Page 28 of Queen (Shattered Pieces #2)

zina

The Whisper That Breaks Her

T he kid’s hands shake so bad the cigarette between his fingers burns down untouched, ash spilling across his lap. He looks like he’s about to piss himself, and for once, I don’t have to lift a blade to make that happen. My silence is enough.

He stammers, eyes darting everywhere but mine. Coward. “Please, Donna Zina, I didn’t—I didn’t mean to hear it. I swear to God I didn’t. They’ll kill me if—”

“Spit it out.” My voice cuts sharp as broken glass, snapping through the air like a whip.

The soldier flinches, swallows hard. He can’t be more than twenty, a body shoved into a suit two sizes too big. Giovanni would’ve never let someone this green near the family. But Giovanni’s in the ground, and I’m staring at his mistake.

The boy leans closer, whisper trembling. “Santino. He—he made a deal. With Russo. Behind closed doors.”

My pulse halts. Russo. That rat-bastard capo has been circling like a vulture since Giovanni’s coffin dropped, waiting for flesh to rot.

The soldier’s lip trembles. “Your death… was the condition.”

The words don’t land like bullets. They seep like poison. Cold. Slow. Crawling through my veins until my whole body goes still, my breath caught somewhere between disbelief and rage.

For a long moment, I just stare at him. The shadows of the room seem to lean in closer, pressing against my skin. The sound of my own breath roars in my ears like surf pounding rock.

“My death,” I repeat, flat, empty, the syllables tasting of rust.

He nods so fast I think his head might roll off. “I didn’t want to say anything—I thought—maybe it wasn’t true—but I heard it, Donna. I swear on my mother’s grave. Santino… he said you were never meant to outlive Giovanni.”

Something inside me snaps clean in half.

I buried my husband. I gave my body to my enemy. But betrayal by blood? That I won’t forgive.

I don’t scream. I don’t cry. I don’t even curse. I just stand, slow and deliberate, smoothing my skirt with fingers that should be trembling but aren’t. My body knows what my mind hasn’t caught up to yet—this is war, carved into my bones.

The boy scrambles to his feet, desperate. “Please—don’t kill me for saying it. I only told you because—because I thought you should know.”

I finally meet his eyes. He wishes I hadn’t. Because what he sees there isn’t mercy. It’s death already written. His breath stutters, chest heaving, as though he’s staring at a blade pressed to his throat.

I step past him without a word, heels clicking sharp on tile, each strike a verdict. He exhales like he’s been spared. Maybe he has. Maybe I’ll send someone else for him later, when the time is right.

Outside, the night air cuts cold into my lungs, sharp and clean, freezing me solid. I let it. Because if I let the fire touch me now, I’ll burn the whole city down before sunrise.

I murmur to the dark, a vow that tastes like iron on my tongue: “Blood for blood.”

And then I walk. Silent. Deadly.

Return to the Cathedral

The blade is a whisper against my ribs, cool steel pressed into the boning of my corset. No guards. No entourage. Just me, the echo of my heels on stone, and the weight of what I already know. If Santino wants me dead, he’ll have to earn it face-to-face.

The cathedral looms like the corpse of God Himself—hollowed stone, blackened beams from the fire years ago.

Giovanni used to drag the boys here to confess, to kneel at the altar and swear they’d serve the family with clean hearts.

Now the air tastes of soot, incense long gone, and secrets rotting under the floorboards.

I slide into a pew halfway down the aisle. The wood groans beneath me, a sound like bones breaking. I don’t pray. Haven’t in years. Instead, I rest my gloved hands in my lap, letting the silence coil around my throat until it’s a noose.

He arrives exactly as I knew he would—late, deliberate, a shadow stretched long across fractured stained glass. Santino. Giovanni’s golden son. My firstborn. My betrayal in living flesh.

His swagger makes the air colder. He doesn’t bow, doesn’t kiss my cheek, doesn’t even pretend respect. He just smirks, hands buried in his pockets, like a wolf welcoming a lamb too foolish to know the den she entered.

“Well, well,” he drawls, voice thick with mockery. “The Queen of corpses.”

The words slice sharper than they should. Not because they’re untrue—but because he says them with Giovanni’s mouth.

I don’t flinch. Instead, I slide the ring off my finger—Giovanni’s ring, the one he forced onto me when he claimed me as his wife. I let it gleam in the fractured moonlight streaming through colored glass. Then I turn it, slow, to reveal the engraving burned into its band: Emiliano’s crest.

His smirk falters. Barely a flicker, but I catch it.

“Funny,” I murmur, voice low enough that the whole cathedral seems to lean closer to hear. “That’s not how your father saw me.”

For the first time, Santino’s mask cracks. His jaw ticks. His eyes flash that storm I once believed only Giovanni carried. But his storm is younger, sharper, more reckless—born of arrogance, not rule.

He steps closer, boots striking the stone with the rhythm of a gavel. “You think wearing another man’s mark makes you untouchable? You think bedding my father’s enemy makes you Queen?”

I lean back in the pew, lazy, deliberate, like I’m bored of the trial already. “No. My crown was forged in fire. In blood. Not in your approval.”

The silence that follows is heavy enough to crush ribs. Dust drifts through the shafts of light above, glittering like ash-snow falling from heaven.

Santino leans down until his shadow swallows me whole. His breath is warm, venom-laced, when he hisses, “You’re already dead, Madre. You just haven’t laid down yet.”

And I smile. A slow, venomous curl of lips, black with promise. “Then bury me yourself, figlio. If you can.”

The Gun Between Them

The cathedral’s air thickens until every breath feels like a trespass, pressing into my ribs like stone.

The silence cuts sharper than any blade, so sharp it hums in my skull.

Santino’s smirk—that arrogant curl of his mouth worn like a badge of blood—finally falters.

What replaces it chills me deeper: the blank mask of a Rivas man who has learned to kill without blinking.

Giovanni wore that same face when he consigned men to their graves.

“You put a hit on me.” My tone is even, but the blade hidden in my corset burns against my ribs, begging for daylight. The words strike the air like thunder in a sanctuary.

Santino doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t deny. He only rolls his shoulders, a shrug so casual it feels like blasphemy in this desecrated holy place. “You were never supposed to outlive him.” His voice is smooth, almost lazy, but beneath the calm coils venom, ready to strike.

The pew beneath me suddenly feels like a coffin, the cathedral itself a tomb prepared to bury me alive.

Rage scorches through me, molten and merciless.

But it isn’t just rage—it’s betrayal that cuts marrow-deep, the kind no blade can excise.

My son, my blood, looks me dead in the eye and speaks my death as if it were scripture.

Then he moves.

His hand dips inside his coat.

Instinct answers before thought. Steel hisses free from my corset, catching moonlight in a flash. I rise in one sharp motion, blade leveled at the hollow of his throat.

Time fractures. One heartbeat suspended in eternity. His hand half-drawn, my knife poised to carve his skin. The cathedral is no longer stone and pews—it is a graveyard of choices, waiting to crown either him or me as executioner.

But when his hand clears, it isn’t a gun. Not steel. Not death in its simplest form.

It’s beads.

A rosary—black wood strung on cord, beads worn smooth by decades of whispered prayers. The crucifix dangles from his fingers, swaying between us like the pendulum of judgment.

Confusion steals my breath. Then I catch the look in his eyes—calm, steady, unflinching. This isn’t a weapon to him. It’s worse. It’s conviction.

“Your soul’s already damned,” Santino whispers.

The words drip like oil, slick and poisonous.

He feeds the beads through his fingers slowly, each click echoing in the vast hollow like the tick of a gun’s safety.

He leans close, the crucifix swinging until its silver nearly kisses the edge of my blade.

“I just wanted to watch you burn first.”

The words strike harder than any bullet.

I should laugh. I should carve him open where he stands.

But grief slashes me instead, jagged and merciless.

My son isn’t holding a gun. He’s holding a faith Giovanni twisted into a weapon sharper than steel.

Every prayer, every bead, another nail in the coffin of what I once believed family could mean.

I press the knife closer until the crucifix almost scrapes the edge. Sparks of fire and ice seethe in the air between us.

“You mistake me,” I murmur, venom coating every syllable. “I was never afraid of fire. I was born in it.”

For the first time, something flickers in his eyes—not fear, not shame. Amusement. Maybe respect. His lips twitch, a ghost of a smile that never touches his storm-dark eyes.

The silence that follows isn’t empty. It’s war, unspoken. A battlefield drawn in bloodlines and damnation. Neither of us lowers our weapons—his beads, my steel. His faith, my fury.

And the cathedral waits, breathless, to see which of us strikes first.

A Crown of Thorns

The rosary dangles between us like a curse, its beads swinging slow, deliberate, mocking. I don’t flinch. I won’t. If I bow now, he wins. If I hesitate, I’m already dead.

So I step forward—closer—until incense clinging faintly to his shirt mixes with the copper bite of ash in the cathedral air. My hand moves faster than thought. My palm cracks across his face, the sound shattering through the hollow vaults like a gunshot.