Chapter 16 Pia #2
I hover behind him, useless and burning and desperate.
My chest constricts.
Not just from tonight—
but from everything I’ve buried beneath it.
My father’s blood on the hospital floor.The lies I learned to breathe like oxygen.The nights spent wrapped around men I didn’t care about just to survive one more dawn.The doors I unlocked.The alarms I disarmed.The names I whispered into the wrong ears.The bodies I never looked at long enough to regret.
Collateral.
That’s the word we all use when the math gets ugly.
Children aren’t supposed to be part of the numbers.
And yet—
Here I am.
A woman who slipped through darkness and came out the other side sharp and breathing.
Standing in a church courtyard while a priest comes apart in front of me because his little brother looked at me like I was death wearing a familiar face.
My stomach twists.
I press my hand over it like I can hold myself together long enough to say something that might matter.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
The word falls between us like a bead from a broken rosary.
He freezes.
Not a flinch.
Not a turn.
Just… stillness.
For a dangerous second, something in me reaches for hope.
That he’ll look at me.That he’ll come to me.That he’ll take my face in his hands the way he does when he forgets the vows and remembers the man.
That we’ll pretend none of this touched us.
That guilt doesn’t stain.
That children forget.
That I’m not what my life insists I am.
Hope has always been my most fragile sin.
Santino exhales slowly, like he’s bargaining just to stay upright.
“For you,” he says quietly, still facing the stone instead of me, “that’s a word.”
Cold spreads through my chest.
“For me,” he continues, “it’s a graveyard.”
My nails dig into my palms.
Then he finally turns.
And there it is again.
Not hatred.
Worse.
Recognition.
“You don’t just scare my brother,” he says. “You are my brother’s fear.”
The words hit like a body blow.
I flinch.
I can’t hide it.
“And what the hell am I supposed to do with that, Pia?” His voice breaks, then rebuilds itself out of something hard and jagged. “You walk into my life with your mouth and your skin and your goddamned secrets—and now my little brother has nightmares with your face in them.”
I open my mouth.
Nothing comes.
He’s already bleeding. I won’t insult him with bandages.
“You’re everything my father pushed into this family,” he says. “Every promise. Every war. Every lie that killed my mother and buried my brothers long before their bodies ever hit dirt.”
I take a step back without meaning to.
Not from him.
From the reflection of myself in his eyes.
“I didn’t come here for this,” I whisper. “I didn’t come here to tear you apart.”
His laugh is short and bitter.
“Damage doesn’t give a shit what you came for.”
Silence swells between us, thick and suffocating.
No wind.No noise from the city.Only us, standing in the fallout of something neither of us knows how to fix.
He turns away again.
Not from me.
From trying.
And that’s when it finally hits me—
low and brutal, beneath my ribs.
I’m not the woman he hates.
I’m the woman his father built and dropped into his life like a fucking bomb.
And that means forgiveness will never come as easily as survival.
I press my tongue to my teeth until I taste blood and swallow.
“I never wanted to be your nightmare,” I say.
He doesn’t answer.
And in that silence, I understand what I’ve been dodging my whole life:
Not every villain is one.
Some of us survive long enough to realize we’ve become the thing that changed everyone else’s story.
And there’s no erasing that.
Only walking away when the damage refuses to let go.
Emiliano’s Return & The Judgment
The courtyard gate creaks.
Not loud.Not dramatic.
Just enough to turn the night’s spine cold.
I look up.
My blood goes hostile.
Emiliano steps through the open iron like he owns the fucking dark. His coat swings with each step, the lining flashing like something alive. He doesn’t pause to read the scene. He doesn’t hesitate.
He arrives.
The way men do when death already checked the guest list.
My body reacts before my brain catches up. My back snaps straight. My shoulders lock. Every nerve pulls itself into a weapon.
Because this man doesn’t walk.
He judges.
Santino turns at the same time I do, fury snapping awake in him so fast it’s almost violent. I’ve never seen it rise that fast—raw and unfiltered.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he growls.
Emiliano doesn’t look at him.
Not even a flick of his eyes.
Nothing.
The silence is deliberate. The kind that strips you of importance and makes you wait to see where you land.
His gaze settles on me.
Not my face.Not my eyes.
My center.
Like he can see through skin and bone and bullshit straight into the part of me that still cares.
The part I fucking hate.
“You caused fear in a child,” Emiliano says quietly.
Soft.So soft, it feels obscene.
Killer-soft.
The voice men use when they’re about to decide whether you die quickly.
My breath cinches tight.
“No,” Santino snaps, stepping in front of me. “You don’t get to—”
“She brought the danger,” Emiliano cuts over him.
The words don’t rise in volume.
They don’t have to.
“She brought the blood. She brought the lies.”
Each one lands with surgical calm.
My hands curl at my sides.
Not in surrender.
In restraint.
I want to scream that he doesn’t know me. That he doesn’t get to stand in this churchyard like some fucking oracle and sentence me for a crime he didn’t even witness.
I want to rip the judgment right out of his mouth.
I say nothing.
Because Guido’s eyes won’t let me.
I see them again—wet and wide, lips trembling, like he already knows he belongs to a grave he didn’t dig.
And I hate myself, because part of me knows Emiliano isn’t wrong.
“I didn’t mean to hurt him,” I whisper.
It crawls out hoarse. Small.
A child’s lie wearing a woman’s voice.
Emiliano tilts his head like he’s listening more carefully now.
Like he’s entertained.
Like I just made this easier.
“And yet you did,” he replies, almost kindly.
I hate it slices deeper than if he’d snarled it. I hate he doesn’t sound angry.
Just… precise.
The words sink into my chest like weights.
Not because I agree—
but because I don’t get to pretend otherwise.
Santino stiffens in front of me, like Emiliano just drew a gun.
“You don’t get to condemn her,” he snaps. “Not here. Not like this. You’re not God.”
Emiliano finally turns his gaze to Santino.
Slowly.Deliberately.
When their eyes meet, something shifts in the air between them—like static right before a lightning strike.
“No,” Emiliano says simply. “I’m not.”
Then his attention cuts back to me.
“I’m worse.”
The courtyard feels smaller.
I swear the stone walls lean in, hungry.
Emiliano steps closer.
Not lunging.Not overtly threatening.
Just… inevitable.
“You walk into a house full of ghosts and wonder why the children scream,” he says. “You brought your war into a family that was already dying from it.”
Santino shifts like he’s about to move in front of me again.
Emiliano lifts one finger.
Not at Santino.
In the space between us.
A boundary. A warning. A cut.
“I’m not here to punish you,” Emiliano says. “I’m here to remind you.”
“Of what?” I bite out.
My voice shakes anyway.
His mouth curls, not quite a smile.
“What happens when you pretend your damage doesn’t bleed?”
The words claw under my skin.
I straighten my spine.
If I’m going to be judged, I won’t fold for it.
“I didn’t come to destroy them,” I say. “I didn’t come to hurt anyone. I didn’t come here to poison a child.”
Emiliano studies me.
For a long, brutal moment.
Then:
“Impact doesn’t give a fuck about your intent.”
The sentence slices clean.
Santino curses under his breath.
Heat stings the backs of my eyes.
I refuse to let tears fall. I will not cry in front of this man.
Emiliano turns his head a fraction, speaking to Santino without looking away from me.
“You love her,” he says.
Not asking.
Stating.
Santino goes still, like the word hit something vital.
“And she’s already a liability,” Emiliano continues. “Not because she’s evil. Because she walks onto sacred ground and it rots behind her.”
My nails bite into my palms until I feel the sting of broken skin.
“Get out of my head,” I snarl.
Emiliano finally looks satisfied.
Because now I’m cracking.
Good.
He steps back one pace.
Just one.
Enough to breathe.
Enough to bleed.
“This place doesn’t forgive,” he says quietly. “It only remembers.”
Then he looks at Santino again.
“And your brother will remember her face long after this night pretends it’s over.”
The words don’t rise.
They don’t need to.
Judgment doesn’t shout.
It settles.
And it’s suffocating.
Pia’s Breaking Point: The Realization
I stumble back like Emiliano just carved something loose inside my chest.
My spine hits stone.
Hard.
The impact knocks the breath out of me with a sharp, ugly sound. Cold slices through my coat and straight into my bones, but I barely register it.
Because something colder just gutted me from the inside.
It comes all at once.
Not gradual.Not merciful.
A fucking landslide.
I didn’t just infiltrate a church.
I infiltrated a family.
A family already bleeding from places that never healed right.A widow crowned under threat.Brothers sharpened into weapons.A child smuggled out of hell and taught to breathe fear instead of air.
And I—
I walked in like a fault line.
And split what little was left.
Guido’s face won’t let me go.
Not his terror this time.
His size.
How small he looked standing there in that doorway.
How little space he took up in a world that wants to kill him just for breathing.
Already traumatized.Already exiled.Already hunted.
And now?
Now marked.
By me.
My fingers dig into the stone behind me like I’m trying to sink into it—to become part of the wall and disappear without another body falling behind me.