Page 22 of Queen (Shattered Pieces #2)

I dream of someone who sees me and doesn’t flinch. Someone who looks at me like I’m not a burden. Not a pawn. Just a woman.

My throat closes. I remember writing it—scribbling until the pen tore through paper, crumpling the sheet, smoothing it out again as if someday I’d find the courage to send it. Of course I never did. Giovanni wouldn’t have cared. He never saw me. Not really.

But now, staring at those words, all I can think of is Emiliano. His eyes, unflinching. The way he looks at me like he’s known all my fractures from the start.

It sounds like him. It always fucking did.

The thought tears me apart—gratitude and fury colliding until I can’t tell which is stronger. I crush the letter in my fist, press it against my chest, as if pressure alone can smother the ache.

A knock breaks the silence. Soft. Not him. He never knocks.

“Mom?” Guido’s voice, small, hesitant.

I swipe my face with the back of my hand, shove the bundle of letters aside, and open the door. My son stands there in pajamas, hair sticking up in wild tufts, eyes too knowing for his age.

“You’re sad again,” he says. Not a question. Just truth.

The words slice me open. I kneel and wrap him tight in my arms, holding him until he squirms, then relaxes into me. His warmth, his heartbeat, his steady little breaths—they’re the only things tethering me to this world.

“I don’t know who I am anymore,” I whisper into his hair, the confession searing like acid.

He doesn’t answer. Just hugs me back, small arms strong around my neck. For a moment, I almost believe it’s enough. That if he loves me, maybe I can survive this.

But when I glance up, the mirror across the room catches me.

Not a widow. Not a queen.

Just a woman unraveling, piece by piece.

Vulnerability as a Weapon

The house exhales after Guido finally goes under, but the quiet doesn’t soothe—it stalks. Every corridor carries a different ghost. Mine have names.

I don’t bother with slippers. I want the cold bite of stone to keep me awake, to keep me angry, to keep me from slipping back into the softness of that moment when I let Emiliano hold my hand like it was something holy.

The library is where I end up, because it still smells like paper and ink instead of him.

Shelves climb toward the carved ceiling, ranks of leather spines catching lamplight like medals on uniforms. Fire settles in the grate—a low, banked glow, the ember-red heartbeat of a room that remembers how to listen.

I curl into the deep corner chair, knees to my chest, forehead on the ridge of bone at my wrist until it hurts enough to distract me.

The burn fades, leaves the blare of thoughts behind: the letter under my pillow, his notes in my margins, the fire he claims he pulled me from.

The edges of me feel raw, like I’ve been sanded down to nerve.

The door whispers, not a slam. Of course he doesn’t knock.

He fills the room the way smoke does—everywhere, even when you can’t point to where it started.

He shuts the door with a careful click that pretends to be polite, and for a few seconds he only stands there, hands at his sides, watching me the way men watch the ocean before they decide whether to dive or drown.

“I don’t know what to believe,” I tell the fire. It comes out too soft, so I harden it. “I don’t know who to believe.”

He crosses the carpet without a sound and kneels beside the chair instead of looming, which is so unlike him it disorients me more than a threat would. He doesn’t touch me. He just kneels. His breath fogs faintly in the cool pocket of air between us.

“Believe this,” he says. “I would’ve died for you then. I still would.”

My laugh is brittle. “You would’ve died to own me.”

He takes the hit without flinching. “I would’ve died to make sure the world didn’t put its boot on your throat again.” A beat. “If that makes me selfish, I’ll wear it.”

“That makes you a liar.” I mean to spit it. It lands like a plea.

He looks at me for a long time, and the things I hate about his eyes—the steadiness, the patience, the way they never slide away when the truth gets ugly—are the things that hold me in place.

He lifts a hand slowly, gives me every inch of time to refuse.

I don’t. He lays two fingers against my wrist, where my pulse hammers like a trapped bird.

“Breathe with me,” he says, low. “In four, hold four, out four.” He counts under his breath in Sicilian, the numbers dark and round against my skin. I try to resist. I fail. By the fourth set, the frantic stutter in my chest loses its teeth.

He doesn’t take advantage of the quiet he made. He keeps his hand where it is, barely there, an anchor instead of a cuff.

“I was fifteen,” I say, surprising myself. “I wrote in that journal because I didn’t have a voice anywhere else. I wrote to make sure I existed. And you…” The rest dissolves into heat.

“Read it,” he finishes for me, not a wince, not a victory. “I did.”

I want to claw his face open and take the truth back out of him, line by line, until there’s nothing left but empty mouth and sorry. “Why keep it? Why write in it? Why—” My throat tightens until the question rips thin. “Why me?”

“Because,” he says, and then he stops, jaw working like he’s grinding steel filings between his teeth.

“Because I saw your spine under all that ash. Because you looked at a world that wanted you small and you sharpened yourself instead. Because the first time I pulled you from fire, I knew it wouldn’t be the last.”

“Don’t romanticize it,” I whisper. “Don’t make a myth out of my survival just so you can crown yourself the hero.”

“Heroes die clean,” he says. “I’m not that. I’m what kept you breathing when clean wasn’t on the table.”

The fireplace shifts, a soft collapse of coal. I stare at the tiny avalanche of sparks, because looking at him feels like standing on the edge of a cliff and daring gravity to blink first.

“Promise me something,” I say.

He doesn’t hesitate. “Yes.”

“You won’t touch Guido to teach me a lesson. Ever.” I look up then, make sure the full weight of the condition crushes any loophole before it forms. “No tests. No fear to force obedience. No knives with my son’s name on them.”

His mouth flattens. “I would cut off my own hands before I let anyone reach for him.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Silence, heavy enough to pull the corners of the room inward. He nods once, a movement like a vow. “On my mother’s bones,” he says, and the way the words leave him tells me that oath costs something. “Never.”

My fingers shake. I hate that it matters. I hate that it helps. I slide my hand into his, not because I forgive him, not because I concede, but because for three breaths I want to be a person and not a weapon. He doesn’t squeeze. He doesn’t pull. He simply holds.

We sit like that while the fire lowers itself to ember and the clock in the hall marks the seconds we’ll regret later. No kiss. No fight. Just two people who don’t know how to be soft anymore, pretending for the length of a breath that they still can.

When I finally rise, he stands with me but doesn’t follow. “Sleep,” he says, as if the command can make it true.

“It won’t,” I answer, and leave before the part of me that wants to ask him to stay can learn to speak.

The Hidden Camera

The corridor is cool on my bare feet. I count doorframes to calm my heartbeat—one, two, three, the linen closet with its iron key, the small alcove with the chipped saint. The house listens. It always has.

By the time I reach my room, my lungs feel scraped raw.

I close the door gently, as if the wood might scream if I slam it, and lean my forehead against it until the grain imprints my skin.

One breath. Two. The rose water on the bedside table has gone stale; the ghost of smoke in the chimney never leaves.

I strip because the dress feels like a bruise.

The zipper complains. Velvet puddles, a black lake at my feet.

The mirror offers no mercy—hair wild, mascara ghosting under my eyes, mouth swollen from words and from the way he looked at me like prayer and verdict.

I take the rest off—lace, silk—because my skin needs air, because I need to see the body he keeps trying to rewrite and remember it still belongs to me.

“Who are you now?” I ask the woman in the glass. “Widow. Pawn. Queen.” The names slip. None fit. “Mother,” I add, fierce, low.

I reach for the robe draped over the back of the chair.

A red blink kisses the corner of my eye.

I still. The room shrinks around the pulse of color.

The air remembers how to hurt. Another blink.

Not reflection—too steady. I pivot my head slowly, because prey that bolts is prey that bleeds, and follow the light to the shelf near the balcony doors.

The glass of the bookcase throws back the last heartbeats of the fire.

Blink.

My robe slides silent from my hands. The carpet eats the sound of my steps as I cross the room.

I kneel, palms flat on the rug to keep from shaking, and study the row of leather spines until I see it: a seam where there shouldn’t be one, a dark hole the size of a coin, a red dot winking like a heartbeat behind it.

I slide the books aside—Dante, Borges, a family bible no one in this house ever read for comfort—and there it is. Small. Black. So precise it feels obscene. A camera tucked into a cutout that’s been lined to swallow sound.

Heat surges to my face so fast I taste metal. My mouth goes dry. My fingers hover, wanting to rip, to crush, to grind the lens to sand.

“How long have you been watching me?” I breathe. It’s not a question for anyone in the room; it’s a prayer to a God who never answered me when it mattered. My throat works around something sharp. “How long?”

“Long enough to know when you lie.”

The voice comes from behind me. Not the hallway. The room. My room.

I don’t turn. Every inch of me turns to glass instead, a woman-shaped vase full of water about to crack from the inside. In the mirror, my eyes are huge, the pupils blown; the camera’s red dot blinks on, steady as a metronome.

“I told you I would protect you,” he says. Calm. Too calm. “That includes from yourself.”

“You put a camera in my bedroom.”

“I put eyes on a queen who attracts knives.” A pause that feels like a hand on the back of my neck. “Especially her own.”

“Get out.” It scrapes out of me like something rusted breaking free. “Get out or I’ll—” I swallow the threat because I don’t know which one I mean, and the ones I do mean sound like crying when I try to say them.

“Turn around, Zina.”

“No.” My nails bite crescents into my palms. The urge to cover myself finally detonates; I snatch the robe and drag it on, the belt a savage knot at my waist. My skin still feels exposed, the robe somehow thinner than air when a lens is blinking.

He steps into the edge of the mirror’s frame then—just the shoulder and the line of his jaw, shadow-carved. He’s left the rest of himself in the dark on purpose. I can feel it. Control by inches. Punishment by inches, too.

“Was it from the start?” I ask, voice barely more than breath. “From Naples? From the fire? Were you already planning to watch me like an animal in a glass box?”

“From the fire,” he says. “I learned a lesson the night I almost lost you: the world takes what it can see in the open. So I closed the windows.”

“You cut new ones,” I snap, pointing at the lens. “You built a house with windows facing only you.”

He doesn’t deny it. The truth has weight tonight, and we both carry it.

“How many?” I force out. “How many cameras?”

Silence. Then, “Enough to make sure no one ever hurts you again without me knowing first.”

A laugh rips up my throat, ugly and wet. “Except you.”

The pause this time is longer. The fire mutters in the grate. Far down the hall, a clock chimes, the sound thin as bone.

“I won’t apologize for keeping you alive,” he says.

“Then I won’t apologize for breaking your toys.” I reach for the camera with a speed that surprises me, yank the little box forward, hard, feel wires tear like veins under my grip.

He moves, a blur in the mirror—hand snapping out to catch my wrist before I can rip it free. Not crushing. Stopping. Heat sears skin to skin.

“Don’t,” he says, quiet, as if the room might wake the dead if he raises his voice. “You’ll bleed yourself for spectacle and call it freedom.”

“Better blood than filth.” I meet his eyes in the glass—mine blown wide, his narrowed to blades. “Get out.”

“Say you’ll stop lying to me.”

“Get. Out.”

We hold there—woman and man and the red-eyed thing between us—until the stretch of it turns my bones to wire. He releases my wrist like he’s making a concession to a treaty no one signed and steps backward, the shadow swallowing him until only the suggestion of him remains.

The camera blinks in my hand—one last red pulse, like a heart refusing to quit—before I twist it, hard. The light dies.

Darkness pours into the space it leaves, so thick I sway.

“Lock your door,” he says from the threshold. “Even queens lock their doors.”

The latch clicks. I stand alone, robe belt digging into my waist, the little dead box heavy in my palm, and for the first time in years I understand that naked doesn’t mean undressed.

It means seen.