Chapter 16 Pia
Pia
The Courtyard in Ruins
The cold hits me like a slap the second Santino drags me out of the tunnel—then lets go. Stone swallows our shadows. The darkness presses close. The courtyard is dead, empty, echoing, the place that remembers every sin ever dragged across its ground.
My lungs burn. White fog spills from my mouth with every ragged breath. My pulse hasn’t caught up with my body yet. My boots are still on the dirt, my skin is on edge, and Santino’s hand is clamped around my wrist. He is holding it as if he fears letting go would cause me to be swallowed.
I should shake from that.
I’m not.
I’m shaking because of Thomas Giovanni Rivas’s son.
From those eyes.
Guido’s face detonates behind my eyelids every time I blink—wide, confused, terrified. Not just afraid.
Tainted.
Like he knew something just crawled out of the dark that wasn’t supposed to touch him.
Me.
I stagger backward until my spine collides with the courtyard wall. Cold seeps into my coat, eats through fabric and bone. I don’t fight it. I let myself slide down the stone like something discarded and end in a crouch, fingers tangling in my hair like I can rip the memory out by the root.
I didn’t come here to hurt a kid.
I came to steal.To survive.To avenge my father with teeth and lies so clean they cut.
I came here to gut a church.
Not a child.
My breath stutters. I clamp a hand over my mouth, but it doesn’t stop the sound. It breaks anyway—raw and small and wrong inside my throat.
Giovanni’s poison lived right behind that boy’s eyes.
Every lie he was fed.Every fear poured into him like scripture.Every story about monsters that wear your face.
I walked straight into that with a knife in my smile.
I press my forehead to my knees and bite down. Hard. I need pain that’s mine. Something I can earn.
“You’re okay,” I whisper, and the words feel like betrayal on my tongue. “You’re fine. He’s fine. You didn’t touch him. You didn’t break him.”
Liar.
I didn’t put my hands on him.
That’s it.
That’s the only mercy I get.
Because of fear?
Fear I delivered.
“Fuck,” I breathe, and my voice skids across the stone. The sound doesn’t come back to me. This place doesn’t echo comfort.
It keeps it.
A flicker.
Santino’s face when he turned back for me in the dark.
Not furious.
Not cold.
Shattered.
Like something holy cracked clean down the middle.
He looked at me like I’d just stepped through his church doors with hell on my breath.
Like my existence was a bruise God didn’t know how to heal.
I squeeze my eyes shut harder. I want the dark. I want blindness. I want anything but the memory of his brother flinching like I was already a ghost.
“I didn’t want this,” I whisper to no one. To stone. To saints that never listened. “I didn’t want this.”
The courtyard refuses to answer.
No wind.
No voice.
Just cold, old rock and the weight of a family I never should have touched.
The church looms behind me, huge and watching. The windows are black. The doors closed.
Like I’m already exiled.
I wipe my face with the heel of my hand, and my skin comes away burning. Everything burns. Inside. Outside. Memory to marrow.
I came into this place thinking I would bleed it dry.
I didn’t know the church would bleed me back.
And somewhere in the dark—
A little boy is learning to fear women with my face.
I wrap my arms around my knees and rock once, hard.
Not because I’m weak.
Because I don’t know how to carry this—
and survive.
The Moment Santino Pulls Away
The crunch of footsteps drags me out of my head.
They aren’t rushed. Not heavy. Just… deliberate. Each step grinds gravel like bone under a boot.
I lift my face from my knees.
Santino is crossing the courtyard toward me.
The security lights catch on his collar, the edge of his jaw, the lines carved into his forehead like someone took a blade to him and forgot to stitch him back up. His shoulders are rigid, but every few seconds I see them tremble—just enough to tell me it isn’t the cold getting to him.
It’s me.
It’s this.
He stops a few feet away.
Not close enough for me to grab his sleeve. Not far enough to pretend he’s just passing through.
We hang there in the space between.
The priest.
The intruder.
My chest tightens. I force my hands away from my hair and press my palms flat to the stone at my sides, like I need something to hold me down before I try to climb into his body just to feel anchored again.
“Santino.”
His name cracks on the way out of my mouth. It tastes like confession and begging and something ugly I don’t want to name.
His eyes close.
Not in prayer.
In surrender.
“You saw him,” he says, voice low and raw, like he’s been chewing on glass since we left the tunnels. “You saw his face.”
It’s not a question.
It’s not an accusation.
It’s worse.
It’s grief strangling his throat.
I swallow, and it feels like I’m choking on that image all over again—Guido’s pupils blown wide, lips parted, breathing like the air itself hurt him.
“I…” The word disintegrates. I clear my throat and try again. “Yeah. I saw.”
Santino opens his eyes and, fuck, I almost wish he hadn’t.
He’s not the controlled, cold bastard who dragged me out of danger. Not the man who pins me to walls and talks about God with his hand between my thighs.
He looks ruined.
“He looked at you like—” His voice splinters. He glances away, jaw working, like he’s fighting himself not to spit the rest out. When he looks back, there’s no shield left. “Like you were another ghost sent to finish what the last one started.”
My stomach drops.
Another ghost.
Bella.
Giovanni.
All the dead that haunt this family—and now me, slotted right in with them.
“I didn’t mean to scare him,” I say, and it sounds pathetic even to my own ears. Thin. Useless. Like a bandage slapped over a bullet wound.
His mouth twists.
The laugh that comes out isn’t amused. It’s a jagged exhale, like the sound tears his lungs on the way up.
“No,” he murmurs. “You didn’t mean to.”
Every syllable lands like a blow.
“But you did.”
The night presses in, colder.
I want to argue. I want to say I knew of Guido's brokenness before entering this church. That whatever Giovanni did to that boy’s mind is the real horror here—not my face in the dark.
It doesn’t matter.
Intent doesn’t erase what he saw.
I scrub at my eyes with the heel of my hand, harsher than I need to. “You think I enjoyed it?” My voice frays. “You think I get off on making children look at me like I’m some kind of fucking nightmare?”
His gaze doesn’t soften.
It burns.
“That boy’s been hunted by shadows his whole life,” Santino says quietly. “By men with guns and God on their tongues. By my father’s enemies. By our enemies. He finally finds a sliver of safety, and what does he see when he opens his door?”
His eyes rake down my body and back up, and I’ve never felt more naked while fully clothed.
“You,” he finishes. “In the dark. In our house. Wearing the same fear he breathes in his sleep.”
My breath stutters.
The courtyard shrinks. The walls edge closer. The church behind me presses in like a witness I never consented to.
“I was there to help you,” I say, clinging to the original script like it still matters. “I was there to get you out, to make sure you didn’t die down there. Him—” I falter. “I didn’t know he’d be there. I didn’t plan that.”
“That’s the problem,” Santino says. The dull grief in his voice sharpens into steel. “You don’t plan the collateral. You just collect it.”
The words drive straight through my chest.
“You don’t know me,” I snap, because if I don’t bare my teeth, I will collapse at his feet. “You don’t know what I’ve done to stay alive—what I’ve had to crawl through—”
“I know what I saw,” he cuts in.
Silence slams down between us.
The only sounds left are our breathing and the distant thrum of the city beyond the walls—cars, sirens, life moving on while we stand in a graveyard someone had the nerve to call holy.
I push myself up slowly, legs shaking but holding. Standing doesn’t make me bigger. It only puts us eye to eye, and there’s nothing safe in his gaze now.
He takes a step back.
Just one.
It isn’t much distance.
It’s everything else.
Something tears inside my chest—clean and vicious. I feel it, hot and raw, numbing my fingers from the inside out.
“Santino,” I say again, and there’s too much in it this time. Want. Guilt. A sound that borders on begging. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?” he asks, flat.
“Like I pulled the trigger on your entire fucking family.”
His face doesn’t crack.
He just holds my gaze, steady and merciless—a priest staring down a confession he never wanted to hear.
“You walked into our war, Pia,” he says at last. “Don’t act shocked when the bullets don’t know the difference between you and the people who started it.”
He turns his head a fraction, breaking the line of my breath, and losing it thins the air.
That single step he took might as well be a canyon.
For the first time since I set foot inside this church, I feel it—
the space ripping open between us, wide and cold,
like God himself just drew a line and shoved me to the wrong side.
Survivor Guilt Rising
He turns away from me like I’ve become unholy in the space of a single breath.
Not storming off. Not slamming doors.
Just… withdrawing.
That quiet hurt is worse than anything violent he could do to me.
I follow him slowly and carefully, like the ground might split open if I move too fast. Gravel bites the soles of my shoes. The sound feels obscene—too loud for a place already soaked in silence.
“Santino, listen—”
“No. Not now.”
The words are sharp enough to cut.
They hit my ribs and knock the air clean out of me. He doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t have to.
Pain carries its own volume.
He stops near the old stone fountain and grips its edge like he might tear it out of the ground if he doesn’t anchor himself to something solid. His back is to me, rigid, unyielding.