Page 53 of Queen
Vulnerability as a Weapon
The house exhales after Guido finally goes under, but the quiet doesn’t soothe—it stalks. Every corridor carries a different ghost. Mine have names.
I don’t bother with slippers. I want the cold bite of stone to keep me awake, to keep me angry, to keep me from slipping backinto the softness of that moment when I let Emiliano hold my hand like it was something holy. The library is where I end up, because it still smells like paper and ink instead of him. Shelves climb toward the carved ceiling, ranks of leather spines catching lamplight like medals on uniforms. Fire settles in the grate—a low, banked glow, the ember-red heartbeat of a room that remembers how to listen.
I curl into the deep corner chair, knees to my chest, forehead on the ridge of bone at my wrist until it hurts enough to distract me. The burn fades, leaves the blare of thoughts behind: the letter under my pillow, his notes in my margins, the fire he claims he pulled me from. The edges of me feel raw, like I’ve been sanded down to nerve.
The door whispers, not a slam. Of course he doesn’t knock.
He fills the room the way smoke does—everywhere, even when you can’t point to where it started. He shuts the door with a careful click that pretends to be polite, and for a few seconds he only stands there, hands at his sides, watching me the way men watch the ocean before they decide whether to dive or drown.
“I don’t know what to believe,” I tell the fire. It comes out too soft, so I harden it. “I don’t know who to believe.”
He crosses the carpet without a sound and kneels beside the chair instead of looming, which is so unlike him it disorients me more than a threat would. He doesn’t touch me. He just kneels. His breath fogs faintly in the cool pocket of air between us.
“Believe this,” he says. “I would’ve died for you then. I still would.”
My laugh is brittle. “You would’ve died to own me.”
He takes the hit without flinching. “I would’ve died to make sure the world didn’t put its boot on your throat again.” A beat. “If that makes me selfish, I’ll wear it.”
“That makes you a liar.” I mean to spit it. It lands like a plea.
He looks at me for a long time, and the things I hate about his eyes—the steadiness, the patience, the way they never slide away when the truth gets ugly—are the things that hold me in place. He lifts a hand slowly, gives me every inch of time to refuse. I don’t. He lays two fingers against my wrist, where my pulse hammers like a trapped bird.
“Breathe with me,” he says, low. “In four, hold four, out four.” He counts under his breath in Sicilian, the numbers dark and round against my skin. I try to resist. I fail. By the fourth set, the frantic stutter in my chest loses its teeth.
He doesn’t take advantage of the quiet he made. He keeps his hand where it is, barely there, an anchor instead of a cuff.
“I was fifteen,” I say, surprising myself. “I wrote in that journal because I didn’t have a voice anywhere else. I wrote to make sure I existed. And you…” The rest dissolves into heat.
“Read it,” he finishes for me, not a wince, not a victory. “I did.”
I want to claw his face open and take the truth back out of him, line by line, until there’s nothing left but empty mouth and sorry. “Why keep it? Why write in it? Why—” My throat tightens until the question rips thin. “Why me?”
“Because,” he says, and then he stops, jaw working like he’s grinding steel filings between his teeth. “Because I saw your spine under all that ash. Because you looked at a world that wanted you small and you sharpened yourself instead. Because the first time I pulled you from fire, I knew it wouldn’t be the last.”
“Don’t romanticize it,” I whisper. “Don’t make a myth out of my survival just so you can crown yourself the hero.”
“Heroes die clean,” he says. “I’m not that. I’m what kept you breathing when clean wasn’t on the table.”
The fireplace shifts, a soft collapse of coal. I stare at the tiny avalanche of sparks, because looking at him feels like standing on the edge of a cliff and daring gravity to blink first.
“Promise me something,” I say.
He doesn’t hesitate. “Yes.”
“You won’t touch Guido to teach me a lesson. Ever.” I look up then, make sure the full weight of the condition crushes any loophole before it forms. “No tests. No fear to force obedience. No knives with my son’s name on them.”
His mouth flattens. “I would cut off my own hands before I let anyone reach for him.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Silence, heavy enough to pull the corners of the room inward. He nods once, a movement like a vow. “On my mother’s bones,” he says, and the way the words leave him tells me that oath costs something. “Never.”
My fingers shake. I hate that it matters. I hate that it helps. I slide my hand into his, not because I forgive him, not because I concede, but because for three breaths I want to be a person and not a weapon. He doesn’t squeeze. He doesn’t pull. He simply holds.
We sit like that while the fire lowers itself to ember and the clock in the hall marks the seconds we’ll regret later. No kiss. No fight. Just two people who don’t know how to be soft anymore, pretending for the length of a breath that they still can.
