When Santino’s calm, he either goes utterly still, or he talks shit—soft jokes, dark humor, smart-mouth commentary about saints with martyr complexes.
Right now, he’s neither.
He’s coiled.
Thinking.
I feel it in the way his hand rests on my hip—loose but not relaxed. His breath sits too high in his chest. In the tension riding his jaw when I tilt my head just enough to study his face.
“Okay,” I murmur into his shirt. “You’re doing the silent brooding thing. That’s either a migraine or a plan—and I really fucking hope it’s not the first one because I just got you back in one piece.”
A breath ghosts through my hair. “Not a migraine.”
“So.” I lift my head enough to see him. “A plan.”
“Trying,” he admits.
Quiet settles again, thick and watchful—like he’s lining words up inside himself, deciding whether to set them loose or let them rot.
“I’m not going back to the old house,” he says.
The sentence lands heavily between us.
I shift so that I can see his face properly. His eyes are on the window, on the slice of sky caught between glass and pine.
“It needs to die,” he adds. “Or be rebuilt. But I’m done living inside his bones.”
Giovanni.
He doesn’t say the name.
He doesn’t have to.
The mansion flashes in my mind: ash in the air, overturned furniture, the weight of secrets pried from a dead man’s safe. Santino standing in the grave.
“Good,” I say. Anything else feels too soft for a place like that. “That house always felt like it was waiting to eat everyone who walked through it.”
His mouth tilts, agreement shadowing his face. “It already did.”
Silence hums again.
Not empty.
Dense.
“And the church?” I ask.
The word tastes wrong now. Like a blade I used to worship.
He finally looks at me.
“I’ll serve,” he says slowly, testing each syllable like it might break. “But not as a priest. Not as anyone’s weapon. I’m done being their blunt instrument in God’s clothes.”
Something in my chest pinches hard enough to ache.
“What does that even look like?” I whisper.
“I don’t know yet.” His thumb circles my hip, absent, restless. “Outreach, maybe. Confession without absolution for men who think they can buy it. I’ll do more damage with truth than I ever did wearing a collar.”
