Santino’s gaze goes lethal-quiet. Like I just said something he’s been circling and refusing to speak out loud.
“How long,” he asks, voice dropped to ash, “have you known about the ledger?”
I drag in a breath that tastes like dust and regret. “Long enough that walking into your church wasn’t an accident. Long enough that I mapped you before I ever touched you.”
There.
Another thread torn.
His eyes flick to the rosary clenched in my fist. Then back to my face.
“And you thought you could just walk in and take it from under Giovanni’s nose.”
“Not just his.” Bitterness slips through before I can stop it. “Yours.”
“You came to my altar to rob me.”
“Yeah.” My voice trembles, but I don’t look away. “I came to rob you blind.”
One bead slips from my grip. Bounces once against the wood. Sounds too loud in the silence.
“What they talked about in that warehouse…” I swallow. “It was all of this. My father. Giovanni. The ledger. They wanted to know how far I got. How close I came. How much I would destroy to finish it.”
My chest clamps tight.
“And the worst part?” I whisper.
He doesn’t interrupt.
“I didn’t have to lie when I told them I’d already gone too far.”
The Full Confession: Why She Really Came
I don’t stop talking because if I do, I’ll fracture clean through.
The silence in this room weighs too much. It’ll crush me if I let it.
“Giovanni picked my father’s crew apart piece by piece,” I say, my voice already tearing under the weight of it. “Not all at once. He didn’t blow them apart with one order and call it finished. He was patient. Precise. He turned men against each other. Paid cops to blink at blood. Bought loyalty in small enough pieces that nobody realized they were being sold.”
Santino doesn’t interrupt.
That makes it worse.
“He used your church as both shield and snare,” I go on. “Laundered money through saints’ mouths. Smuggled hell into confession boxes. Acted like God himself stamped approval on his sins.”
My throat burns like it’s being flayed open.
“When my father outlived his usefulness, Giovanni stopped pretending. He made sure someone else took the fall. Wrapped it in a respectable story. A clean execution.”
My vision buckles.
“They shot him in front of me.”
The words don’t break.
They flatten.
Die.
