Fog curls around my boots like it’s trying to trip me, low and hungry against the pavement. The city is half-dead in that ugly hour between night and consequence—steel shutters locked down, neon signs flickering outside bars that never really close. Somewhere close, a siren starts and then cuts itself off. A drunk yells from an alley. A door slams like a warning shot.
I walk.
Not fast.Not careful.Forward.
Toward the part of the city no one claims—the industrial rot where Giovanni once buried men and called it business. Warehouses gutted and stitched back together. Factories turned into mausoleums for the people who disappear without paperwork.
His enemies live there now.
Rot doesn’t die.
It just moves.
A bus wheezes at the end of the block. The driver glances my way and then deliberately looks anywhere else. A woman dragging her kid to school takes one look at my face and crosses the street without checking the light.
Good.
They see something dangerous.
They’re right.
My hands flex at my sides—empty. No Bible crushing my palm. No rosary cutting my skin. No collar whispering instructions into my blood.
Just fists that learned how to break bone long before they learned how to bless.
And a rage sharp enough to catch light.
Pia’s voice leaks into the fog like smoke.
From the vault—breathless, nails digging into my arm when she whispered I saved her.
From the courtyard—wrecked when she forced herself to walk away like loving me was a sin she refused to commit.
From the phone—her scream slicing through static until something inside me tore open and stayed that way.
I see her every time I blink.
Lip split.Defiant.Eyes bright with fury even when she was terrified.
They took that.
They laid hands on what’s mine and assumed the priest would come to bargain.
They do not know who they summoned instead.
My boots slap cracked pavement as I cut toward the river. The air thickens—oil, rust, water left too long in broken pipes. The streets narrow. The lights fade. Shadows stretch like hands.
Perfect territory for an execution.
Giovanni loved it here.
I pass one of his old drop points—a sagging dock, graffitied over with trash tags that half-heartedly tried to erase the Rivas crest. Memory muscles its way in any way: me at fifteen, knuckles already ruined, standing two steps behind him while he spoke through men instead of to them.
Giovanni taught me to read fear like scripture.
Fear looks the same on everyone.
Even God’s men.
