The words hit me like an unexpected knife. Clean. Quiet. Dead-on.
“I—”I try to be casual, but my voice betrays me—thin, crooked, unconvincing.
He doesn’t move away. Doesn’t soften. Doesn’t shift back into that priestly mask I’m used to seeing.He takes one slow step toward me, and everything in the room shrinks around him.
“Yes,” he says simply.
That single word strips every wall I thought I’d built between us.
He’s still in the clothes he killed in—collar skewed, blood drying along his jaw, a rust-red trail curving up toward his cheekbone. His lip is split. His knuckles are raw and torn. He looks dangerous, disheveled, half feral.
He looks honest.
And God help me… that’s the part that scares me most.
His gaze finds mine again—less suspicious than before, less cold. What I see now is something worse. Something gentler. Something searching.
“I need to know who was down there with you,” he says, voice lower than before. “Why they want you. What they think you’re hiding.”
My heartbeat spikes so fast it hurts.
I look away—at my boots, at the faint trail of dust we tracked in from the tunnels, at anything that isn’t him. But it doesn’t matter. His presence fills the room. I feel him everywhere, even without his hands on me.
I didn’t plan on telling him anything.But he killed for me.He chose me without hesitation.And now the lies I’ve been carrying feel too heavy to hold.
My legs give out first.
I sit on the edge of the bed, forcing a slow breath, trying not to tremble. Santino follows, stopping close enough that I feel the heat at my side—just out of reach, but crowding every inch of the air.
“Pia.”My name leaves his mouth rough, unfinished, like he’s still trying to understand it.
I stare at my hands until the tremor becomes too obvious to hide.
“My father,” I whisper. “It’s about my father.”
The shift in him is immediate.
His shoulders tense. His breath catches—just barely—but I feel it, the way you feel a door slam down a hallway. The word father hits him like a fresh bruise.
He doesn’t sit.He doesn’t speak.He waits.
“Start there,” he says finally.
Two words.Soft.Unyielding.
I lift my gaze.
Santino is looking at me like I’m a confession he hasn’t forgiven… or devoured. The priest mask he wore when I first arrived cracked wide open, revealing the man who strangled someone for putting a blade to my ribs.
A man who hasn’t decided if saving me was his salvation—or his damnation.
My chest tightens until breathing feels like bleeding.
If I tell him the truth, even a piece of it…he’ll never walk away.
And if I don’t — I’ll lose the only man who would burn the world to protect me.
The Partial Truth
