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Gone.

Replaced by the white-knuckle vigilance of a man who has memorized every page of every pregnancy book on his nightstand and knows that thirty-two weeks is viable but early. And early means risk. And risk is the one variable he cannot eliminate with strategy or force or money or the Rivas name.

“I’m fine,” Nova says. Before he asks. Because she knows the question is coming the way she knows everything that comes out of this man — the patterns, the tells, the way his body shifts from leader to husband in the space between one heartbeat and the next.

“You’re sure.”

“She kicked. That’s what they do. It’s in chapter nine of the book you highlighted with three colors.”

“Four colors. I added green.”

Nova’s mouth curves. Not the almost-smile Marisol inherited — the full, warm, devastating smile of a woman who fell in love with a man who burned eggs and drove too fast and has now color-coded a pregnancy book with the seriousness of a field operation.

Romeo’s hand stays on her belly. The baby settles. The kick subsides into the slow, rolling movement of a girl finding a comfortable position inside a body that has become a shared space.

Two wars demanding his attention simultaneously.

The one in the city. Emiliano Maritz — a man who calls his daughter at 7:15 every morning and asks, “Are you safe?” and does not know that safe is a word his own architecture made meaningless eleven years ago when Giovanni mapped her through a trust fund and a shadow network and the kind of patience that outlasts the living. The alliance. Fragile. Operational. About to take a bullet it cannot survive if Emiliano discovers we knew about Liana before he did. And Liana’s forty-eight-hour clock — already expired, already ticking past the deadline into the territory where a twenty-year-old girl who has spent her life reading locked doors decides to kick one open.

The confrontation is coming. Whether we reach Emiliano first or not.

And the one inside his wife’s body. Thirty-two weeks. Eight from the due date. Seven if the baby is impatient. And every piece of data Romeo has consumed in the last eight months says the window between thirty-two and thirty-six is where everything is probability, and nothing is certain, and the only thing a man can do is stand close enough to catch whatever falls.

Romeo looks at his phone. Looks at Nova’s belly. The Patek Philippe ticks against his wrist — Giovanni’s rhythm, the dead King’s metronome counting down on one timeline while a living heartbeat counts down on another.

Two clocks.

One in the city. One under his hand.

I watch from across the kitchen. The margin. The place I have occupied my entire life. But the pawn on the sixth rank is no longer sitting. I moved it. Told my brother the truth. Stepped into the center of the room for the first time in twenty-six years, and the center did not collapse beneath my weight.

Marisol was right.

Sitting on the sixth rank forever doesn’t make you safe. It makes you stuck.

Romeo’s thumb finds Emiliano’s number. His other hand presses gently against Nova’s belly — not tracking now, not cataloging, just holding. The way a man holds what matters most when the world is about to shift, and the only anchor available is the heartbeat beneath his palm.

“Make the call,” Nova says. Quiet. Steady. The intelligence officer and the mother speaking with the same voice. “I’ll be here when you’re done.”

The phone rings.

And in this family, nobody has ever waited for permission to arrive.

10

liana

The Lock She Picked

Ifound him the way he taught me to find everything.

By following the shape of what he hid.

Three years ago, I mirrored his tracking app. Not his phone — the GPS relay that routes through his driver’s device, the one he thinks is invisible because it sits inside a secondary application he has never mentioned, buried beneath three layers of privacy architecture designed by men who understand that the best security is the kind the protected person never knows exists.

I know it exists. I have known for three years. Because my father’s world runs on exclusion and exclusion has a frequency, and I have been tuned to that frequency since I was fifteen years old, standing barefoot on cold tile, listening to a name that broke his voice open.

The tracking data is useless by itself. A GPS map of a man’s movements tells you where he goes. It doesn’t tell you where he doesn’t go.