My mouth goes dry.
Then he lances it straight through me.
“You’re afraid of losing the priest.”
The pain vanishes.
In its place—ice.
Not the kind poured on skin.The kind that crawls into bone.
I shake my head once, sharply as I can make it. “You don’t know a damn thing about me.”
His smile thins.
“We know everything,” he whispers. “We know how he watches you when he thinks you can’t see him. We know where his hands stop before they ever touch you. We know what his mouth wants—and where his conscience bleeds all over it.”
I hurl myself against the restraints. Plastic saws my skin until heat tells me I’m open somewhere.
“Don’t you touch him,” I growl. “Don’t you fucking—”
He doesn’t hear me.
He opens the knife.
The sound is intimate.Obscene.
“And we know,” he continues easily, “that when he walks through that door… he dies.”
My body betrays me.
It shakes.Not from pain.From terror with teeth.
Carlo sees it.
Consumes it.
“That,” he murmurs, reverent. “That was the only blade we needed.”
He advances. The knife catches the warehouse light and throws it back in sick gold.
I lift my chin and drag my voice up from somewhere scorched.
“Touch him,” I tell him, slow and lethal, “and you won’t live long enough to remember what you tried to take from me.”
His laugh is quiet. Delighted.
He raises the blade.
And I seal my mouth shut.
If this is the price—I pay it in blood.If this is the cost—I bleed without sound.
Because Santino is still breathing somewhere outside this room.
And I will not lead him to his demise.
Santino’s Roar
