Instead, it showed me exactly where to strike back.
I open my eyes.
And I know—
This war isn’t over.
It’s just done pretending.
Santino’s Oath, Not to God — to Pia
The warehouse finally shuts up.
No shouting.No gunfire.No metal screaming under bullets.
Just the slow, steady drip of water in the dark and the soft tick of cooling steel. The silence that shouldn’t exist over this much blood.
Carlo lies facedown on the mezzanine behind me, out cold, breathing shallow. Below, bodies are scattered like broken rosaries on concrete. The air tastes like gunpowder and rust and something that might pass for victory if I were stupid enough to trust it.
I’m not.
Pia’s hand finds mine in that quiet.
Her fingers thread through my bloody knuckles like she isn’t afraid of what they’ve done—or what they’ll do again.
I turn to her.
Slow.
Because I know what I look like right now.
Blood is drying on my cheek, a smear along my jaw I didn’t bother to wipe. Dust clings to my clothes. Sweat runs cold down my spine. My arm throbs in a brutal rhythm where the bullet kissed me, sleeve soaked, fingers tacky. My heart is still punching adrenaline through my veins, and under all of it—
Something new.
Something ugly and holy at the same time.
Not devotion.Not faith.
Choice.
It burns more than the wound.
Her eyes drag over me, cataloguing every cut, every bruise, every place I might be broken. There’s a tremor in her shoulders she can’t hide, but her gaze doesn’t flinch.
She looks like a woman who walked through fire and decided hell doesn’t scare her anymore.
Something shifts between us.
Not subtle.
A click. A lock sliding into place.
“I swore my life to God,” I hear myself say, voice low and roughened by smoke and shouting. “And he never answered.”
The confession hangs there, blasphemous and bare.
Pia swallows hard. Her throat works around my name. “Santino…”
