Broad shoulders. Shirt collar open. A hint of the collar at his throat. A man who looks like a priest and walks like a fucking war.
My heart slams against my ribs so hard it hurts.“Santino,” I breathe.
He steps inside, one foot over the threshold, eyes black in the dim light as they go straight to me. They flick to the gun at my ribs, the fist in my hair, the phone on the table, then back to my face.
The air in the warehouse changes—thicker, sharper, charged.
Carlo’s smile turns feral.“Welcome to the party, Bishop,” he says. “Let’s see how much you bleed for her.”
He snaps his fingers, delighted.
“Close the door,” he adds, never taking his eyes off Santino.
The heavy metal slams shut behind him with a final, echoing boom.
And all I can think, as the sound seals him in with us, is that I’ve just watched the only man who ever tried to save me walk straight into my execution—
and maybe his own.
19
Santino
On the Church Steps: The Silent Breaking Point
The church steps are slick with last night’s rain, and I’m still sitting on them like a man who thinks stone might keep him from coming apart.
Morning fog drags low along the street, smothering the edges of buildings, bruising the city into a dull gray hush. The cracked streetlight above the gate hums weakly, dying the same slow death as the night. Cars whisper past somewhere beyond sight, tires hissing over wet asphalt. A bell tolls in the distance. Not for me. Never for me.
I don’t move.
My hands rest open on my knees, palms up — a posture that looks like prayer if you don’t know how empty it is. Like I’m waiting for God to drop an answer into my skin.
He doesn’t.
He never fucking does.
The air tastes like exhaust and wet concrete. Every breath pulls cold into my lungs and leaves nothing behind. No anger. No grief. Not even fear.
Just hollow.
I have never been this empty.
Not when Giovanni beat obedience into me with leather and knuckles. Not when he forced me to kneel for hours, confessing sins that weren’t mine while Zina bled in the next room. Not even when they lowered his coffin into the ground and the city pretended it was burying a king instead of a monster.
This is different.
Pia is out there.
Taken.
Because of me.
I see her every time I blink — hair slicked to her face by rain, eyes feral under the streetlight, mouth shaping my name a heartbeat before the van door slammed. I hear tires shrinking into the dark. The scrape of boots. The awful thunder of blood in my own ears as I ran too late.
Priest. Bishop. Son. Heir.
None of it means a goddamn thing when a woman disappears into the dark on your watch.
