Chapter 18 Pia
Pia
The Night She Runs
Into
the Trap
The gate slams behind me like a verdict.
Cold air knifes across my face as I step off Rivas ground and into the street, into a night that doesn’t bother pretending it has a soul.
I don’t look back.
If I do, I’ll see the iron bars.I’ll see the church tower.I’ll hear Santino’s voice breaking on my name.
I won’t survive that and still leave.
One foot in front of the other. My boots slap through shallow rivers collecting along the curb. Rain claws down my neck, threads into my hair, soaks the seams of my jacket. My hands shake, but not from the cold.
Guido’s eyes won’t get out of my head.
Wide.Gone.Terrified.
He looked at me like I’d crawled out of the dark to finish what the last nightmare started. Like I was the next wrecking ball God planned to send swinging through his half-built life.
Good. Let him hate me.Hate is distance.Distance is safety.
My chest knots.
That’s a lie I keep shoving down my throat.
If you leave, they’ll be fine.If you cut yourself out, the bleeding stops.
One block.Then two.
By the time I hit the third, my lungs burn and my legs go soft—not from the run, from the way my body keeps dragging me backward. To Santino’s hands. To his mouth. To the way he spoke my name like a promise and an execution in the same breath.
I shove him out of my head.
He isn’t mine.I’m not his.
I’m a walking crime scene wearing lipstick.
Mercy is a luxury I stopped earning the night my father’s blood hit tile.
Water cascades off awnings. Somewhere a dog barks, sharp and desperate. Traffic whispers in the distance like it knows something’s wrong and refuses to say it out loud. A car glides past, headlights smearing gold across brick.
Disappear.Forget them.Let them forget you.
Lightning fractures the sky, white and violent. Thunder never comes. Even the heavens are holding their breath.
I’m halfway across the next intersection when the van appears.
Black. Unmarked. Windows are too dark for a city that likes to pretend it’s safe. It turns onto my street slow and certain, the curve of something that already knows where it’s going.
My pulse spikes.
Not because I’m scared.
Because the feeling is familiar — the weight of the engine’s hum,the grip of tires on wet stone,the way it doesn’t rush.
Predatory.
I tell myself I’m imagining it. Another vehicle. Another asshole driving cautiously in the rain. I tell myself I’ve lived in enemy territory too long, and every shadow looks like a threat when your nerves are stripped raw.
Then the van eases under a streetlight.
And I see the crest.
Small, black-on-black. Easy to miss—unless you grew up seeing it stitched on jackets across poker tables and back rooms. Unless you memorized it with your teeth clenched and your heart in your throat.
My stomach drops.
Vescari.
My father’s executioners.
My fingers go numb. My throat locks. I force my legs to move faster and duck down the next side street like I’ve got anywhere in the world to be. Rain lashes my jeans, colder, harder, like the night’s decided it owns me now.
If I can reach the avenue two blocks over — If I can melt into a crowd — If I can—
The van doesn’t pass.
It follows.
Slow.Deliberate.Certain.
Every hair on my body rises.
No. Not now. Not here. Not after I finally did the one thing that might spare them.
I scan the street. A shuttered shop. A locked gate. An alley choking on trash bags and rancid water. No lights. No witnesses.
Of course.
“Keep walking,” I whisper to myself. “Don’t run. Don’t—”
The van edges ahead and stops.
Right in front of me.
Doors click open before it even settles.
Three men step out.
Not kids. Not junkies.
Boots. Gloves. Faces carved from stone. The men whose bodies already know how this ends.
My heart detonates.
The closest one moves toward me. Rain beads on his shaved scalp. His jacket falls open just enough to flash the crest stitched into the lining.
The crown.
The fist.
My father’s last sight.
I take a step back.
“Wrong girl,” I say, flat and brittle. “Try again.”
He smiles. It doesn’t touch his eyes.
“Pia Moretti,” he answers. “Giovanni’s little ghost.”
Ice floods my veins.
Run.
I spin.
I don’t make it in three steps.
An arm hooks my waist and rips me backward so hard I lose my breath in a broken cry. A gloved hand slams over my mouth, rubber and rain and sweat. I bite down. Taste it. Feel it give. He curses.
“Little bitch,” he hisses in my ear.
I fight—heel to shin, elbow to gut, nails tearing at his wrist. For one insane second I think I’m going to make it. My shoulder twists. Fire flashes down my arm.
Then, the third man steps into my view like he’s offering me a light.
White cloth between his fingers.
No.
My body knows before my brain catches up.
The sting crawls into the air first. Sharp. Chemical.
Not again.
I jerk my head, fight the grip, but the hand over my mouth shifts and forces my face up.
The cloth slams down.
Over my nose.Over my lips.
I try to scream and drag the drug straight into my lungs instead.
Fire.
Then numb.
The alley tilts. The rain becomes streaks. The streetlight smears itself into molten gold. Hands wrestle me closer. Someone swears. A fist drives into my ribs and empties my lungs of whatever was left.
Sound tunnels.
My knees fold.
My last clean thought isn’t Santino’s mouth or Guido’s eyes or Giovanni’s damned ledger.
It’s the same one I had when my father hit the floor and the world first went red and silent around me.
Not again.
Darkness snaps shut as they drag me toward the open mouth of the van.
Waking in the Dark
I surface slowly.
Smell comes first.
Oil, old and burned into concrete and steel. Mildew crawling underneath it. Damp stone. Rust. Something sour riding the air.
Then the sound.
A drip somewhere behind me. The low electrical hum of dying wires. Pipes knocking in walls that haven’t heard a repairman in decades. No traffic. No life.
Underground.
Of course.
Pain is next.
My shoulders scream as if something pulled them from their sockets. My wrists burn—white-hot where steel has kissed bone. When I move them, even an inch, metal bites deeper.
Handcuffs.
Perfect.
I force my eyes open.
Light stabs straight through my skull. A single bulb sways overhead, yellow and merciless, flickering like it’s laughing at me.
The room stutters into place in jagged frames—concrete floor blackened with age, walls stained with ghosts, steel beams ribbing the ceiling, shadows piled thick in every corner.
Basement.Warehouse.Dungeon.
The chair is bolted to the floor. Cold metal leaches through denim into my bones. My ankles are loose, but my legs are dead and buzzing, blood crawling back through them in painful pins and needles.
I shift.
The cuffs drag against the chair back.
“Easy there, princess.”
The voice hits from straight ahead.
I blink again. Force my vision to sharpen.
He’s lounging like this is a barstool instead of a holding cell. Legs spread. Elbows on his knees. Hands loose and lazy—like there’s nothing in this world capable of arcing far enough to hurt him.
Smiling.
Not warm.
Predatory.
Like something that tasted blood once and decided it was a hobby.
My memory snaps his face into place before the rest of me catches up.
Carlo Vescari.
Knife hand.
Second to the man who spilled my father across marble.
My throat locks. My stomach flips. The room tilts once—hard—and then my heart freezes into something jagged and bright.
Of course it’s him.
“Carlo,” I rasp. “You’re aging like milk.”
His grin widens.
“There she is,” he murmurs. “Giovanni’s favorite little secret.”
The words crawl over me.
I swallow down the echo of Santino’s hands. His mouth. The way my name sounded when it left him — like prayer and sin in the same breath.
That Pia can rot.
She’s a liability.
I straighten in the chair and lift my chin.
“Then kill me,” I say. “Finish the job your boss started.”
His laugh is so loud, it ricochets off the walls.
“Oh no,” he says brightly. “Not today, Bella. Today, you’re bait.”
Bait.
Heavy. Familiar.
Everyone’s always loved turning me into that.
My heart doesn’t break.
It tightens.
Because I already know whose name sits in his mouth.
I play stupid anyway.
“For what?” I ask flatly. “You got rodents down here I’m supposed to distract?”
He rises with a stretch that cracks his spine. Smoke and cheap cologne trail behind him, layered over sweat and rot.
“For the Bishop,” he says. “Who else?”
Santino.
“You kidnapped the wrong nun,” I say. “He doesn’t chase women. He gives sermons.”
Carlo’s eyes light like I just handed him a confession.
“Come on,” he croons. “You think we don’t watch you on those cozy little cameras? Bishop of Blood suddenly gutting my men like dogs because some girl with sad eyes marks his altar?”
The air thins.
They know about the tunnels.
About the fight.
About the bodies.
Santino killed for me.
Not in holy rage.
In something darker.
Closer to what lives in my blood.
Carlo steps in close until his shadow swallows my lap. He bends down, face level with mine. I can see the scar carved along his jaw, yellowed fingertips, busted veins webbing his nose.
“Men like him always fall wrong,” he whispers. “And when they do… cities burn.”
His knuckles drag along the chair back.
Mocking.
“Santino Rivas,” he says. “Bring us the Bishop — or we feed him pieces of you.”
For one suspended heartbeat, I go hollow.
Then fire floods back in.
Not Santino.Not again.Not because of me.
His face flashes behind my eyes—jaw set on the altar, eyes ruined for God and everything else. Guido clutching his sleeve. Romeo’s stare in the dark. Giovanni’s body falling. My father’s hand reaching and never finding mine.
All the men who died for what they thought I was worth.
Or what they thought I could buy them.
A weapon made of loss.
A thief with a dead father and a ledger-shaped blade hanging over her spine.
Now a target with a priest’s heart wrapped around her throat.