Page 58 of Queen
“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.”
“Call Santino,” I say. “If he doesn’t answer, call Romeo. If he doesn’t answer, call Dante. If none of them answer, start at their weakest soldier and climb the ladder with a blowtorch.”
Marco hesitates. “If Santino is involved—”
“If Santino is involved,” I say, and let the room feel what happens after theif, “I will bury him with his father’s teeth in his pocket.”
He doesn’t need the metaphor explained.
“Make a list,” I finish. “People who knew the boy’s habits. People who knew the door code changed last week. People who knew Zina would sleep through anything if she took the pills the doctor prescribed for ‘nerves.’ Find out who filled that prescription. If the pharmacist is dead by morning, it’s because he insisted.”
Men scatter like knives.
I stay. Watch the same clip again. The van slips. The fog eats it. The guard scratches his face as if he’s itchy where shame lives.
“Bring me Post B,” I say without turning. “And bring the electrician. Bring the tech. Bring them breathing.”
I feel, more than hear, Marco nod.
“You’ll find him,” he says, and for once, it isn’t a promise from me to a soldier. It’s a soldier to a king.
“No,” I answer. “I’ll take him back.”
On the wall, a new feed lights. A camera two blocks down from our outer fence. A white panel van with a dent on the driver’s side rear where a stupid man kissed a bollard last month. The time-stamp lands ten minutes after the breach, heading east, not west toward the freeways, bold as daylight in darkness. Whoever took him wants me to see this. Wants me to know they can walk through my teeth and not get cut.
I feel my mouth curve. Finally, something that tastes familiar.
“They’re proud,” I say. “Good. Pride makes men careless.”
I point. “Freeze. Enhance the lower right of the rear door.”
Marco clicks. The image clarifies a fraction—enough to give me what I need. A sticker. Faded. A service company logo someone tried and failed to peel clean. Three letters, half a phone number.
“That’s our shadow,” I say. “Pull every permit for that company. Every address on their last two years of invoices. Every subcontractor they stiffed. Start at the unpaid debts; resentment talks first.”
The room surges again.
I touch the table, palm flat, as if the wood could hear me. The anger that started crisp starts to go quiet, deeper, hotter. Not a flare now. A furnace.
They moved a pawn.
They forgot what happens when you take mine.
Zina’s Collapse
The corridors of this house feel endless, carved from stone that was never meant to offer comfort. My legs move before I can think, carrying me toward the one man I should despise and yet can’t escape. My body trembles so hard I have to clutch the wall just to keep from collapsing.
He steps out of the war room, the door hissing shut behind him. His presence fills the space like smoke—heavy, suffocating, impossible to escape.
I throw myself in front of him, cutting him off before he can vanish again into his world of blood and orders. My throat burns as the words rip free.
