22
Pia
After the Warehouse, in Someone Else’s Silence
The safe house doesn’t feel safe.It feels like a throat someone stopped singing in.
The apartment is a corpse of a place—one narrow kitchen above a closed bakery, dust welded into the corners, cracked tiles like chipped teeth. A single bulb over the sink flickers sickly yellow, stuttering shadows across flaking paint. There’s an old table jammed against the wall and exactly two chairs that don’t match. Someone left a rosary on the scarred wood years ago.
Santino brought me here.Romeo drove.
No music. No talking.
Just the city bleeding past the windows in streaks of neon and oil-slick rain while the war I walked out of throbbed behind my eyes like a second heartbeat.
Romeo’s gone now—“to make calls,” which in his mouth can mean anything from lining up surgeons to lining up funerals. The door slammed ten minutes ago and took the last scrap of outside noise with it.
Now it’s just us and what didn’t die with the bodies.
Santino leans against the counter with his arms folded, his body tight and closed off like a chest that doesn’t give up its valuables. There’s dried blood at the corner of his jaw. His sleeve is stiff with it. He watches me the way men watch an unexploded bomb—careful, calculating, unblinking.
I hover by the table, not sitting, not moving, my fingers resting on the rosary. The beads are cool, gritty with age and dust. It feels wrong to touch them. Like I’m trespassing on a grave.
My throat tightens.
I told myself I would leave him to protect him.
Then he walked into hell and dragged me out by the throat.
There’s nowhere left to run from the truth.
My lungs finally remember how to work. Breath scratches in and out of me, loud in the unnatural quiet. Every nerve is still buzzing, like the warehouse carved its name into my skin and didn’t bother to apologize on the way out.
Santino doesn’t move.
He just… waits.
That’s worse than shouting. Worse than Carlo’s voice in my ear. A man yelling wants something. A man waiting already has it.
I drop my eyes to the rosary and rub my thumb across one bead until it warms under my skin. I can feel my pulse inside it—panicked and alive. The thought hits hard and clean:
This could’ve been the last thing I ever touched.
The apartment smells of old oil and burned sugar and cold bread. It presses on my ribs from the inside. I shift once. Then again. Then finally drift to the narrow window over the sink and look three stories down into an alley where trash piles into crooked cardboard cities.
“So,” I whisper.
It’s not a question. Just a sound. A fracture in the quiet.
He doesn’t answer.
Of course he doesn’t.
My chest aches with everything I didn’t say in the car—with every confession rehearsed and strangled.
I turn back to him and force myself to stop moving.
He’s changed since the warehouse. Not the way men usually change after blood. He’s quieter. Colder. Like a blade laid in snow.
