Chapter 11 #2
My jaw locks hard enough to ache.
All those years I thought I was choosing the church over him…and the whole time, I was walking straight into the center of his web.
My fingers tighten on the edge of the ledger until the paper warps.
I flip deeper.
The entries change—larger numbers, bigger risks, notes written faster. His handwriting sharpens, gets sloppy in places like he was writing in a rage.
Dates jump closer to the present.
I skim the margins—
—and my heart stops.
My name.SANTINO R.
The letters stare back at me, clean and undeniable, like a fist slamming into my chest.
I stop breathing.
It’s not listed beside an account.Not under “accomplices.”
It’s under a different header:
COVER.
The entry reads:
“Funds moved through the Bishop. No suspicion.”
For a moment, the words make little sense.
Then they do.
Bishop.
Not the title I refused.The role I played just by existing.
My presence at the church.My collar.My name.
Giovanni used me for cover.
All those “generous” donations to quiet projects, all those church repairs, all those checks he wrote under my parish’s umbrella—people trusted them because he had a son in the priesthood.
Why question the grieving widower whose son served God?
I wasn’t a son in his eyes.
I was a shield.A holy prop.A fucking smokescreen.
My throat tightens painfully.
I flip back a few pages, hunting for my name again—needing to know if it was a one-off or a pattern.
It’s a pattern.
SANTINO R. — appearance at charity gala.Funds cleared. No questions.
S.R. — presence confirmed at orphanage fundraiser.Transfer completed. LA account.
And the worst one:
“The Bishop’s shadow is enough.”
Giovanni’s note.
My fingers go numb.
He used me even when I wasn’t there—just the idea of me.The good son.The priest.The boy who “escaped.”
I wasn’t running from sin when I joined the seminary.
I was walking straight into the machine powering his kingdom.
My stomach lurches.
I slam the ledger shut. The crack echoes through the vault like a gunshot. Dust trembles off the shelves. My pulse throbs in my ears.
I press the heel of my hand to my forehead, breathing hard.
All those years I thought if I stayed on my knees long enough, if I said enough Hail Marys, if I bled in ways that looked holy instead of violent… I could outrun him.
Outrun this.Outrun what he made me.
But my name is on these pages.
Permanent.Unforgiving.
Proof that I was never separate from Giovanni’s empire.
He wove me into it.A thread in his design.
My hand drags down my face, shaking. The room feels tighter. The ledgers stare back at me, dozens of black leather spines whispering the same truth:
You were part of it.You were always part of it.
I grip the spine again, knuckles white.
“I didn’t know,” I rasp. My voice sounds broken. “I didn’t fucking know.”
But the paper doesn’t care.
Numbers don’t care.
Intent doesn’t erase impact.Ignorance doesn’t erase blood.
I force my breath steady and flip to the most recent entries.
If Giovanni used me…who else did he use?
And which one did he mark the way he marked Pia’s father?
The answer isn’t here.
It’s deeper.Buried.
Waiting in the next ledger like a loaded gun.
What Giovanni Was Afraid Of
The air changes the moment I turn the page.
The ledgers were already a coffin of sins, but this — this feels different.
A red slash cuts across the top corner.Sharp. Violent. Giovanni’s private code.
Critical risk.
My pulse kicks—hard enough I feel it in my teeth.
I drag the ledger closer, knuckles whitening around the edges as I flip to the marked section.
POTENTIAL TRAITORS
The heading punches straight through my ribs.
He catalogued them.Every threat.Every whisper.Every fucking shadow that dared move out of step with his empire.
My father didn’t keep lists like this unless the paranoia was already eating him alive.
I scan the names.
Some are familiar—weak links, opportunists, men who served him out of fear instead of loyalty.But others twist hot and ugly in my gut:
Priests I grew up around.Consiglieres who swore blood oaths.Runners who took bullets without complaint.Drivers who spent decades guarding the family’s secrets.
He didn’t trust any of them.
But it’s the next entry that freezes my breath.
It stretches across two lines, underlined twice—ink pressed so deep Giovanni nearly tore through the page.
RIVAS — internal threat
My stomach drops.
“No.” The word barely makes a sound.
But the ledger doesn’t change.The ink doesn’t soften.The dagger Giovanni buried in these pages doesn’t pull itself free.
A Rivas betrayed him.
Pia was right.Her father was framed.
Giovanni didn’t execute a thief.He buried a scapegoat.
I press the heel of my hand to my brow, fighting the sudden rush of heat behind my eyes. The room tilts. The shelves warp at the edges of my vision, tall shadows leaning in like they want to watch me shatter.
Which Rivas did this?
Romeo?Dante?Me?
A sick flash of memory hits—Romeo’s warnings, his silence, the way he watched Pia like she carried a fuse he was terrified I’d light.
And Dante… loyal to a fault, but Giovanni always said even the quiet ones carry knives behind their backs.
My throat closes on a curse.
I flip the page—desperate for clarity, for sense, for anything other than this widening chasm beneath my feet—
—and find Giovanni’s handwriting.
Not the clean, elegant script he used on church paperwork.
This is messy.Erratic.Letters carved in anger.
“The betrayal came from blood. The King will die by a son’s hand.”
The words slam into me like a punch to the ribs.
The ledger slips from my grip.
A cold wave rolls through me so viciously my vision goes spotty.
He knew.
He knew he wouldn’t die old, comfortable, adored.He knew it wouldn’t be a rival.He knew it wouldn’t be some outsider hungry for the crown.
He knew it would be one of us.
My breath stutters—harsh, uneven, too loud in the suffocating vault.
I stagger back until my shoulder hits the cold stone wall.
My father predicted his own murder…and he blamed one of his sons.
The truth sinks claws into my spine.
“Jesus…” I choke. “What the fuck did you do?”
Did he confront the wrong person?Accuse the right one?Provoke the betrayal he feared?
Or worse — did he set a trap and fall into his own?
My hands won’t stop trembling.
All his life, Giovanni made loyalty sound simple.
Family.Blood.Obedience.
But here—hidden in his own hand, buried in a vault he meant no one to open — is the truth he refused to say out loud:
The danger wasn’t outside the family.It was inside it.Inside us.Inside me.
And now that I’ve opened this vault, there’s no going back.No unseeing.No unknowing.No pretending.
The red slash burns at the corner of the page.
The words echo like a curse: The King will die by a son’s hand.
My breath fractures.
Because suddenly the question isn’t which Rivas betrayed him — it’s what he was planning to do to stop it…
…and whether the one who killed him simply struck first.
The Name He Never Expected
My pulse is still hammering from the last revelation when another thought wedges itself between my ribs.
Romeo.
His voice.His warnings.His fucking fear every time I got too close to the truth.
My breath grows thin.
I don’t want to look.I don’t want to flip another page.
But I can’t stop myself.
I grab the next ledger—hands shaking, grip too tight—and drag it off the shelf. It lands open across my palm, pages fanning out like a deck of blood-marked cards.
The divider title knocks the air straight out of me:
CONFESSION ENTRIES–TO BE DESTROYED
My stomach knots.
Giovanni kept copies of confessions.Not summaries.Not interpretations.Copies.
Blasphemy.Corruption.Leverage.
Every sin he collected was insurance—another loaded gun aimed at the people who trusted him.
I flip the page.
Dozens of taped slips stare back at me, crooked and yellowed, edges stained from fingerprints and time. His handwriting lines each one with tight, ruthless notes.
The air feels colder.
I slide one free.
“Met the King alone the night he died.”
My vision narrows.
Another slip:
“He said he had a plan. I told him I wouldn’t let him follow through.”
A chill crawls down my back.
Not a rival.Not an outsider.Someone he trusted enough to meet alone.
I reach for the next slip, fingers trembling so badly I almost rip it.
“He gave me something. Said it was the key to everything.”
The key.
My hand flies to my pocket—Giovanni’s actual key is still cold and heavy against my thigh.
What the hell did you hand over, old man?
I flip to the final taped slip, but someone ripped half of it clean off. A jagged tear cuts down the center, like someone tried to destroy it before they ran out of time.
Only a single fragment remains.
One name.
ROM—
My breath stops.
I tear it from the ledger, lift it to the light.There’s no mistaking the way Giovanni wrote that R — heavy, carved, final.
ROMEO.
The room blurs.
The shelves.The ledgers.The cold vault walls.Everything dissolves into white noise as the blood roars in my ears.
My brother.
My fucking brother.
The same brother who looked me dead in the eyes last night and said:
“If you open that vault, you’ll wish you never did.”
He wasn’t warning me away.He was protecting himself.
My fingers seize the ledger so hard the spine cracks. Paper groans under the pressure of my shaking hands.
Fragments of memory slam into me — Romeo pacing the hallway.Romeo dodging every question about Giovanni’s final hours.Romeo shadowing Pia as if she carried a detonator.Romeo watching me like he was weighing how close I was getting.
My chest tightens.
I drop the slip. It flutters to the ground like ash.
And Giovanni’s last confession echoes in my skull:
“A son will be my undoing.”
A line I dismissed as melodrama.Paranoia.The dying rant of a tyrant who saw ghosts everywhere.
But now — now it slices through me like a blade.
My throat burns.
Because Giovanni knew.He fucking knew.
And I didn’t see any of it.