Page 55 of Queen

Silence. Then, “Enough to make sure no one ever hurts you again without me knowing first.”

A laugh rips up my throat, ugly and wet. “Except you.”

The pause this time is longer. The fire mutters in the grate. Far down the hall, a clock chimes, the sound thin as bone.

“I won’t apologize for keeping you alive,” he says.

“Then I won’t apologize for breaking your toys.” I reach for the camera with a speed that surprises me, yank the little box forward, hard, feel wires tear like veins under my grip.

He moves, a blur in the mirror—hand snapping out to catch my wrist before I can rip it free. Not crushing. Stopping. Heat sears skin to skin.

“Don’t,” he says, quiet, as if the room might wake the dead if he raises his voice. “You’ll bleed yourself for spectacle and call it freedom.”

“Better blood than filth.” I meet his eyes in the glass—mine blown wide, his narrowed to blades. “Get out.”

“Say you’ll stop lying to me.”

“Get. Out.”

We hold there—woman and man and the red-eyed thing between us—until the stretch of it turns my bones to wire. He releases my wrist like he’s making a concession to a treaty no one signed and steps backward, the shadow swallowing him until only the suggestion of him remains.

The camera blinks in my hand—one last red pulse, like a heart refusing to quit—before I twist it, hard. The light dies.

Darkness pours into the space it leaves, so thick I sway.

“Lock your door,” he says from the threshold. “Even queens lock their doors.”

The latch clicks. I stand alone, robe belt digging into my waist, the little dead box heavy in my palm, and for the first time in years I understand that naked doesn’t mean undressed.

It means seen.

12

emiliano

The Missing Piece

Morning is wrong. I feel it before I’m fully awake—the kind of silence that isn’t rest but vacuum. Zina’s side of the bed is cold, her perfume just a ghost in the sheets. The house hums with electricity and money and fear; today it does none of that. It waits.

The door slams. Marco stumbles in, ashen, eyes too wide for a man who’s seen what we’ve seen. He doesn’t waste breath.

“Sir… he’s gone.”

I sit up. The sheets slide from my waist. My pulse stays steady in that dangerous way I trust more than panic. “Who.”

His throat works. He doesn’t say the name; it falls out of him like a confession.

“Guido.”

I’m already moving. Cold floor under bare feet, the shock of it ripping whatever sleep was left out of me. I catch Marco by the collar and pull him into the corridor. The guards lining the hall won’t meet my eyes. Of course they won’t. Cowards always study the floor when the blade is coming.

“Show me.”

We reach the boy’s room. The door stands ajar, a careless lip of wood and paint that looks obscene now. Air hangs heavy with copper. At first I think I’m smelling the echo of old battles, the metallic ghost that lives in every house like this. Then I see the pillow.

A pawn, white wood, the grain stained red.

Not his, I tell myself. Not his blood. Not my boy.