Page 91 of Queen
Guido won’t let go of my hand. His palm is clammy, his grip desperate, like he already knows this isn’t just another midnight ride. He looks up at me with wide, haunted eyes, waiting for answers I can’t give. Not tonight. Maybe not ever.
I kneel in the dirt. The earth is damp, salted with rain and sea air. It clings to my skin, packs beneath my nails, smears like blood across my knuckles. Still, I dig. My breath fogs in the night air as my hands tear into the soil, clawing a shallow grave. Not for a body. For a crown.
The crown sits heavy in my lap. Once, it was bright enough to blind. Now its jewels are dulled, crusted with old blood that will never wash away. It is not glory. It is a curse. A fucking target.
I wrap it in the scarf I wore to Giovanni’s funeral. Black silk, still faint with incense and ash. The same scarf I clutched when I swore I’d never kneel again. Tonight it becomes a shroud.
Guido’s voice cracks the silence, thin and trembling. “Mama… why are you burying it?”
I meet his eyes, my throat raw. “Because some things,” I whisper, lowering the bundle into the earth, “are too dangerous to wear in the light.”
He doesn’t understand—not fully—but his silence tells me he feels the weight. The soil falls heavy as I cover it, each handfulsealing away another piece of the woman I was. The Queen they feared. The Queen they hunted. The Queen they thought they could break.
When the ground is smooth again, I press my palm flat against it, dirt grinding into my skin. It feels like sealing a coffin. A vow buried with it.
“One day,” I murmur, turning to Guido, “you’ll come back and dig it up. And when you do, it’ll be because you’re ready to wear what I couldn’t.”
His lip trembles. He doesn’t want crowns. He just wants his mother.
I rise slowly, hands filthy, body heavy. For the first time in years, I don’t feel like a queen at all. I feel like what I was before—just a woman clawing at the dirt to shield her child from a world that wants him bled dry.
Then headlights cut the dark.
Far off, crawling along the coastal road. Too steady. Too deliberate. Like a predator stalking prey it already owns. At first it’s just light slicing the night. Then the shape sharpens—the squared hood, the low growl of an engine I know too well.
My stomach knots. I’ve seen that car parked outside the cathedral, gleaming in Giovanni’s garage, the same one Santino always drove like the world owed him the road.
The beams lock on me, flooding the cliffside in white. My blood runs cold.
“Inside,” I hiss, shoving Guido behind me, my dagger flashing in my fist. My fingers are raw from burying the crown, but they curl around the hilt like it’s carved from my bones.
Exile was supposed to save us. Instead, it paints us in neon against the night—a mother and son waiting to be devoured.
The crown sleeps beneath the earth. Death comes for us above it. And if those headlights belong to Santino, then betrayaldoesn’t just wear a rival’s crest—it carries my husband’s blood in its veins.
The world holds its breath.
20
emiliano
Watching Her Leave: The Silence of Power
From the top floor of the villa, I stand behind the glass, a ghost among velvet drapes. The courtyard below is a stage, and she—my Queen, my ruin—walks across it with Guido’s small hand clutched in hers. The boy clings to her, eyes wide, but she doesn’t falter. Her spine is steel, her chin sharp, her shadow longer than mine.
She doesn’t look back. Not once.
The guards whisper, thinking it’s over. They think I broke her, that Zina leaves in disgrace—just another woman chewed up and spat out by the empire. Their murmurs scrape at my skull like knives. Idiots. They can’t see what I see.
She isn’t broken. She’s burning in silence. I see it in the tension of her shoulders, the exact control of her stride, theway her grip on Guido tightens every time his little feet stumble against the cobblestones. That isn’t defeat—it’s fury dressed in poise.
And still, every step away from me tears another strip from my chest.
Guido falters on a loose stone. Zina pulls him close, shields him, murmurs something I can’t hear. That maternal fire—fuck, it’s the very reason I let them walk out. His blood will not be the price of my war. Neither will hers.
But letting them go feels like sawing off my own arm and calling it strategy.
I lean my forehead against the cool glass, eyes locked on her silhouette until the gates swing open. She passes through, the headlights of the waiting car swallowing her into the night. The courtyard falls still. Too still.
