But Romeo opened the door that let him in.
My finger hovers over the trackpad again. I want to replay it. To dissect every second. Every word. Every flinch.
Instead, I close the player.
The office rushes back in—the ruined desk, the dead laptop fan, the distant creak of the house settling around us like a tired beast.
Pia’s hand finds my shoulder, squeezing once. “Santino,” she says quietly. “Look at me.”
I do.
“This isn’t a clean story,” she says. “You know that. He was cornered. Threatened. Used. That video…” She nods toward the laptop. “It doesn’t show intent. It shows a man drowning.”
“I don’t give a shit what it shows,” I say.
It’s a lie. We both know it.
I scrub a hand over my face. “Giovanni was right. One of his sons helped kill him.”
I stare at the dark screen, and all I can see is Romeo’s eyes.
Terrified.Guilty.Mine.
“I have to talk to him,” I say.
The decision lands in my chest with a dull, final click. Like a bolt sliding into place.
Not as a priest.
Not as Giovanni’s weapon.
As the man who’s going to decide whether this truth burns the family down—or just scars it.
I stand.
The floor creaks under my weight. The house listens.
Behind me, the laptop screen times out and goes black, swallowing the frozen ghosts of a king and the son who accidentally helped bury him.
“Where are you going?” Pia asks.
I don’t look back at the safe. Or the desk. Or the envelope still burning a hole in my jacket.
“To find Romeo,” I say.
Because after tonight, nothing between us will ever be the same.
Brother vs Brother: The Confession in the Ruins
The back garden used to be my mother’s pride.
Now it’s a grave pretending to be a memory.
The marble Virgin is split clean down the middle, like God finally chose a side and walked out. The fountain is dry—no trickle, no whisper—just a cracked stone mouth frozen open like it died screaming. Dead leaves rot in the basin, sludge-black and floating in rainwater that smells like rust and old sins.
Romeo sits on the lip of it with a cigarette burned down to the filter, ash clinging to the tip like he forgot it was there. His shoulders are caved in. His spine looks too tired to hold itself up.
For once, the family prodigal doesn’t look like the golden boy.
