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The sentence costs me something I didn’t expect. Saying it aloud makes it permanent. The Pawn is not a child piece anymore. Eighteen years old with his mother’s patience and his father’s face and a way of seeing what the rest of us miss — the empty square, the silence between notes that tells you more than the music.

Guido doesn’t thank me.

“Confirmed.”

The line goes dead. The brevity sits in my chest like respect delivered without wrapping.

Three brothers searching. One in the field with a blade. One reading absence from the margins. One standing in a kitchen with a blinking grid and a compass on the fridge with seven rays.

The grid blinks. Fabio’s grid. Fabio’s system. Fabio’s thirty years of service welded to infrastructure he rebuilt from the studs because I asked him to.

I asked him to tear down the King’s model and build something different. Every door open. Every operative given the same feed. Because I watched Giovanni ration information like ammunition — one round per man, just enough to aim, never enough to see the full target — and I saw what it produced. Brothers who held secrets like shrapnel. A family that ran on obedience and shattered the moment the man who enforced it stopped breathing.

I believed — still believe, my knuckles white on the counter’s edge — that trust builds strength the way fear never can.

The Mole used every door I opened.

The Mole walks my hallways. Drinks the coffee Nova pours. Every coordinate I feed Fabio’s team is a coordinate the Mole already has. Every resource I throw at finding Dante is being watched by the person who put him in that room.

I built an open house and someone used my openness as a fucking entry point.

My hand grips the counter. The marble is cold and I hold onto it the way I hold onto the principle — hard, knowing the grip is costing me skin.

I don’t regret the model.

I regret that its price is my brother chained to a chair while the person who put him there stands inside the walls I built to protect him.

The fridge hums. Tomás’s drawing hangs at the center — a stick-figure sun in yellow marker, seven rays fanning out because Tomás decided seven was the right number. He drew it three weeks ago at the kitchen counter with his tongue poking out the side of his mouth, the Knight chess piece beside his elbow, Nova watching from the stove with the quiet vigilance of a woman who understands that a child making art in a safe kitchen is the most fragile thing in the world.

I look at the sun.

Seven rays. Yellow marker already fading at the edges. The stick figure beneath it has no face — just a circle and two dots and a curved line Tomás called a smile. The drawing is taped to a twelve-thousand-dollar refrigerator in a penthouse owned by a man whose father’s watch ticks on his wrist and whose brother is bleeding in the dark.

The sun doesn’t tell me where Dante is.

It tells me why I’m still standing here instead of burning the city to its foundations to find him. Because burning is the King’s answer. Burning is closed fists and sealed doors and a family held together by terror.

I keep the doors open.

Even when keeping them open is killing me.

The penthouse exhales.

Tomás left for school twenty minutes ago. Marisol walked him — hood up, her brown eyes scanning the sidewalk with the sweep of a thirteen-year-old whose radar has been running since her mother left. She held his hand at the elevator. She didn’t hold mine when I told her to have a good day.

Smart kid. Terrifying kid.

Now it’s just us. Nova and me and the grid blinking and three phones face-up on the marble cycling through silence.

She sits at the table. Both hands around her mug. The tea she switched to two weeks ago without explaining why. I know why. I know the raspberry is the reason the coffee stopped and the tea started and the crackers appeared in the nightstand drawer and her hand finds her lower back three times an hour when she thinks I’m looking at the grid instead of her.

I am never looking at the grid instead of her.

“What do you have?” she asks.

Direct. No cushion. Nova asks questions the way other people throw punches — square, from the shoulder, aimed at the answer she actually needs rather than the one that makes the room comfortable.

“Nothing actionable. Dead ends across the full grid. Thermal sweeps clean. Camera pulls clean. Every lead that should produce something produces lint.” I lean against the counter. “Someone’s managing the search ahead of us. Cleaning the trail before we reach it.”