Page 23 of Queen (Shattered Pieces #2)

emiliano

The Missing Piece

M orning is wrong. I feel it before I’m fully awake—the kind of silence that isn’t rest but vacuum. Zina’s side of the bed is cold, her perfume just a ghost in the sheets. The house hums with electricity and money and fear; today it does none of that. It waits.

The door slams. Marco stumbles in, ashen, eyes too wide for a man who’s seen what we’ve seen. He doesn’t waste breath.

“Sir… he’s gone.”

I sit up. The sheets slide from my waist. My pulse stays steady in that dangerous way I trust more than panic. “Who.”

His throat works. He doesn’t say the name; it falls out of him like a confession.

“Guido.”

I’m already moving. Cold floor under bare feet, the shock of it ripping whatever sleep was left out of me. I catch Marco by the collar and pull him into the corridor. The guards lining the hall won’t meet my eyes. Of course they won’t. Cowards always study the floor when the blade is coming.

“Show me.”

We reach the boy’s room. The door stands ajar, a careless lip of wood and paint that looks obscene now. Air hangs heavy with copper. At first I think I’m smelling the echo of old battles, the metallic ghost that lives in every house like this. Then I see the pillow.

A pawn, white wood, the grain stained red.

Not his, I tell myself. Not his blood. Not my boy.

A strip of paper is tied around the pawn’s neck in a neat little strangulation. Ink slashed hard into the fibers:

The Queen can’t protect her piece.

The world tightens to a point.

Behind me—Zina’s scream. It splits the corridor open. She comes like a storm, hair unbound, bare feet slapping marble, nightdress twisted. Two guards reach instinctively for her; she rips free before their fingers graze cloth.

“Where is he?” She hits the doorframe with her shoulder and would go through it if bone could cut oak. “Where the fuck is my son?”

Useless statues in suits. None of them answer. The closest one looks like he might be sick.

I grab her. Hands to shoulders, anchoring her with the same force I use on men who forget who pays them. She fights—nails score tracks across my chest, a sting that argues I’m still human. Good. Let it burn.

“Let me go!” She’s trying to bite through the words. “I’ll find him—”

“Zina.” I lock her in with my stare. “Look at me.”

She does. Eyes like wet glass. Terror, rage, and something that goes darker when it remembers the camera I tore out of her wall and didn’t apologize for. She’s shaking, all fight and no air.

“I will bring him back,” I say.

“You don’t—”

“I understand everything.” I don’t raise my voice. I don’t have to. “But you stay here.”

I ease her backward and shove a blanket at a useless maid until the woman remembers how arms work. Zina sags only enough for breath to find her again. Not surrender. Nothing about her is that soft.

I step inside the room. Take inventory in a glance:

Window latch undisturbed. No glass, no pry marks.

Vent grate unscrewed and re-screwed; the heads are too clean.

The faintest scuff on the sill—rubber, not leather.

The nightlight is dead though the bulb isn’t burned; someone killed the power to this room alone, then brought it back.

The boy’s favorite book open spine-down on the carpet; he was taken gently, or fast by a hand that knows children.

No overturned furniture. No struggle. In and out like a surgeon.

A thin smear of blood on the sheet, near the pawn. A needle prick’s worth. The piece is bait; the stain is message. They want us to think about queens and boards and all the wrong wars.

I hold the pawn. It’s warm from the room, tacky where the red sits. I pass it to Marco without taking my eyes off Zina.

“Have the lab tell me if the blood is his,” I say. “And if it is, how much I’m going to make the city pay.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Lock the estate. No one in, no one out. Anyone tries a phone call without my permission, break their fingers.”

The guards finally wake up. Orders give frightened men a spine. Feet thud down stairs. Radios crackle.

Zina sways once like the floor fell an inch. I’m there before she drops. She claws at my forearms to hold herself up. Her mouth opens; no sound comes. When her voice finally scrapes free it’s sand and glass.

“Please.”

I’ve heard that word a hundred ways. From enemies begging, from soldiers bargaining, from bankers who think cash can buy them back their lives. From her, it’s different. It’s a blade, and I deserve the cut.

“I’m bringing him home,” I say again, and make it a vow I can hang men from.

I brush past her into the hall, call over my shoulder without looking. “Get Santino on the phone. If he doesn’t answer, find the church he thinks God is listening in today and burn it to the fucking ground until he crawls out.”

“Sir—” Marco’s caution.

“Do it.”

I spare the pawn one last look. It sits on a white pillow like a bone.

You moved a piece, I think, whoever you are. You think that means you’re playing me.

I don’t play. I end.

The Storm Unleashed

The war room lives under the house like a heart. Concrete, steel, cables stapled along ceiling joists. It smells like gun oil and damp stone and ambition. Tonight it stinks like what I’m going to make the city breathe.

The table is already dressed for violence—maps of the west docks, freeway arteries, safe-house grids, a row of suppressed pistols like silverware. Screens line the far wall; the grid is green and gray and empty of what I need most.

My men form a crescent—fifteen killers pretending to be administrators. I nod once. Marco kills the lights over the table; the screens go brighter.

“Gates feed, four-twenty-one to four-twenty-four,” he says.

The clip rolls. Fog like milk over asphalt, a van ghosting in with its lights down to a predator’s slit.

The outer camera glitches at the exact three seconds it shouldn’t.

The guard on Post B scratches his chin and looks the other way in a performance I could teach in a day.

The inner gate opens a breath too early. The van slips. Out of frame. Gone.

“Payoff or dead?” I ask.

“Payoff,” Marco says. “Post B’s heart rate doesn’t spike. He never saw a gun.”

“Find him,” I say. “Bring what he loves.”

A few men start to move. I raise a finger; they freeze. “You’ll bring what he loves if he makes us waste a second. If he talks quick, you’ll bring him a doctor.”

They nod. I let them have the difference. Sometimes mercy makes the knife go in cleaner next time.

“Back it up,” I say. “Gate glitch.”

We watch the pixel smear bloom and die. Not random. Not cheap. A clean scrub layered over the line; I can hear the pride in the ghost who coded it.

“Inside help,” Marco says.

“More than one,” I say. “House power to the nursery cut at the breaker and restored inside three minutes. That’s not Post B. That’s a ghost with keys.”

The room shifts—weight moving foot to foot, men hungry for a name to hurt.

“Names,” I say.

We start the recitation. Drivers on duty.

Maids who swapped shifts for cash. A tech who bragged about buying a watch he shouldn’t afford.

The electrician who replaced the nursery’s dimmer last week, not because it was broken but because paperwork said it was.

I have half their faces memorized by the time Marco is done talking.

“Divide them,” I say. “Liars, borrowers, gamblers, true believers. The liars we break quick. The borrowers we buy and use. The gamblers we ruin and make examples of. The believers—” I smile. It’s not a nice thing. “—we introduce to a different religion.”

Phones light. Doors open and close upstairs like a machine starting. My machine.

Still, there’s a drum under my sternum that won’t find a rhythm. It beats a single word: boy .

Giovanni sits himself in my head without permission, like always. If you ever cross into fatherhood, it’ll destroy your edge, Emiliano. You can’t run an empire and cradle a child. One will always bleed for the other.

I’d laughed at him then. Arrogant. Young enough to think the world was smaller than my hands.

He was right about the bleeding. He was wrong about the edge.

Edge is for fencers. I am not a fencer. I am fire.

I slam my palm on the table. The guns rattle like teeth in a glass. Half the men jump because they are wise; the other half don’t because they are foolish.

“No sleep. No mercy,” I say. “You will tear the docks down to pilings. You will crawl the warehouses on West Sixth, sweep every freezer, every truck. You will buy men faster than the saints can forgive them. You will pull traffic cams from the freeway and find my van by dent and wheelbase and the cheap aftermarket rack some idiot thought wouldn’t show in fog.

Cross-check with plate readers and the three tow companies who’ll do anything for cash.

You will pull phone dumps within a mile for the hour we need and scrub for spikes and dead zones.

A Faraday cage leaves a hole; find it. There’s an empty space on the map where a van sat. I want its shadow.”

They move. God bless them, they move.

“And the boy,” I add, softer than the rest. The room stills because softness from me is rare. “If he is there, you call me first. You do not touch him until I’ve put my hands on his shoulders myself.”

Marco nods. “Understood.”

The screen splits into six, then twelve.

Docks. A warehouse camera someone forgot to wipe.

A street cam that shows fog and a stray dog, useless until you force it to give you the way tires scuff when a van turns left too hard.

It’s all useless until it isn’t. I know that game. I invented half of it.

“Check hospitals,” I say, eyes on the pawn I can still feel tacky in my hand. “Urgent care. Any clinic that saw a child before dawn with a puncture, a scratch, a cough from chloroform. They’ll have paid cash. Cash leaves a face.”

“On it.”