Page 71 of Queen
His swagger makes the air colder. He doesn’t bow, doesn’t kiss my cheek, doesn’t even pretend respect. He just smirks, hands buried in his pockets, like a wolf welcoming a lamb too foolish to know the den she entered.
“Well, well,” he drawls, voice thick with mockery. “The Queen of corpses.”
The words slice sharper than they should. Not because they’re untrue—but because he says them with Giovanni’s mouth.
I don’t flinch. Instead, I slide the ring off my finger—Giovanni’s ring, the one he forced onto me when he claimed me as his wife. I let it gleam in the fractured moonlight streaming through colored glass. Then I turn it, slow, to reveal the engraving burned into its band: Emiliano’s crest.
His smirk falters. Barely a flicker, but I catch it.
“Funny,” I murmur, voice low enough that the whole cathedral seems to lean closer to hear. “That’s not how your father saw me.”
For the first time, Santino’s mask cracks. His jaw ticks. His eyes flash that storm I once believed only Giovanni carried. But his storm is younger, sharper, more reckless—born of arrogance, not rule.
He steps closer, boots striking the stone with the rhythm of a gavel. “You think wearing another man’s mark makes you untouchable? You think bedding my father’s enemy makes you Queen?”
I lean back in the pew, lazy, deliberate, like I’m bored of the trial already. “No. My crown was forged in fire. In blood. Not in your approval.”
The silence that follows is heavy enough to crush ribs. Dust drifts through the shafts of light above, glittering like ash-snow falling from heaven.
Santino leans down until his shadow swallows me whole. His breath is warm, venom-laced, when he hisses, “You’re already dead, Madre. You just haven’t laid down yet.”
And I smile. A slow, venomous curl of lips, black with promise. “Then bury me yourself, figlio. If you can.”
The Gun Between Them
The cathedral’s air thickens until every breath feels like a trespass, pressing into my ribs like stone. The silence cuts sharper than any blade, so sharp it hums in my skull. Santino’s smirk—that arrogant curl of his mouth worn like a badge of blood—finally falters. What replaces it chills me deeper: the blank mask of a Rivas man who has learned to kill without blinking. Giovanni wore that same face when he consigned men to their graves.
“You put a hit on me.” My tone is even, but the blade hidden in my corset burns against my ribs, begging for daylight. The words strike the air like thunder in a sanctuary.
Santino doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t deny. He only rolls his shoulders, a shrug so casual it feels like blasphemy in this desecrated holy place. “You were never supposed to outlivehim.” His voice is smooth, almost lazy, but beneath the calm coils venom, ready to strike.
The pew beneath me suddenly feels like a coffin, the cathedral itself a tomb prepared to bury me alive. Rage scorches through me, molten and merciless. But it isn’t just rage—it’s betrayal that cuts marrow-deep, the kind no blade can excise. My son, my blood, looks me dead in the eye and speaks my death as if it were scripture.
Then he moves.
His hand dips inside his coat.
Instinct answers before thought. Steel hisses free from my corset, catching moonlight in a flash. I rise in one sharp motion, blade leveled at the hollow of his throat.
Time fractures. One heartbeat suspended in eternity. His hand half-drawn, my knife poised to carve his skin. The cathedral is no longer stone and pews—it is a graveyard of choices, waiting to crown either him or me as executioner.
But when his hand clears, it isn’t a gun. Not steel. Not death in its simplest form.
It’s beads.
A rosary—black wood strung on cord, beads worn smooth by decades of whispered prayers. The crucifix dangles from his fingers, swaying between us like the pendulum of judgment.
Confusion steals my breath. Then I catch the look in his eyes—calm, steady, unflinching. This isn’t a weapon to him. It’s worse. It’s conviction.
“Your soul’s already damned,” Santino whispers. The words drip like oil, slick and poisonous. He feeds the beads through his fingers slowly, each click echoing in the vast hollow like the tick of a gun’s safety. He leans close, the crucifix swinging until its silver nearly kisses the edge of my blade. “I just wanted to watch you burn first.”
The words strike harder than any bullet.
I should laugh. I should carve him open where he stands. But grief slashes me instead, jagged and merciless. My son isn’t holding a gun. He’s holding a faith Giovanni twisted into a weapon sharper than steel. Every prayer, every bead, another nail in the coffin of what I once believed family could mean.
I press the knife closer until the crucifix almost scrapes the edge. Sparks of fire and ice seethe in the air between us.
“You mistake me,” I murmur, venom coating every syllable. “I was never afraid of fire. I was born in it.”
