I can picture it too easily—the way people will keep coming to him, even without black fabric as armor. The way they’ll talk because his eyes don’t blink first. The way he’ll stand between them and the hell they’re building and make them look at it.
“But it’ll be mine,” he adds, jaw setting. “On my terms. Not Giovanni’s. Not the Church’s. Not the fucking Rivas legend.”
My throat tightens.
“And your brothers?”
Something sharp crosses his face and disappears.
“They’ll follow the truth I give them,” he says. “Not the truth that kills them.”
He doesn’t explain.
He doesn’t need to.
Romeo’s secret curls in the air between us—loud and invisible. The letter. The footage. The way Santino walked out with a new lie on his spine and his brother’s life stitched into it.
I feel it beating inside him like a second heart.
“Does that mean telling them everything?” I press, because I’ve never known how to leave wounds alone.
His gaze breaks first, back to the window. “It means telling them what won’t destroy us.”
Not an answer.
Exactly an answer.
I swallow it and pivot before we both start bleeding.
“And me?” I ask.
That pulls him back instantly.
Now there’s something wary in his eyes—not of me. Never me. Of what I might say. Of the door he’s just opened and whether I’ll run through it.
“What about you?” he asks.
The question shouldn’t break me.
It does.
No one has ever let me choose anything that mattered. Men chose. Power chose. Giovanni chose. Emiliano chose. My body, my future, my pain—always carved up by someone else’s appetite.
“Santino…” My voice thins. I hate it. I clear my throat and try again. “I don’t know how to be safe. I don’t know how to live without running… without tracking the exits every time I step into a room.”
He nods once, like he’s been waiting for that answer since the day he met me in confession and heard every lie ring true.
“Okay.”
Just that.
I handed him a problem, and he already knows how to solve it.
My eyes burn. “Okay?” I echo. “That’s it? I dump all my brokenness on you, and you just… say okay?”
He shifts, untangling our legs with a quiet firmness that isn’t rejection—it’s repositioning. His hands catch my waist, and I’m pulled into motion before I can think.
Guided.
