Page 21 of Queen (Shattered Pieces #2)

zina

The Unveiling

T he room smells like roses. Fresh sheets. Fresh flowers. Fresh lies.

I should feel safe here, wrapped in the silk Emiliano insists belongs to me, but there’s no such thing as safety in this house. Not when the walls are laced with hidden eyes and every corner feels like it’s listening.

My hand drifts across the pillow, searching for something to ground me. That’s when I feel it—the edge of paper, sharp against my skin. My stomach knots as I pull it free.

It isn’t sealed. No envelope. Just folded once, neat.

A letter.

The handwriting makes my chest seize. Not his. Mine.

No. Worse.

It’s my fucking journal. Pages I scrawled at fifteen, hunched on a cot in the Calabrese orphanage, trying to bleed my loneliness onto paper before it devoured me whole. Words I swore no one would ever read. Words that belonged only to me.

But they aren’t alone anymore.

Dark ink curls through the margins—his ink. Emiliano’s handwriting, precise and merciless, dissecting every confession I ever made to myself. Mocking some. Answering others. His thoughts like barbed wire threaded through mine.

My eyes snag on one entry, one I remember scribbling through tears: I feel like a ghost in my own skin.

His note beside it: Not a ghost. A queen in the making.

The air vanishes from my lungs. He’s had this all along. He’s had me all along.

“Motherfucker,” I whisper, my voice ragged. The page trembles in my hands as fury coils hot and fast inside me. He’s been inside my head since before I knew what love was. Before I knew what he was.

The rage surges so sharp my vision blurs. I shove the door open, heels striking the marble like gunshots as I storm down the hall. The letter burns in my grip, proof of a violation that makes me want to claw my skin raw just to erase his touch from it.

And of course, he’s there—leaning against the balustrade like he’s been waiting for me to detonate. Shadows carve his face into something cruel and beautiful, the kind of face that dares you to strike it.

I slam the paper against his chest. “How long?” My voice is raw, shredded. “How long have you been watching me?”

He doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t even glance at the words. His eyes pin me, dark and fathomless.

“Since before you even knew what danger was,” he says, calm. Too calm.

The bottom drops out of me. The air leaves my lungs like a punch, but I force steel into my spine.

“You—” My throat burns. “You had no right. That was mine. My thoughts. My life.”

His mouth curves, not into a smile but into something worse. A dare. “Your life has never been yours, Zina. Not since the first time I saw you. You just didn’t know it yet.”

My pulse hammers so loud it drowns everything else. Betrayal. Rage. The memory of a girl who once thought words on paper were the only safe place she had.

“Fuck you,” I spit, because it’s all I have left.

His reply is soft. Lethal. “Already did.”

The world tilts. I don’t know if I want to run—or tear him apart with my bare hands.

The Past Resurfaces

I don’t wait for him to follow. I march ahead, the letter still clenched so tight it crumples under my grip. I need distance. Walls. A door. Anything to close between us before I shatter.

But Emiliano doesn’t chase like a man desperate to explain himself. He prowls. Slow, silent, letting me feel the weight of him even when I can’t see him.

By the time I shove into his office, the air already feels poisoned. Smaller. Thicker. Like the room itself bends to him. I throw the letter onto his desk. It lands bent and battered, my handwriting staring up at me like the ghost of the girl I used to be.

“You stole this from me,” I snarl, my voice raw. “You’ve been in my head since I was a child.”

He shuts the door behind him, deliberate, then strides to his chair and lowers himself into it like a king on his throne. His gaze doesn’t flicker to the letter. It stays locked on me.

“Zina,” he says evenly, “you’ve always belonged to me. You just didn’t know it.”

My nails dig into my palms until pain shoots up my arms. “Stop talking in riddles. Stop pretending this is fate. You don’t get to rewrite my life into some obsession you dressed up as destiny.”

Something flickers in his eyes—annoyance, maybe pity. He leans forward, elbows braced on the desk, his voice dropping low. “Do you remember the fire at the Calabrese orphanage?”

The name alone guts me. My throat tightens. Smoke fills my lungs again. I hear screams. I taste ash.

“I was thirteen,” I whisper. “I almost died that night.”

“You didn’t.” His words are brutal. “Because of me.”

The world tilts. My knees nearly buckle, my hand clutching the desk for balance.

“You—”

“You were choking on smoke, trapped in the dormitory. Everyone else had fled. I carried you out.” His voice grinds rough, gravel dragged across stone. “Your face was black with soot, your eyes wide, but alive. You clung to me even unconscious. You didn’t know me. But I knew exactly who you were.”

My chest constricts, every ragged memory colliding—heat, flames, lungs clawing for air, and then hands lifting me into the cold night. I’d told myself it was a stranger. A nameless savior.

But it wasn’t. It was him. Always him.

“You—” My words fracture. “You watched me grow up. You chose me before I even knew you existed.”

His lips twitch, almost a smile, but it’s crueler than comfort. “Not chose. Claimed. The night I pulled you from the fire, you were mine.”

Gratitude slams into fury, colliding so violently I can barely breathe. He saved me. He fucking saved me. And he forged shackles out of it.

“You don’t get to use that against me,” I hiss, tears burning hot. “You don’t get to twist the worst night of my life into proof that I belong to you.”

His gaze hardens, unyielding. “It isn’t proof. It’s truth.”

My voice breaks on the sob clawing out of me. “No. No, fuck you, Emiliano. You don’t get to rewrite our story.”

Emotional Whiplash

The air in his office is choking me. Smoke from a fire I barely survived coils with his words, wrapping around my throat tighter than the flames ever did. I can’t breathe here—not with his truth pressed against me, not with my own memories unraveling like loose stitches.

My nails scrape the polished wood of his desk as I push away, needing distance, needing air. I storm toward the door, heels hammering marble in a rhythm like gunfire echoing through the corridors.

“Zina.” His voice follows, low and commanding, the same timbre that once pulled me out of nightmares when I was thirteen. Only now it drags me deeper into one.

“Stay the fuck away from me!” I fling the words over my shoulder, not slowing.

But Emiliano never obeys. The door swings wide behind me, his stride lengthening, every step a predator closing in. By the time I reach the grand foyer, shadows crawling up the stone walls in candlelight, his hand clamps around my arm and spins me hard.

I slam into the wall. Breath punches from my lungs. The flicker of candle flames paints his face in shifting light, making him look less man, more specter.

“You think this changes what you did?” I spit, voice raw with rage and shame tangled together.

His eyes burn, dark and merciless. “I think it changes everything.” His hand lifts slowly, brushing wetness from beneath my eye.

A tear. Shit. I hadn’t even realized it escaped.

The humiliation sears me hotter than the fury. I slap his hand away so hard my palm stings. “Don’t fucking touch me! You don’t get to own me just because you saved me!”

His jaw tightens, but he doesn’t retreat. The space between us suffocates, his presence heavy, every breath laced with him.

“You think I saved you to own you?” His voice is quiet but sharper than a scream. “I saved you because the world would’ve lost something it didn’t deserve to lose. You were mine before you knew what it meant.”

I shake my head, fury boiling over. “You sound insane. You sound like Giovanni—twisting everything into some fucked-up version of love that only serves yourself.”

The mention of Giovanni slides between us like a blade. Emiliano doesn’t flinch, but his gaze sharpens to a lethal edge. He cages me against the cold stone, body close enough that his breath grazes my cheek.

“Tell me it meant nothing,” he murmurs, each word a dare. “What we did last night. Say it, Zina, and I’ll let you walk away.”

The foyer goes still. My pulse drowns out the flicker of candles and the moan of wind at the shutters.

My lips part. I want to scream the denial, to spit poison into his face, but the truth jams in my throat. Because it didn’t mean nothing. It meant everything—and that terrifies me more than fire ever did.

I clench my fists, nails biting into my palms, desperate for pain to ground me. But he sees it. He always sees it. The crack I can’t hide. The truth I can’t smother.

My silence is his victory.

And we both fucking know it.

Cracks in the Armor

I leave him in the foyer, his silence pressing against my back like a weight I can’t shake. My heels hammer the stairs, every step an act of defiance, but by the time I slam my bedroom door shut, the fight drains from me.

The room feels too big, too empty. The fire in the hearth is long dead, leaving behind cold ashes and the faint tang of smoke that twists my stomach. I yank open my nightstand drawer, hands shaking, dragging out the bundle of letters I swore I’d never touch again.

Old paper, fragile and creased. My handwriting snakes across page after page, a ghost of the girl I used to be. I tear through them, searching for—what? Comfort? Clarity? A reason to keep breathing in this house of ghosts?

One slips free, fluttering onto the rug.

I stoop, fingers trembling as I pick it up. The date stops me cold. Six years ago. Months after I married Giovanni.

I sink onto the bed, the letter shaking in my grip. Tears smudged the ink years ago, but the words are still legible, still sharp enough to wound me now: