I don’t move.
Santino notices.His grip tightens.
“This is what you do?” Santino hisses. “This is who you follow? Men who torture women? Who hunts them down like animals?”
Rocco’s breath rattles in his chest.
Santino’s voice drops to a whisper that scrapes straight down my spine.
“You should have died the first time you touched her.”
My knees nearly buckle.
His fury isn’t aimless. It isn’t blind. It’s pointed—at Rocco, at the faction that murdered my father, at the nightmares clawing at my heels.
Anyone who dares think I’m unprotected.
A new crack fractures open inside me, sharp and bright.
Santino shouldn’t care.Not like this.Not violently.Not protectively.Not obsessively.
And yet—
He does.
I feel it in every inch of him.
He won’t let anyone take me.Not again.Not ever.Not while he’s still breathing.
Rocco’s knees give out. His face reddens, eyes bulging, breaths thin and broken. Santino is seconds away from crushing the last air out of him.
And I should stop this.I should say something.
But when my mouth opens—
nothing comes out.
Because the truth is terrifying:
I don’t want him to stop.Not yet.
The Moment Pia Chooses Him
The alley reeks of fear.And blood.And something else—heat, tension, possession.
The air is thick with it, hot and suffocating despite the cold night. It coils around us, sinks into my skin, crawls straight down my spine. I can taste metal at the back of my throat from the brick dust drifting through the air. Rocco’s strangled breaths stutter like a dying engine.
Santino turns just enough to look at me.
And it hits me—hard, brutal, inescapable.
His eyes aren’t the eyes of a priest.They’re not soft.They’re not forgiving.They’re not restrained.
They’re on fire.They’re fury.They’re a man’s eyes — a man who would kill for me without hesitation.A man who already has.
My lungs tighten. Something deep inside me buckles.
“You know him,” he says.
