Pia’s breath stutters—sharp, involuntary—and I hear it the way I used to hear prayers at midnight: fragile and real and completely useless.
The room tilts.
Giovanni’s confession, sour with half-truths.The ledger that paired names that should’ve never touched papertogether.Routes interrupted were too clean.Shipments that vanished like they were never alive.Ambushes with timing too perfect to be chance.Romeo’s shadow, always half a step ahead of the light.
Or—
Someone wanted it to look like Romeo.
None of it matters.
Not now.
Because I can see the only future this moment allows.
If I give them what they want, Pia dies.If I fight here, Pia dies.If I walk away—
I become my father.
I close my eyes.
Once.
I breathe in oil and blood and the ghost of incense that lives nowhere but my marrow.
Then I open them.
And I step forward.
The gun at my chest doesn’t waver.The gun at her skull doesn’t blink.
I look at Carlo like he’s already a body.
“I don’t trade in family,” I tell him.
He chuckles softly. “You will.”
“No,” I correct. “I won’t.”
I turn my head so that Pia is all I see.
Just a second.Just long enough to carve her into whatever’s left of me.
She’s shaking.
Not from fear.
From the rage that doesn’t know where to go yet.
“Santino,” she whispers.
I answer it with a promise.
“You hear me?” I say to Carlo without breaking my gaze from her. “Touch her again, and I will erase you from this city. I will salt every grave you ever stood near. Your blood won’t even remember your name.”
Carlo’s smile dulls.
Just a shade.
