Page 73 of Queen

No note. No signature. Just blood.

The message is clean and cruel: you don’t protect what you don’t control.

The room tilts. The walls narrow, pressing the air out of my lungs. The soldier slips from my fingers and clatters against the stone—hollow, brittle—like bones in an ossuary. I bend, shove shaking hands into the sheets, breathe through the urge to tear the room apart with my bare nails.

Guido’s face flashes—milk teeth and sunlight, the boy who still runs when nightmares claw his sleep. My baby. My blood. The last unbroken piece of innocence in this rotten empire.

And they dared touch him.

Heat surges up my throat, cauterizing fear into fury. The world sharpens at the edges until everything is cuttable—walls, vows, men. They think they can herd me with a relic and a smear? Teach me obedience with a memory I bled to keep?

They’ve forgotten who the fuck I am.

I cross to the vanity, yank open the drawer, and pull the dagger free. Steel kisses my palm; my pulse settles. In the mirror, a woman stares back who isn’t anyone’s widow and sure as hell isn’t anyone’s pawn. There’s ash in my hair, iron in my mouth, and a ring at my throat that burns hot as a brand.

I lift the soldier again and study the blood. Too dark to be fresh. Not Guido’s. A controlled message, not a confession. They wanted it on my pillow, not on a body. They wanted me to imagine the rest.

I set the toy on the vanity like evidence and scan the room. Curtains undisturbed. Locks intact. Camera blind spots—sealed since the last time I found a red light where it shouldn’t be. Whoever placed the soldier knows the bones of this house. Mine. Or his.

A laugh—short, vicious—scrapes out of me. “You want my fear?” I whisper to the empty air. “Earn it.”

I open the armoire and pull on black. Not soft fabric—armor. Boots. Holster. The dagger slides home against my thigh with a sound that makes my shoulders loosen. I tuck the wooden soldier into my coat pocket, the broken sword biting my ribs with every breath.

Let it bruise. Let it mark.

I crack the door and glance down the hall. Two guards straighten, startled. I don’t slow. “Double the rotation,” I say,voice flat. “No one in, no one out. Anyone touches my son’s door without me present—anyone—you break their fingers and bring me the pieces.”

They flinch and nod. Good.

Back in the room, I flick off the lights and stand in the dark until my eyes adjust, until the memory of the box on the pillow stops trying to crawl under my skin. I press my thumb to the split in the soldier’s paint and feel something settle inside me—not calm. Not peace.

Purpose.

“They just made this war personal,” I tell the quiet, each word a blade. “Blood for blood.”

The whisper hangs heavier than a scream. I pocket the soldier, slide the bolt on the door, and sit with the dark like an old friend, counting heartbeats until dawn.

Let the city sleep.

When it wakes, it will learn what a Queen does when you touch her child.

16

emiliano

Ambush in the Rain

The rain starts as a whisper. By the time Zina’s convoy pulls out, it’s a war drum—water hammering rooftops, clawing at the pavement, rattling steel bones. The storm feels wrong. Too sudden. Too heavy. My chest tightens with the kind of warning you don’t ignore.

The radio crackles, static cutting jagged through the air. Then two words snap the night in half:“Target engaged.”

Everything inside me stops.

Gunfire thuds through the receiver. A muffled scream. Then silence.

I crush the radio in my fist until the casing cracks. “Where the fuck is she?!”

Static. Then a ragged choke, the dull smack of a body hitting pavement—and the line dies.