Page 69 of Queen

“It always was.” I open the rear door for her. Courtesy is a language of power; tonight I speak it fluently. “They just forgot whose game this is.”

She doesn’t get in. Not yet. Her gaze slides past my shoulder to the black between trees. The wind shifts, carrying the last breath of our fire and something older, colder. For a heartbeat, I hear Giovanni the way I used to—inside the skull, not the ear.

Every empire needs its altar. Every altar draws witnesses.

“Let them watch,” Zina says, almost to the forest. “Let them see what they woke up.”

She climbs into the back. I close her door, circle to the driver’s side, and slide behind the wheel. The engine turns over, a low growl under my hands. As I pull onto the narrow track, smoke blurs the mirrors and the wind pushes harder, hunting the seams of the car for a way in.

Black knight. A clean signature. The kind of move men make when they think they know me.

I press the accelerator and smile without warmth.

Come closer, then. Bring your horses. Bring your ghosts.

We’ll meet you in the open—and feed you to the dark.

The Ghost King’s Challenge

The forest is too still when we reach the car, the silence dense, almost deliberate—like the trees themselves are holding their breath. I slide behind the wheel, key poised in the ignition, then stop. Something gnaws at me, a whisper that isn’t wind.

I kill the engine and push the door open. “Stay here,” I order, voice flat as stone.

Zina doesn’t listen. Of course she doesn’t. Queens don’t wait when the night itself is conspiring. She falls in step behind me, her presence an unspoken challenge.

The grave lies back in shadow, soil still smoking from our fire. But on the dirt track ahead—something waits.

A sliver of white against the earth.

I crouch, massive hands curling around it. Not random. Not careless. Placed with precision.

A chess piece.

The knight. Carved in black marble, edges worn but unbroken. Its horse head glares upward like it mocks us.

Beneath it—a scrap of paper. Rough parchment, ink thick as blood. I lift it, and the words punch straight through bone:

The King never died. You just forgot how to kneel.

My chest seizes, blood turning to frost. The cadence is too familiar—command I’ve heard a thousand times in boardrooms, alleys, over spilled wine and spilled blood. Giovanni’s cadence.

The note trembles in my grip, not from fear, but because rage coils so tight inside me my hands shake with the need to break something.

Zina steps close, her breath brushing my neck as her eyes rake the page. She reads once, then cuts the silence in half.

“This is Giovanni’s handwriting.”

Her certainty slams harder than the words themselves.

I stare at the note, refusing to blink, refusing to admit the impossible. Giovanni is dead. I felt the weight of his coffin. I saw the blood, the ruin, the ash. And yet—

The knight glowers from my palm. The words burn into my skull.

And Zina—Giovanni’s curse and his crown—doesn’t falter. She names the ghost aloud.

The wind surges, a savage gust rattling the pines, hissing through grave soil like laughter. The parchment slips free, whipping once before clinging to the blackened dirt as if it belongs there.

My pulse hammers. My breath rasps. For the first time in years, I feel it—not power, not command, but the raw edge of being hunted.