Page 25 of Queen (Shattered Pieces #2)

zina

The Queen’s Reign Begins

M orning tastes like metal. Bitter, sharp, clinging to the back of my throat. I don’t sleep—I molt. I peel myself out of the shell of yesterday, strip off grief, and armor up. Black. Slick. Severe. Nothing soft. Not mourning. War.

At the mirror, I pull my hair into a knot so tight it won’t move even if I bleed. The dress is plain, but it cuts like a blade—made for utility, not beauty. Stockings. Boots. I strap the sheath along my thigh and slide the dagger home. Not Giovanni’s. Mine.

The house hums beneath me, a low, feral vibration. Doors open and close. Radios hiss with clipped orders. Men shuffle, pretending the world hasn’t already shifted under their feet. I leave my room without a word.

The knight I dropped last night still lies face-down on the nursery floor, as if ashamed to meet my eyes. I don’t pick it up. I don’t need talismans. I need obedience.

The war room waits under the bones of the estate, cool and damp, a bunker carved into stone. Two guards stand at the door. They know better than to question me. I push through before they can salute.

Inside, the air stills. Voices die mid-sentence. Screens glow with camera feeds and maps, red lines crisscrossing the city like arteries. A table the size of a coffin dominates the center, cluttered with files, shell casings, and the bloodstained pawn sealed in plastic.

Marco falters mid-report when he sees me, words choking back down his throat.

Men shift, their eyes sliding away. Emiliano stands at the head of the table, jacket open, sleeves shoved up, veins carved down his forearms. His eyes find me first. They track the black.

The boots. The blade strapped high on my thigh. His pride sparks quick and dangerous.

He looks like a king who just realized the throne was never his.

I don’t slow. I don’t ask. My heels strike stone, sharp, cutting through their huddle.

“Everyone out,” I say. My voice is calm, low, the kind of calm that gets people killed. Then, with a glance at him, “Except him.”

No one argues. Chairs scrape. Maps fold. Boots shuffle. Men who could break necks with two fingers file out like chastised schoolboys. Marco hesitates, torn between loyalty and the ice in my tone. I look at him once. He’s gone.

The door shuts. Silence—thick, heavy, a silence that carries weight.

Emiliano doesn’t move. He’s a storm on the horizon, inevitable. “Your timing is shit,” he says dryly.

“My timing saves lives.” I grab the pawn from the table, hold it to the light. The dried smear of blood looks weak now. Brown. Brittle. “Yours should’ve.”

His face flickers with something ugly before it vanishes. He’s used to men bowing with words even when they bite. I don’t bow.

I drop the pawn. Plastic cracks against wood. Then I draw my dagger and drive it into the table, steel slicing through maps and paper until the hilt kisses stone. The sound rings like a bell.

“If you’re not going to raze the world,” I lean on the blade, “I will.”

For a beat, water murmurs through the pipes in the walls—steady, indifferent. Emiliano doesn’t step closer. He steps back.

“Then take it,” he says.

I circle the table and claim the head like I was born to it. Maybe I was. My palms flatten over the maps. The city lies beneath my hands like a throat I’m ready to crush.

“Here’s how this goes,” I tell him. “I want access to every feed you control. All calls in and out of this house for the last seventy-two hours. Visitor logs. Gate cams. Deliveries—down to the fucking milk.”

“You’ll have it.” His reply is immediate.

“And your men stop preening for your approval. They answer to me now. If they don’t like it, they can explain that to a mother who just lost her son.”

The corner of his mouth curves. Admiration lingers in the room, hot and quiet. “Done.”

I tap the dagger’s hilt. Let the hum of steel remind us both who holds the blade. “Lock the compound. No one in or out without my say.” I point at a grainy camera feed—south perimeter, fog pooling at the fence line. “That blind patch? Fix it. I want a lens in every shadow that thinks it’s safe.”

Emiliano follows my gesture. His eyes glint. “You missed your calling.”

“No,” I say coldly. “I was never allowed to answer it.”

We stand there—me with the city beneath my hands, him watching like he’s never seen anything more dangerous than the woman he tried to cage. It should scare me that he looks proud. Instead, it fuels me.

“Anything else, Queen?” he asks. The word isn’t mockery. It’s acknowledgment.

I pull the dagger free. The maps breathe, edges springing up from the wound. “Yeah,” I say, sliding steel back against my thigh. “Find out which of your men sold us. Then bring him to me.”

His eyes darken. “To you.”

“Do I stutter?”

His nod is clean, sharp. No hesitation. “No.”

I move to the wall of screens. Light burns my eyes, cold and unflinching. The throne isn’t a chair—it’s presence. It slides across my shoulders like armor I should’ve worn years ago.

“Good,” I murmur to the city itself. “Because I’m done asking.”

Emiliano doesn’t touch me. Doesn’t temper me. He yields the space, stepping aside—not out of reach, but out of my way.

Let the world take note. Emiliano Maritz commands empires. But today, he yields the room. And I—dressed in black, blade humming, grief sharpened into a weapon—take it.

Finding the First Rat

The walls of this house are thick, but secrets bleed through them if you know where to listen.

Giovanni trained me in that art. A queen in his kingdom wasn’t meant to smile for the cameras—she was meant to hear what he couldn’t, to see what he missed.

I sharpened myself on whispers, on footsteps too light for a soldier, on the sweep of a broom that lingered too long outside a door.

Tonight, I call that training back.

Maria shuffles into my sitting room, her shoulders bent with age, her hands still smelling of soap and polish.

She served under Giovanni’s reign, back when I believed loyalty could be bought with coin or kindness.

She was the one who used to slip folded scraps of gossip under my teacup—secrets overheard while scrubbing ashtrays or turning sheets. She was never wrong.

Now, I don’t need gossip. I need blood.

“Tell me,” I whisper.

Her voice trembles, but her eyes hold steady. “One of his men… the tall one. Matteo D’Orsi. Always slipping away. Hours at a time. I followed him once, my lady. He went past the gates, down to the docks. No orders were given. None that I heard.”

Matteo. Emiliano’s lieutenant. The name tastes like acid.

“Did you see him with anyone?” My tone is quiet but unrelenting.

She shakes her head quickly. “Only that he came back late. His hands too clean for a soldier’s.”

Guido’s empty bed flashes across my mind, the sheets still neat, still cold. Rage claws my throat. My boy stolen, and some rat thinks his silence will protect him.

“Good,” I murmur. “You’ve done enough. Go.”

She hesitates, voice breaking. “And if he learns I—”

I seize her chin—gentle, but unyielding. “He won’t. Because he’ll never see daylight again.”

Her eyes widen. Then she nods and scurries out, skirts whispering across marble.

The moment the door clicks shut, I move. No hesitation. My phone glows in my palm, tracing the last signal from Guido’s burner before it went dark. The map flickers—too close to home. Too precise. Betrayal rooted inside these walls. My blood runs cold, then hot, molten steel flooding my veins.

I stride through the corridors, servants scattering. The house feels smaller, its shadows too sharp, too knowing. At the first guard I see, I snap, “Lock it down. Nobody leaves. Nobody enters. Not until I say.”

His eyes widen, but he nods sharply and disappears into the dark to carry out my command.

By the time I reach the courtyard, my voice is iron. “Bring me Matteo D’Orsi. Alive. Drag him to the cellar.”

For a second, hesitation flickers. A dangerous mistake. I step closer, letting them see the fury burning in my eyes.

“You heard me. The cellar. Now.”

The command slices their doubt clean in half. They scatter like wolves unleashed, boots pounding stone, the hunt already begun.

My hand slips into my pocket, closing around the wooden knight I carried since last night. The edges bite into my palm until blood prickles my skin. Giovanni taught me cruelty, but he never let me wield it. Emiliano thinks he’s the only one who understands war.

They’re both wrong.

I am not their pawn. I am the board.

Tonight, the first rat squeals. And by dawn, Matteo D’Orsi will learn what it means to betray a mother’s vow.

The Interrogation

The wine cellar reeks of damp stone and oak, but tonight it carries a sharper note. Iron. Blood.

Matteo sits tied to a heavy chair, wrists bound tight behind him, ankles lashed to the legs. His mouth bleeds where someone introduced him to the back of a fist. A bruise blossoms under one eye, ugly and purple. Yet when I step into the circle of light cast by the single bulb overhead, he smirks.

That smirk lights something feral in me.

I circle him slowly, my heels echoing against stone. Each strike sharp, deliberate—the rhythm of a predator closing in. He watches me with cocky detachment, as if the ropes make him untouchable. As if I haven’t already decided he’s dead.

“You think this is a game?” My voice is calm, but inside my chest my heart hammers like a war drum.

He spits blood onto the floor. “You wouldn’t dirty your hands. Queens never do.”

The corner of my mouth curves, but it isn’t a smile. It’s rage honed to a blade. “Then you never knew Giovanni.”

At the name, his eyes flicker—just for a moment. That’s all I need. I step closer until I can smell the sour tang of his fear beneath the blood. My hand closes on the knife I stole from the guard’s belt. The handle is already warm, as though it knows what it’s about to do.