Page 68 of Queen

Flame crackles around the grave, devouring salt and soil. The stink of char and iron fills the clearing, mingling with the blood drying on our hands. This isn’t just burial. It’s ceremony. It’s coronation.

Something shifts—silent, savage. A bond forged not in mercy, but in fire and blood.

The queen isn’t rising. She already has.

The Warning in the Wind

The fire behind us still smolders, smoke unwinding into the trees like a vow we can’t take back. I keep Zina close as we cutthrough the pines toward the car, boots whispering over needles, salt and ash slicking the air. We don’t speak. Her silence is forged steel; mine is a blade I’m not done sharpening.

The sedan sits where we left it, blacked-out and breathing frost. The trunk feels heavier now that it’s empty—as if Matteo’s corpse left something behind that fire couldn’t cleanse. I unlock the doors. My phone buzzes.

A tremor in the palm. Bad news has a rhythm. This is it.

“Talk,” I say, answering.

“Boss.” Rocco. Clipped, loyal, a man who wastes nothing. The pause after my name isn’t hesitation; it’s respect for the hit he’s about to make. “You’re not alone out there.”

My gaze goes to the treeline. Shadows move if you stare hard enough. I stare harder. “Explain.”

“They left a message. At the grave.”

Cold slides beneath my ribs. We only just sealed the circle. Which means they were watching. Close.

“What kind of message?” My voice goes flat, knife-edge.

“A piece.” Another beat of silence. Then: “From the board.”

My jaw locks. “Which one.”

“A knight. Black.”

The line goes dead between us because I kill it. I stand there with the trees pressing in, listening to the wind thread through dead branches like a choir of broken bones. When I turn, Zina’s already watching me. She reads storms the way most people read clocks.

Her chin lifts, a small, lethal angle. “This wasn’t retaliation.”

She doesn’t guess. She states. It sinks into me like a steel pin, holding the moment to the wall.

“This was provocation,” she says, wiping a streak of soot across her cheek and leaving it like war paint.

“Someone wants a war,” I say. Not threat. Fact.

Zina steps into my space until the smoke on my breath becomes hers. Firelight from the clearing licks the edges of her hair, setting stray strands to gold. She doesn’t look scared. She looks inevitable.

“Then let’s give them one.”

She threads her fingers through mine—blood to blood, oath to oath—then drags my fist to her sternum, pressing it there like she’s stamping me into the bone. The gesture isn’t tender. It’s a binding. For a second, I don’t know if she’s my partner, my queen, or the executioner waiting to swing.

The wind answers for her, rising, bending the pines until they hiss. Somewhere behind us a coal pops, bright as an omen, then dies.

I pocket the phone and scan the dark. Knight. Black. Not subtle. Not random. Whoever placed it knows our board, knows Giovanni’s old catechism: pawns test, bishops bless, rooks hold, but knights break lines you think are safe. Santino chose a collar; someone else chose the piece.

“Rocco.” I call him back, speaker off, voice low. “Tighten the outer ring. No headlights, no chatter. Sweep the approach we didn’t take and the one they did. Thermal first, then dogs. If you find a camera, follow its signal, not its lens.”

“On it.”

“Good. And pull the list of every soldier who ever called him King and still breathes. Start with the ones who know Latin.”

Zina’s mouth tilts—danger, not humor. “The board is live.”