass says hold still when every cell in my body has spent five days screaming at me to burn this city to the foundation and sift the ash until I find my brother.