Page 36 of Queen (Shattered Pieces #2)

Zina doesn’t answer. She leans against the window frame, her black dress still shimmering faintly with the candlelight from the hall. Arms crossed, face unreadable. Her silence feels like judgment, but her eyes track me like a predator waiting to see if I’ll stumble.

I pace, a caged animal, blood still caked into the lines of my palm. Shards crunch beneath my boots, dragging across marble like broken teeth. Every breath burns.

“I should’ve put him on his knees right there,” I spit. “Dragged him back to the table, made him bleed for every disrespectful word. Instead he storms out, and half the fucking room is wondering if they should’ve followed.”

Her reply cuts soft, deliberate. “You didn’t lose the room.”

I whip my head toward her, fury flashing. “You think I don’t fucking know that? You think I didn’t see them hesitate? You think I don’t feel Giovanni’s ghost breathing down my neck every time one of those bastards weighs me against his memory?”

The words tear out raw before I can choke them back. My fists clench until fresh blood seeps from the half-healed cut, dripping slow and steady. Zina’s gaze flicks to it. She doesn’t move. She lets me bleed.

Finally, she asks the question that lands like a blade to the ribs. “Do you regret it?”

For a heartbeat, the answer claws at me. Regret is weakness. Weakness is death. But when I meet her stare, I know I can’t lie. Not to her.

“No.” My voice drops lower, rougher, scraped raw. “That blood pact—our blood—it was the only way forward. The only thing strong enough to bind this family or break it. And I’ll never regret claiming you before them. Never.”

Her shoulders ease, though her face doesn’t soften. She tilts her head, regal even now, her words a scalpel. “Then accept the truth. We have enemies not only in the shadows, but at our own table. That ceremony didn’t just unite the loyal. It painted a target on our backs.”

I drag a hand down my face, fury hardening into steel. “Then let them come.”

She steps closer, close enough that I catch the faint trace of smoke clinging to her hair from the candles. Her words are final, razor-sharp: “We started a war at that table, Emiliano. And there’s no going back.”

I meet her eyes, and the war inside me answers hers. “Good. Because I’ve never been more certain.”

Intimacy of Equals: Love, Not Leverage

The storm inside me is still rattling the walls when her hand closes over mine.

Not pulling. Not commanding. Just resting—light, deliberate—on the palm I split open in front of them all.

The cut still stings, scabbed in jagged red.

Blood dried black at the edges, the mark of vow and violence both.

I expect her to flinch. To recoil like everyone else does when they touch the proof of what I am.

Instead, she lifts it.

Zina brings my hand to her mouth, lips pressing against the scar—soft as sin, reverent as a prayer. I don’t fucking move. For the first time in years, I’m afraid that if I breathe, the moment will vanish.

Her whisper ghosts across my skin. “The blood on your hands doesn’t frighten me anymore.”

I feel it more than I hear it. The words soak into cracks Giovanni carved into me long before tonight, filling hollow places I’d convinced myself would never heal. No fear. No judgment. Only binding.

My throat tightens. “You should fear it. You should fear me.”

Her gaze lifts, molten and merciless. “I don’t.”

And for a second, I almost believe her. Almost. Until her fingers trace the edge of the wound, slow, deliberate, like she’s reading the lines of my damnation. It burns worse than the blade ever did.

I’ve broken men for less. Killed for less. But her touch strips me raw. Stripped. Human.

She steps closer, her body pressing to mine, her crown of ruin nearly cutting into my chest. “You didn’t force this crown on me, Emiliano.” Her voice is steel wrapped in silk. “I claimed it.”

Her words are a knife to my gut—but not the kind that wounds. The kind that carves truth into bone. She chose this. She chose me.

My hand shakes as I lift it to her face. I don’t command her chin up like I would anyone else. I just… hold her. My thumb smears a faint streak of dried blood across her cheek, marking her the way I marked the pact.

“You think I’ll ever let them take it from you?” My voice is low, dark, dangerous. “No, Zina. I’ll defend it. I’ll defend you—with every last drop of blood I have left to bleed.”

For the first time in my life, a vow doesn’t feel like strategy. It feels like surrender.

Her lips curve—not into softness, but something sharper.

Approval. Challenge. A vow of her own. But I see it then: the flicker in her eyes when she thinks of Guido.

Even here, even now, she carries him like a second pulse.

She’s Queen, yes—but also mother. She would burn me alive if I threatened either role.

And maybe that’s why I can’t let her go.

Her breath warms my cheek, steady, unafraid. My hand cups the nape of her neck, pulling her close until her forehead rests against mine. The silence isn’t empty—it’s alive, thrumming with everything we’ve carved into each other.

For once, I don’t feel like the monster clutching the crown. I feel like the man she bound in fire and salt. The one who isn’t afraid to bleed if it means she stands beside me.

And fuck me, but that terrifies me more than any war ever could.

An Empty Throne

The house has finally gone quiet. Too quiet. After the blood vow, after Santino’s storming exit, even the walls feel hollow, echoing with everything unsaid.

I should be sleeping, but men like me don’t sleep once war is declared.

I sit in my study, scotch burning down my throat, firelight flickering against Giovanni’s old shelves.

Zina lies stretched across the couch opposite me, black silk clinging, her crown of ruin glinting faint in the flames.

She doesn’t doze. She watches. Always watching.

The knock comes just after midnight. Three raps—too measured to be nervous, too precise to be innocent.

One of my guards steps in, carrying a small velvet box. Black, sharp-edged, heavy enough that my gut twists before it even touches the desk. “No return address, boss. Dropped at the gates.”

I wave him out.

The click of the door sounds like a coffin lid sealing.

Zina rises slowly, circling the desk in silence. She doesn’t touch the box, only paces around it like a predator sizing prey. My hand hovers longer than I want her to see before I snap the lid open.

Inside, cushioned against black satin, gleams Giovanni’s wedding band.

Not a replica. Not a forgery. The original.

Cleaned. Polished. Gleaming as though time itself bowed to preserve it.

I know every curve, every weight of that ring.

I watched Giovanni crush men with that hand, seal alliances, choke enemies into silence.

That ring carried the kingdom long before I did.

Zina exhales slow, sharp as a blade sliding free of its sheath. “Who the fuck would dare?”

There’s more. Folded beneath the band, a slip of parchment. Old. Stiff. Ink bleeding red across its surface. I unfold it once. Twice. A third time, because the words don’t shift, don’t soften, no matter how hard I glare.

"Rex cadere potest, sed umbra eius numquam dormit."

A king may fall, but his shadow never sleeps.

The weight of it drops into the room like a guillotine.

My jaw locks. My pulse hammers. I’m not a man who flinches, but this—this is Giovanni’s ghost slamming his fist on the table we thought we’d claimed.

Zina steps beside me, close enough that the scent of her crown oil and steel cuts through the smoke.

She stares down at the ring, her expression unreadable—until her lips twist into something darker than fear.

Something closer to recognition. “His shadow,” she whispers, eyes lifting to mine.

“Or someone who wants us to believe it.”

Her hand brushes my arm. A small touch. Grounding. Necessary. She doesn’t say more. She doesn’t have to.

I snap the box shut, the sound final, violent. My reflection glares back in the black lid—hard, unyielding, but not untouched.

I lift my gaze to her. My voice comes out low, cold, certain. “It’s started.”

And in her silence, I hear the truth neither of us dares say aloud.

If Giovanni’s shadow is rising, then the blood pact we carved tonight wasn’t the end.

It was the fucking beginning.