Yet here he is.
He looks at Pia first.
Of course he does.
His gaze drags over her—mussed hair, ripped shirt, bruises blooming along her throat—and something ugly flickers there. Recognition, like an old scar. Disappointment sharp enough to cut. Then something darker, buried deep, like he’s cataloging her against a list I’ve never seen.
His eyes come to me next.
No surprise.No confusion.No “what the hell did I just walk into?”
Just confirmation.
“You’ve lost control,” he says quietly.
Not an accusation screamed in my face.
A clinical note.
“And now everyone will pay for it.”
My hand moves on its own.
Fingers wrap around the handle of my knife, the familiar weight sliding into my palm like it’s been waiting for this exact moment since the day Giovanni handed it to me and said, You’re not ready yet.
Pia steps closer, so close I feel the heat of her body at my back. Her palm hovers near my shoulder blade like she’s stopping herself from touching me, and that restraint hurts worse than any wound.
Emiliano takes one step forward.
The tunnel shrinks.
He doesn’t rush. Doesn’t posture. He just walks like the world rearranges itself to make room when he moves.
“Try it, Bishop,” he murmurs.
The title sounds wrong in his mouth, like he’s biting down on something sour.
“See what happens.”
I raise the blade a fraction, low and lethal.
“I’m not your fucking bishop,” I say.
My voice comes out rough, scraped raw by the last ten minutes and the last ten years.
“You don’t get to crawl out of whatever hole you’ve been hiding in and talk about control. You left. You don’t get a vote.”
His mouth twitches—too small to be called a smile, too sharp to be anything but a cut.
“Is that what Giovanni told you?” he asks. “That I left?”
My jaw clenches.
Behind me, Pia goes still.
“He told me enough,” I snap. “He taught me how to survive monsters.”
Emiliano’s gaze drops to my hands—blood drying in stiff brown streaks along my knuckles, knife glinting in the half-light—then flicks to the bodies we left in our wake.
