Page 54 of Queen
When I finally rise, he stands with me but doesn’t follow. “Sleep,” he says, as if the command can make it true.
“It won’t,” I answer, and leave before the part of me that wants to ask him to stay can learn to speak.
The Hidden Camera
The corridor is cool on my bare feet. I count doorframes to calm my heartbeat—one, two, three, the linen closet with its iron key, the small alcove with the chipped saint. The house listens. It always has.
By the time I reach my room, my lungs feel scraped raw. I close the door gently, as if the wood might scream if I slam it, and lean my forehead against it until the grain imprints my skin. One breath. Two. The rose water on the bedside table has gone stale; the ghost of smoke in the chimney never leaves.
I strip because the dress feels like a bruise. The zipper complains. Velvet puddles, a black lake at my feet. The mirror offers no mercy—hair wild, mascara ghosting under my eyes, mouth swollen from words and from the way he looked at me like prayer and verdict. I take the rest off—lace, silk—because my skin needs air, because I need to see the body he keeps trying to rewrite and remember it still belongs to me.
“Who are you now?” I ask the woman in the glass. “Widow. Pawn. Queen.” The names slip. None fit. “Mother,” I add, fierce, low.
I reach for the robe draped over the back of the chair.
A red blink kisses the corner of my eye.
I still. The room shrinks around the pulse of color. The air remembers how to hurt. Another blink. Not reflection—too steady. I pivot my head slowly, because prey that bolts is prey that bleeds, and follow the light to the shelf near the balcony doors. The glass of the bookcase throws back the last heartbeats of the fire.
Blink.
My robe slides silent from my hands. The carpet eats the sound of my steps as I cross the room. I kneel, palms flat on the rug to keep from shaking, and study the row of leather spines until I see it: a seam where there shouldn’t be one, a dark hole the size of a coin, a red dot winking like a heartbeat behind it.
I slide the books aside—Dante, Borges, a family bible no one in this house ever read for comfort—and there it is. Small. Black. So precise it feels obscene. A camera tucked into a cutout that’s been lined to swallow sound.
Heat surges to my face so fast I taste metal. My mouth goes dry. My fingers hover, wanting to rip, to crush, to grind the lens to sand.
“How long have you been watching me?” I breathe. It’s not a question for anyone in the room; it’s a prayer to a God who never answered me when it mattered. My throat works around something sharp. “How long?”
“Long enough to know when you lie.”
The voice comes from behind me. Not the hallway. The room. My room.
I don’t turn. Every inch of me turns to glass instead, a woman-shaped vase full of water about to crack from the inside. In the mirror, my eyes are huge, the pupils blown; the camera’s red dot blinks on, steady as a metronome.
“I told you I would protect you,” he says. Calm. Too calm. “That includes from yourself.”
“You put a camera in my bedroom.”
“I put eyes on a queen who attracts knives.” A pause that feels like a hand on the back of my neck. “Especially her own.”
“Get out.” It scrapes out of me like something rusted breaking free. “Get out or I’ll—” I swallow the threat because I don’t know which one I mean, and the ones I do mean sound like crying when I try to say them.
“Turn around, Zina.”
“No.” My nails bite crescents into my palms. The urge to cover myself finally detonates; I snatch the robe and drag it on, the belt a savage knot at my waist. My skin still feels exposed, the robe somehow thinner than air when a lens is blinking.
He steps into the edge of the mirror’s frame then—just the shoulder and the line of his jaw, shadow-carved. He’s left the rest of himself in the dark on purpose. I can feel it. Control by inches. Punishment by inches, too.
“Was it from the start?” I ask, voice barely more than breath. “From Naples? From the fire? Were you already planning to watch me like an animal in a glass box?”
“From the fire,” he says. “I learned a lesson the night I almost lost you: the world takes what it can see in the open. So I closed the windows.”
“You cut new ones,” I snap, pointing at the lens. “You built a house with windows facing only you.”
He doesn’t deny it. The truth has weight tonight, and we both carry it.
“How many?” I force out. “How many cameras?”
