Page 5 of Queen

My fingers tremble. My throat tightens. Maybe I was the traitor first.

I shove the frame back, slam the safe shut, lock it.

But ghosts don’t stay buried.

At the vanity, I catch my reflection in the soft light. I look haunted—not by Giovanni’s death, not by Emiliano’s letter, but by the choices that make me exactly who they think I am.

The number sits in my phone, unmarked. But I know it like I know the shape of his hand on my skin.

I tap it.

One ring. Two.

My thumb hovers overEnd Call.

Before the third, I delete it.

Gone. But not gone. Because he’s already winning. Not with the letter. Not with the will. With the fact that I can’t delete him from my mind.

The Widow Makes Her Move

The storm rolls in like an omen.

It’s past midnight, and sleep has abandoned me. I don’t even try. The house is silent in a way that isn’t peace—more like a warning. The kind of stillness that comes in the eye of a hurricane, when you know the real violence hasn’t hit yet.

Rain pounds the glass in relentless bursts, each drop sharp as a bullet casing. Wind claws at the windows, howling like the ghosts Giovanni left me with. Lightning splits the sky, skeletal and merciless, washing the city skyline in stark white flashes. The view looks less like a city and more like a morgue lit by police cameras.

I stand in front of the floor-to-ceiling window of the master suite—Giovanni’s sanctuary, his throne when the boardrooms bored him. Now it’s mine. I hate how cavernous it feels when I’m alone in it, how the silence exaggerates every inch of distance between me and the man buried in the ground.

The letter sits on the table behind me. Torn once. Patched back together with shaking fingers. Its jagged edges sneer at me whenever I glance back.

You always knew how this would end.

The words hover in the air like cigarette smoke.

I raise the glass of scotch to my lips. The liquor burns, searing all the way down, but the fire inside me doesn’t settle. My hand looks steady from the outside—perfect, unshakable queen—but inside, I am vibrating, rattling apart thread by thread.

All day, I wore the crown. Sat at Giovanni’s table. Faced his sons without bowing, without blinking. Every breath coated in venom, every word a blade. I kept the kingdom on my shoulders like it weighed nothing.

But here? Alone in this mausoleum? There’s no mask thick enough to hide the fracture lines.

I turn toward the table. The phone lies beside the letter, its black screen pulsing in my peripheral vision like a dare. My reflection ghosts across it, pale, unsleeping, hungry.

This is the moment that separates the broken from the ruthless.

And I was never built to stay broken.

My hand closes around it. One tap, and his number surfaces. Of course it’s there. I never deleted it, not really. Erasure is a lie I tell myself when I want to sleep.

I press call.

One ring.

Two.

Three.

Then his voice.