Page 60 of Queen

I give myself over to him—not because I trust him, not because I forgive him—but because there is nothing left of me to hold back.

I stop fighting.

And God help me, it feels like drowning and resurrection all at once.

When it ends, I am raw, breathless, scraped open in ways no blade could ever achieve. My forehead presses to his chest, his heartbeat a thunder that matches mine. He doesn’t speak. Neither do I. Words would ruin what just burned between us.

But deep inside, I know nothing will ever be the same again.

The Clue in the Pawn

The silence after her storm still clings to me—heavy, suffocating, like the smoke of a house already burned to the ground. Zina lies tangled in the sheets, her body trembling in a way I can’t fix—not with words, not with promises, maybe not even with blood.

I should stay. I should hold her until she believes me. But my eyes keep drifting to the pawn.

That fucking pawn.

It sits on the table where I dropped it hours ago, blood dried to a rusty crust in the grooves. Its carved edges are too sharp, too deliberate. I pick it up, rolling the weight in my palm. Heavier than it should be. Heavier than coincidence.

At first the scratches on the base look meaningless, the kind of scuff a piece of wood gets passed hand to hand. But I know better. My thumb follows the marks, tiny strokes buried deep in the grain. Latin. Letters etched so fine they’d vanish to anyone who wasn’t trained to look for them.

I tilt it into the lamp light. Three letters burn through:S.V.M.

The breath stills in my chest. This isn’t random. This isn’t just a threat. It’s a signature.

“They want me to know,” I mutter, voice low, more to myself than to the room. “They want me to know it was personal.”

A name crawls out of memory. One of Giovanni’s old ghosts. Smart. Calculated. The kind of man who slips through the cracks when bodies fall and debts get buried. We never found him. I told myself he’d gone to ground, or maybe someone else had put him in the dirt for me.

But maybe not. Maybe the bastard’s been waiting. Watching.

Giovanni’s voice cuts through memory like broken glass:The ones you don’t bury right, they come back to choke you later. Don’t forget that.

My jaw locks tight. He was right. The fucker was always right.

“Lorenzo!” I bark, my voice ripping through the quiet like a gunshot.

My second-in-command appears in the doorway within seconds, chest heaving from the sprint. His eyes flick to the bed—Zina half-bare beneath the sheets—but he’s smart enough to keep his stare pinned to me.

“Bring me the list,” I order, voice cold steel. “Every one of them we put in the ground but never saw rot. Names. Dates. Places. I don’t care how far back—don’t fucking stop until you have it.”

Lorenzo nods once, sharp, and disappears without a word.

I set the pawn back down, staring at it like it’s a riddle carved from my own sins. My pulse pounds harder, steady as a war drum, each beat promising violence.

From behind me, a voice cuts the quiet.

“How many enemies do you have?”

She’s framed in the doorway, robe pulled tight, hair wild, eyes darker than the night itself. She looks at me like she can’t decide whether to scream or beg.

I turn fully, letting her see all of it—all the fury, all the ghosts, all the rot in me that refuses to die.

“All of them,” I say flatly.

For the first time, she doesn’t argue. She just stares, and in that silence I see it—acceptance. Not surrender. Not forgiveness. Just understanding. She finally knows what it means to share my war.

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