Page 46 of Queen
I don’t look back. The saints keep their eyes on God. The glass keeps bleeding color across the pews until it looks like spilled wine, spilled blood—take your pick. Either way, the room belongs to the devil tonight.
And the devil answers to my name.
Flashback: The Blood Pact
Cold wraps the courtyard when the chapel door thunders shut. I don’t head for the house. I let the gravel carry me—crunch, pause, breath—until the edge comes off the urge to turn back and finish what I started.
My hand finds the inside pocket of my jacket. The weight there is small, familiar. I draw it out.
The knife takes the moon like it’s been waiting for it. Old steel, honest, with a nick near the guard that fits the pad of my thumb. The handle is dark from hands that didn’t mind getting dirty. I drag my thumb along the groove and the night falls away.
I’m back in Giovanni’s cigar lounge.
Low light. Brass sconces throwing bruised shadows. Smoke coiling slow under the ceiling like a lazy storm that decided to live indoors. Leather soft as sin. A jazz record arguing with itself in the corner, the saxophone sounding like it never quite learned how to breathe.
Giovanni sits across from me, not slouched, not stiff—balanced, the way men sit when they know the room is theirs and always will be until someone pries it from their hands. Bourbon sweats on the table between us, ring of water painting the wood. His signet catches the lamplight, a brief flare like a lighthouse warning no one will heed.
“If I fall,” he says, like he’s adding a footnote to a contract, “you protect them. Even her.”
Even her. He doesn’t say Zina. He doesn’t have to. Her name hums in the air anyway, a tune only the two of us can hear.
I take a drink. It burns sweet and mean, the way I like it. “What if I want more than protection?”
He doesn’t laugh. His mouth curves, but it’s the kind of curve wolves make when you say the wrong thing. “Then I’ll slit your throat before I let you near her.”
We hold each other there, two boys from Naples who clawed their way up, too proud to say brother, too honest to say enemy, and too bound to admit either word is enough. We understood each other better in the moments we threatened to kill than in the years we pretended not to.
His hand disappears under the table and comes back with a knife—this knife. He turns it once, like a priest turning a relic, then drives it into the oak between us. The point bites deep. The crack is louder than the music, louder than my pulse, louder than the lie of peace we’d been pouring down our throats.
“Say it,” he tells me, nodding at the blade.
My palm rests on the table. I can smell the oil on the steel, the faint tang of past blood scrubbed but not forgotten. “If you fall,” I say, and my voice is a thing I don’t recognize—steadier than I feel, older than I am, “I protect them. All of them. Even her.”
He nods once. Then he pulls the knife back out and offers it across the table, handle first. I take it because I can’t not. That’s how vows are made between men like us—point first is for enemies; handle first is for the ones you’ll forgive until you can’t.
He rolls his sleeve, baring the inside of his forearm. The skin there is pale where the sun never reached. He takes the point, presses, drags. Not deep. Enough. Blood wells, bright as a ruby in bad light. He holds his arm over the ashtray and lets it tap—tap—tap onto the gray bed of old endings.
“Now you,” he says.
So I do it. Same place. Same shallow line. It stings, then it doesn’t. I hold my arm over his, and for a second our blood touches in smoke.
“Brothers,” he says.
“Until blood says otherwise,” I answer.
We don’t shake. We don’t smile. He slides the knife back onto the table between us, and the jazz wails a little louder, like it knows something it shouldn’t.
The memory thins, and the courtyard grows around me again—wet stone, black windows, the distant, muffled thud of a door somewhere in the house closing on someone else’s secret. The knife is warm from my hand. I study the nick near the guard and wonder if it’s from that night or a hundred after. With Giovanni it’s hard to tell which scar belongs to which story. They all end the same way anyway: with a cost paid in full.
I slide the blade back where it lives, close to the heart I pretend I don’t have. Santino thinks a collar makes him holy. Giovanni thought a pact would make me loyal. Maybe they’re both right. Maybe that’s why I can’t decide if I kept my promise or broke it the minute I put a ring back on Zina’s finger and called it protection.
Some promises are meant to be broken. And some are meant to be kept in blood. I know which kind I made that night.
I also know which kind I’ll make again if anyone touches her.
Obsession Unleashed
The study smells of leather, aged paper, and whiskey soaked into the grain of my desk, the kind of scent that seeps in over decades and refuses to leave. Heavy curtains block out the rest of the house. In here, there’s only silence and my dominion. This is my room. My kingdom. No one enters unless I say so. No one touches what’s mine.
