Chapter 15 Santino
Santino
The Voice Outside the Door
“Found the girl.”
The words slide under my skin like a blade dipped in something slow and poisonous.
Not a shout.Not a warning.A statement.
Casual. Certain.
I don’t breathe.I don’t move.I don’t even blink—because something in me knows, down to the marrow-black truth—that if I shift an inch, they’ll sense it.
Predators always do.They smell readiness the way priests smell lies.
Pia’s breath stutters on the other side of the steel door.
Tiny.Fractured.Too fast.
I press my palm flat against the cold metal as if I can transmit command through skin and bone and will alone.
I’m here.I’ve got you.I’m not letting them touch you.
Her breathing hitches like she heard it anyway.
Shadows slide beneath the threshold.Two pairs of shoes.
Heavy—in that lazy way men get when they don’t believe the prey has teeth.
A key scrapes into the outer lock.
Metal on metal.
The sound drills straight down my spine and splinters behind my eyes.
I widen my stance without thinking. Knees loose. Shoulders ready. The blade in my waistband is already warm, already familiar in the way a weapon becomes when you finally stop pretending you’re meant to be saved instead of surviving.
Priest by name.Killer by blood.
Giovanni’s son doesn’t pray when the lock turns.
He decides where the blood will land.
“Back away from the door,” I whisper.
Not gentle.Not careful.
Urgent in a way that doesn’t offer hope.
Her reply barely finds me.
“Santino…”
Her voice shredded to threads.
“…don’t die for me.”
I shut my eyes.
Just once.
Not for God.
For her.
Because if I answer that out loud, my voice will splinter—and something feral inside me will snap its leash too soon.
It is already too late for don’t die.
The lock clicks.
The outer latch releases with a soft, final sound that gouges my gut hollow.
I draw the blade without a breath.
Every sense ratchets higher—
Pulse slowing.Vision narrowing.Hearing thins out.
Their voices leak through the metal.
“She’s in there.”“Open it.”“Boss wants her alive.”
Alive.
The word scorches.
The door shifts.
Barely an inch.
Enough.
Violence in the Dark
The door gives.
Six inches of space.Six inches of stupid fucking confidence.
That’s all I need to get in.
The first man slides through the gap, half-turned, gun low, already cataloging this as easy work.
I rush in with no time to waste, I lunge forward on him.
I hook my fist in his collar and slam his skull into the steel frame hard enough to send the impact vibrating up my bones.
Bone breaks.
Blood spits across the metal—and onto my face—painting the threshold in a wet, ugly arc.
Pia gasps small and strangled—
—but she doesn’t scream.
The second man charges without a word.
Knife first.
Of course.
The world narrows to a single sharp point.
The blade drives toward my ribs. I pivot, catching his wrist in both hands. Steel whispers over fabric, misses skin by a breath.
He grunts, trying to power through.
I’m already moving.
Twist.Drop my weight.Let leverage eat muscle alive.
His wrist pops sideways with a wet, unforgivable sound.
He howls.
The knife slaps the floor and skids beneath Pia’s bare foot.
I don’t give him time to think about reaching it.
My knee slams between his legs hard enough to steal his voice. He folds in on himself, breath choking out in a busted gasp.
My forearm catches his throat, and I drive him backward into the door, using the vault like a second weapon.
Cartilage grinds.
Air vanishes.
He claws at my arm, fingers scrabbling, skin slick with panic.
I feel the truth land in him before his body does:
There will be no air.
“Shh,” I breathe against his ear.
No prayer.No redemption.
Just silence.
His eyes bulge. His kicks get sloppy. His grip slides uselessly down my sleeve.
I wait until the fight drains clean out of him—
—and then I let him fall.
He hits the floor hard, half-draped over his unconscious friend.
A grotesque little monument to being too fucking late.
For a beat, the vault holds its breath.
Then Pia’s breathing breaks the stillness.
So does the drip.
Blood on stone.
The smell hits next—wet iron, old incense, dust, the faint ghost of holy oil in the walls.
The church’s heart.
Turned into a slaughterhouse.
I bend, snatch up the fallen knife, and wipe the handle on dead fabric.
No prints.
Old instinct.
Giovanni drilled it into us before we were tall enough to see over a wheel.
Think like you’re already hunted.Kill like they’ll never prove it.
I straighten with steel in my hand and steel against my spine.
Two weapons.
I turn.
Pia stands framed in the doorway, hair wild, eyes too bright, skin bruised and breathing too fast beneath torn fabric.
She looks like something ripped out of hell—
—and like the only goddamn thing in this place that matters.
Her gaze drops to the bodies.
To my blood.
To the knife.
Her throat works.
She doesn’t look away.
Good.
Fear keeps you breathing.Denial buries you.
“Stay behind me,” I tell her.
The words leave me rough, gravel-cut, like stone scraped raw.
It should sound like an order.
It doesn’t.
It sounds like a vow.
Her eyes lift.
For one impossible second, everything else vanishes — the distant gunfire, the shouts somewhere in the tunnels, the city breathing overhead—
Only the tremor in her mouth.Only the fight in her eyes.
She nods.
Small.Shaking.Real.
“I mean it, Pia,” I add, stepping into her space until she has to tilt her chin to keep looking at me. “You don’t pass me. Not once. You move when I move.”
Her mouth parts.
Obedience is not in her nature.She is fiery.
Her gaze flicks to the men on the floor—and whatever settles there kills the argument before it can live.
“Okay,” she whispers.
It scrapes out of her.
Raw.
She reaches for me.
Not clinging.Not dramatic.
I feel that touch harder than I feel the blood drying on my skin.
I step over the corpse.
Her grip tightens.
We move.
The vault yawns behind us—a steel mouth stuffed with secrets and corpses.
Not a room anymore.
A grave.
The tunnels close in cold and damp and breathing.
And something ugly and absolute locks into my bones:
I will kill every man down here if that’s the price.
Every scout.Every soldier.Every idiot loyal to a dead king.
I’ll stack them in sacred hallways like a new altar.
Because the collar I wore couldn’t save my soul.
She walks one step behind me, trusting me with her life.
“Stay close,” I murmur, blade low.
“I’m not fucking losing you again.”
The Tunnels: Graveyard of Secrets
The tunnel swallows us the moment we clear the vault.
Cold breathes off the stone like the mouth of something ancient—something that’s been starving in the dark for centuries. Water seeps from the ceiling in fat, irregular drops, each one hitting the floor with a hollow plunk that sounds too much like counting.
Time.Lives.Mistakes.
The walls press tight enough to graze my shoulders if I forget how wide I am with a blade in one hand and Pia one step behind me. The air is damp and old and wrong—like it’s been steeping in prayers that rotted before they ever reached heaven.
I move.
Slow.Measured.
My boots barely whisper across the stone, but my eyes never stop.
Every shadow could be a man.Every echo could be a footstep.Every breath I hear could be a lie.
Pia stays close behind me.
Like she knows I’m the only thing between her and the ground falling out from under her—and she’s daring the world to try.
We walk through stone doorways, finding only darkness. Old catacombs. Storage chambers. Sealed confessionals left behind when the church pretended it had evolved.
No one cleans a place like this.
They just bury the rot deeperand paint crosses over the cracks.
“I didn’t think we’d make it out,” Pia whispers.
Her words don’t echo.
They die where they land.
Good.
Sound is a traitor.
“We’re not out yet,” I tell her, low enough that even the bones can’t hear it.
Her fingers tighten.
I feel everything.
The hitch in her breath.The jitter in her pulse.The aftershock is still shaking her spine like it doesn’t want to let go.
The blade hangs loose in my grip. My senses stretch thin and sharp—the way they only ever do when fear and purpose collide full-force inside my chest.
This is where I live now.
In the space just before something breaks.
We round a bend—
—and the mosaic waits for us.
Saint Michael.
War locked in glass and gold.
His wings explode across the wall in a riot of jeweled feathers. His sword glows, righteous, and he raises it high. His foot pins a devil to stone, halo blazing above a face too calm for a man committing holy murder.
I stop.
Half a breath.
The angel stares back at me.
Judging.Pleading.Lying.
Pia notices.
Of course she does.
She steps closer—not in front of me, not beside me—just close enough that her shoulder brushes mine and something inside my ribs snaps quietly into place.
“That’s who you think you are,” she whispers.
Not mocking.
Searching.
I don’t look at her.
I don’t look away from the angel either.
“No.”
The word lands heavy in my gut.
“That’s who I’m becoming.”
It isn’t said for drama.It isn’t meant to sound brave.
It’s a fact.
It tastes like rust.
Her fingers slide from my back to my wrist.
Not stopping me.
Holding.
Like she felt something just die inside me.
And she’s the only one standing over the body.
I move past the mosaic.
The angel stays frozen—trapped in glass and lies forever.
We don’t slow.
The tunnel slopes downward now. The cold grows teeth. The dark gets heavier. Every breath feels like it’s scraping my lungs raw.
Pia stumbles.
I catch her without breaking stride.
She doesn’t thank me.Doesn’t apologize.
She keeps moving.
Damn, she’s strong.
Not in the pretty way men like to romanticize.
In a way that survives.
In a way that comes out of hell scarred and swinging.