Page 19 of Queen (Shattered Pieces #2)

emiliano

The Warning

T he chapel sits at the far edge of the Rivas estate, tucked away like a secret no one talks about.

It smells of dust, candle wax, and the faint bite of old incense—like the air has been holding its breath for decades.

The door gives when I push, a groan rolling through the stone and climbing the ribs of the vaulted ceiling until it fades into colored light.

Stained glass pours reds, blues, and golds over the pews.

Saints and martyrs watch from their niches, hands folded, eyes tipped toward heaven—stone witnesses that don’t have to choose between mercy and survival.

They were never asked to love the way we do in this world: with knives, with lies, with skin.

Santino is at the altar, back to me, striking matches.

One. Two. Three. He touches each flame to a waiting wick like he’s baptizing it.

The flare warms the edge of his collar, then settles into a steady halo.

He moves without hurry, without noise. That’s always been his trick—stillness sharpened into threat.

My boots beat a slow, deliberate rhythm down the center aisle. Every step is a warning. My shadow stretches ahead of me, cutting the rainbow slashes in half, crawling over the rail and swallowing his.

“Lighting candles for your sins?” My voice is low, unhurried, a blade laid flat.

“Maybe I’m lighting them for yours.” He doesn’t look up when he says it. The words drift like ash.

“I see the way you look at her.” I come around so he has to face me. “You think I won’t gut a priest?”

His eyes lift at last. Flat. Unblinking. “You think this collar protects me? Or you?”

The corner of my mouth twitches—humor without heat. I pluck a spent match from the rail, roll it between thumb and forefinger. “That collar’s just fabric,” I murmur. “Burns easy.”

I take the last inch of space, and the chapel tightens around the two of us. The incense is a ghost in my lungs; the candles throw small, living hearts of flame between us. I can smell his aftershave, clean and cold, like a confession booth at midnight.

“Touch her again,” I whisper, and the whisper carries farther than a shout, “and I’ll bury you where your father lies. One stone. Two sons.”

His jaw ticks. He doesn’t break eye contact. Not challenge—calculation. He wants to see where the edge is.

“Zina doesn’t belong to you,” he says finally. The words are gentle, coated in the kind of righteousness that gets men killed. “No one belongs to you. Not here.”

I lean in until the heat of the nearest candle licks my cheek. “She does now.”

“She chose a cage,” he answers, soft as prayer. “You just painted it gold.”

“And you,” I say, “would chain her to a cross and call it salvation.”

Silence. We stand there while the saints pretend not to hear us and the wax softens into small white pools.

I study him the way I study enemies I don’t want to underestimate: the barely healed split on his knuckle, the pale ridge of an old scar peeking from the cuff, the way his hands stay loose even when mine don’t.

Priest, yes. But bred in this house—born to war in a collar.

“You’re playing with fire,” I tell him. “And I don’t warn twice.”

He smiles then, a thin, almost tender thing that doesn’t touch his eyes. “You’re right,” he says. “You don’t warn. You take.”

I let that sit between us, heavy as a dropped bell.

The candle flames bow in a small draft; colored light slashes red across his cheekbone like a premonition.

I could push him now. I could set a match to this room and call it justice.

But justice is a story men tell themselves to make hunger sound holy.

I step back. One pace. Two. The aisle yawns behind me.

“Stay away from her.” I turn, and my voice climbs the stone and hangs there like smoke. “Or I’ll show you how fast heaven looks the other way.”

I don’t look back. The saints keep their eyes on God. The glass keeps bleeding color across the pews until it looks like spilled wine, spilled blood—take your pick. Either way, the room belongs to the devil tonight.

And the devil answers to my name.

Flashback: The Blood Pact

Cold wraps the courtyard when the chapel door thunders shut. I don’t head for the house. I let the gravel carry me—crunch, pause, breath—until the edge comes off the urge to turn back and finish what I started.

My hand finds the inside pocket of my jacket. The weight there is small, familiar. I draw it out.

The knife takes the moon like it’s been waiting for it. Old steel, honest, with a nick near the guard that fits the pad of my thumb. The handle is dark from hands that didn’t mind getting dirty. I drag my thumb along the groove and the night falls away.

I’m back in Giovanni’s cigar lounge.

Low light. Brass sconces throwing bruised shadows. Smoke coiling slow under the ceiling like a lazy storm that decided to live indoors. Leather soft as sin. A jazz record arguing with itself in the corner, the saxophone sounding like it never quite learned how to breathe.

Giovanni sits across from me, not slouched, not stiff—balanced, the way men sit when they know the room is theirs and always will be until someone pries it from their hands.

Bourbon sweats on the table between us, ring of water painting the wood.

His signet catches the lamplight, a brief flare like a lighthouse warning no one will heed.

“If I fall,” he says, like he’s adding a footnote to a contract, “you protect them. Even her.”

Even her. He doesn’t say Zina. He doesn’t have to. Her name hums in the air anyway, a tune only the two of us can hear.

I take a drink. It burns sweet and mean, the way I like it. “What if I want more than protection?”

He doesn’t laugh. His mouth curves, but it’s the kind of curve wolves make when you say the wrong thing. “Then I’ll slit your throat before I let you near her.”

We hold each other there, two boys from Naples who clawed their way up, too proud to say brother, too honest to say enemy, and too bound to admit either word is enough. We understood each other better in the moments we threatened to kill than in the years we pretended not to.

His hand disappears under the table and comes back with a knife—this knife.

He turns it once, like a priest turning a relic, then drives it into the oak between us.

The point bites deep. The crack is louder than the music, louder than my pulse, louder than the lie of peace we’d been pouring down our throats.

“Say it,” he tells me, nodding at the blade.

My palm rests on the table. I can smell the oil on the steel, the faint tang of past blood scrubbed but not forgotten. “If you fall,” I say, and my voice is a thing I don’t recognize—steadier than I feel, older than I am, “I protect them. All of them. Even her.”

He nods once. Then he pulls the knife back out and offers it across the table, handle first. I take it because I can’t not. That’s how vows are made between men like us—point first is for enemies; handle first is for the ones you’ll forgive until you can’t.

He rolls his sleeve, baring the inside of his forearm. The skin there is pale where the sun never reached. He takes the point, presses, drags. Not deep. Enough. Blood wells, bright as a ruby in bad light. He holds his arm over the ashtray and lets it tap—tap—tap onto the gray bed of old endings.

“Now you,” he says.

So I do it. Same place. Same shallow line. It stings, then it doesn’t. I hold my arm over his, and for a second our blood touches in smoke.

“Brothers,” he says.

“Until blood says otherwise,” I answer.

We don’t shake. We don’t smile. He slides the knife back onto the table between us, and the jazz wails a little louder, like it knows something it shouldn’t.

The memory thins, and the courtyard grows around me again—wet stone, black windows, the distant, muffled thud of a door somewhere in the house closing on someone else’s secret.

The knife is warm from my hand. I study the nick near the guard and wonder if it’s from that night or a hundred after.

With Giovanni it’s hard to tell which scar belongs to which story.

They all end the same way anyway: with a cost paid in full.

I slide the blade back where it lives, close to the heart I pretend I don’t have.

Santino thinks a collar makes him holy. Giovanni thought a pact would make me loyal.

Maybe they’re both right. Maybe that’s why I can’t decide if I kept my promise or broke it the minute I put a ring back on Zina’s finger and called it protection.

Some promises are meant to be broken. And some are meant to be kept in blood. I know which kind I made that night.

I also know which kind I’ll make again if anyone touches her.

Obsession Unleashed

The study smells of leather, aged paper, and whiskey soaked into the grain of my desk, the kind of scent that seeps in over decades and refuses to leave.

Heavy curtains block out the rest of the house.

In here, there’s only silence and my dominion.

This is my room. My kingdom. No one enters unless I say so. No one touches what’s mine.

I slide into the chair, lean back, then reach down. My fingers find the hidden latch beneath the lowest drawer—smooth wood giving way to the click of a secret I’ve kept longer than I should have. The false panel shifts, and there they are.

The envelopes.

Stacked neatly, bound together by a black silk ribbon, the knot tight enough to bite into the paper.

Zina’s handwriting slants across every one—sharp, impatient, elegant.

The kind of script a woman uses when she’s trying to outrun her own heart.

Letters she never sent. Letters I made sure she couldn’t send.

I untie the ribbon slow, savoring the whisper of paper against paper. The first page trembles slightly in my hand. My eyes trace the opening lines, and I hear her voice in every stroke of ink.

Emiliano,

“I don’t know why I’m writing to you. I shouldn’t be. I told myself I was done.”