Page 57 of Queen
You moved a piece, I think, whoever you are. You think that means you’re playing me.
I don’t play. I end.
The Storm Unleashed
The war room lives under the house like a heart. Concrete, steel, cables stapled along ceiling joists. It smells like gun oil and damp stone and ambition. Tonight it stinks like what I’m going to make the city breathe.
The table is already dressed for violence—maps of the west docks, freeway arteries, safe-house grids, a row of suppressed pistols like silverware. Screens line the far wall; the grid is green and gray and empty of what I need most.
My men form a crescent—fifteen killers pretending to be administrators. I nod once. Marco kills the lights over the table; the screens go brighter.
“Gates feed, four-twenty-one to four-twenty-four,” he says.
The clip rolls. Fog like milk over asphalt, a van ghosting in with its lights down to a predator’s slit. The outer camera glitches at the exact three seconds it shouldn’t. The guard on Post B scratches his chin and looks the other way in a performance I could teach in a day. The inner gate opens a breath too early. The van slips. Out of frame. Gone.
“Payoff or dead?” I ask.
“Payoff,” Marco says. “Post B’s heart rate doesn’t spike. He never saw a gun.”
“Find him,” I say. “Bring what he loves.”
A few men start to move. I raise a finger; they freeze. “You’ll bring what he loves if he makes us waste a second. If he talks quick, you’ll bring him a doctor.”
They nod. I let them have the difference. Sometimes mercy makes the knife go in cleaner next time.
“Back it up,” I say. “Gate glitch.”
We watch the pixel smear bloom and die. Not random. Not cheap. A clean scrub layered over the line; I can hear the pride in the ghost who coded it.
“Inside help,” Marco says.
“More than one,” I say. “House power to the nursery cut at the breaker and restored inside three minutes. That’s not Post B. That’s a ghost with keys.”
The room shifts—weight moving foot to foot, men hungry for a name to hurt.
“Names,” I say.
We start the recitation. Drivers on duty. Maids who swapped shifts for cash. A tech who bragged about buying a watch he shouldn’t afford. The electrician who replaced the nursery’s dimmer last week, not because it was broken but because paperwork said it was. I have half their faces memorized by the time Marco is done talking.
“Divide them,” I say. “Liars, borrowers, gamblers, true believers. The liars we break quick. The borrowers we buy and use. The gamblers we ruin and make examples of. The believers—” I smile. It’s not a nice thing. “—we introduce to a different religion.”
Phones light. Doors open and close upstairs like a machine starting. My machine.
Still, there’s a drum under my sternum that won’t find a rhythm. It beats a single word:boy.
Giovanni sits himself in my head without permission, like always.If you ever cross into fatherhood, it’ll destroy your edge, Emiliano. You can’t run an empire and cradle a child. One will always bleed for the other.
I’d laughed at him then. Arrogant. Young enough to think the world was smaller than my hands.
He was right about the bleeding. He was wrong about the edge.
Edge is for fencers. I am not a fencer. I am fire.
I slam my palm on the table. The guns rattle like teeth in a glass. Half the men jump because they are wise; the other half don’t because they are foolish.
“No sleep. No mercy,” I say. “You will tear the docks down to pilings. You will crawl the warehouses on West Sixth, sweep every freezer, every truck. You will buy men faster than the saints can forgive them. You will pull traffic cams from the freeway and find my van by dent and wheelbase and the cheap aftermarket rack some idiot thought wouldn’t show in fog. Cross-check with plate readers and the three tow companies who’ll do anything for cash. You will pull phone dumps within a mile for the hour we need and scrub for spikes and dead zones. A Faraday cage leaves a hole; find it. There’s an empty space on the map where a van sat. I want its shadow.”
They move. God bless them, they move.
