Chapter 19 Santino
Santino
On the Church Steps: The Silent Breaking Point
The church steps are slick with last night’s rain, and I’m still sitting on them like a man who thinks stone might keep him from coming apart.
Morning fog drags low along the street, smothering the edges of buildings, bruising the city into a dull gray hush.
The cracked streetlight above the gate hums weakly, dying the same slow death as the night.
Cars whisper past somewhere beyond sight, tires hissing over wet asphalt.
A bell tolls in the distance. Not for me. Never for me.
I don’t move.
My hands rest open on my knees, palms up — a posture that looks like prayer if you don’t know how empty it is. Like I’m waiting for God to drop an answer into my skin.
He doesn’t.
He never fucking does.
The air tastes like exhaust and wet concrete. Every breath pulls cold into my lungs and leaves nothing behind. No anger. No grief. Not even fear.
Just hollow.
I have never been this empty.
Not when Giovanni beat obedience into me with leather and knuckles. Not when he forced me to kneel for hours, confessing sins that weren’t mine while Zina bled in the next room. Not even when they lowered his coffin into the ground and the city pretended it was burying a king instead of a monster.
This is different.
Pia is out there.
Taken.
Because of me.
I see her every time I blink — hair slicked to her face by rain, eyes feral under the streetlight, mouth shaping my name a heartbeat before the van door slammed. I hear tires shrinking into the dark. The scrape of boots. The awful thunder of blood in my own ears as I ran too late.
Priest. Bishop. Son. Heir.
None of it means a goddamn thing when a woman disappears into the dark on your watch.
I should have believed her.
I should have trusted the way my chest locked up when she went near anything dangerous. The way my hands moved before my brain when someone touched her. The way my pulse stuttered every time she said she was going to fix what my family broke.
Instead, I listened to a corpse.
Giovanni’s voice has lived in my head for years — a priest of his own rotten gospel: loyalty, control, necessary violence. He taught me not to trust anyone but him. Made me doubt Zina. Made me doubt myself.
And tonight, he made me doubt her.
I let his ghost put a hand on my throat.
She walked away from the courtyard with her heart in pieces because I couldn’t sever the last thread tying me to the man who ruined all of us. Because fear of becoming him weighed more than the truth in her eyes.
Now she’s gone.
Fog tightens around the church, dressing the stone in a burial shroud. The stained glass — the same windows that watched me rot from bruised boy to trembling priest — stare down with dead eyes.
I used to think they saw everything.
Now I know better.
They didn’t see Giovanni dragging men into the tunnels beneath this place and bleeding secrets out of them. They didn’t see the ledger hidden behind the false walls. They didn’t see me and Romeo arguing in whispers at the altar about which of us would burn first.
They didn’t see Pia torn from this street while I was still inside on my knees, begging a silent God to prove she wasn’t poison.
I inhale, slow and sharp, and lift my hand.
My fingers find the thin band of white at my throat.
The collar is damp with fog and sweat. It’s small. Pathetic, really, how much power we let a scrap of fabric pretend it holds. Cloth stiffened into command. A strip of surrender. A leash I fastened myself to so I could believe I wasn’t Giovanni’s son.
The symbol of every vow I made.
And every truth I traded.
My thumb presses against the edge where it bites into black cotton.
The last time I took it off was to shower.
The first time I put it on, Giovanni stood at the back of the church, arms folded, eyes burning with ownership. “My son,” he said, loud enough to poison the air. “My bishop.”
I mistook possession for love.
Now it feels like a brand.
Property of a dead king.Kneeling to a God who never answered.
My throat tightens.
I look up.
The sky is a slab of gray. No sun. No mercy. Just another ceiling we’re trapped under. No thunder. No divine outrage for the crimes committed in His name.
“Forgive me,” I whisper.
The word scrapes raw on its way out.
Habit makes me throw it upward — fling it at the empty sky and hope something living catches it.
But I don’t.
Not this time.
My eyes drop to the street. To the corner where the van swallowed the only honest thing in my life.
“Forgive me,” I say again.
And now I know exactly who I’m talking to.
Not God.
Pia.
Forgive me for doubting you.For letting you leave alone.For letting my father’s shadow touch you even after he was in the dirt.
Fog snakes around my ankles. Stone drains the heat from my bones. The thick wood and cold iron of the church doors behind me are locked, as if trying to hold me inside the life Giovanni carved for me.
But Pia isn’t inside.
She’s somewhere dark. Somewhere filthy. Somewhere that smells like blood and unfinished wars. Somewhere, men still speak the name Rivas like a curse.
My hands knot into fists.
This collar didn’t stop Giovanni from turning faith into theater.It didn’t stop me from becoming his weapon.And it sure as hell won’t bring her back.
Something small and exact fractures inside my chest.
Clean.Final.
Not belief.
That died years ago.
This is worse.
This is the moment I stop pretending the body is still warm.
I close my eyes once — just long enough to see her face slick with rain, lips forming don’t before they dragged her away.
Then I open them to the street.
To the truth.
“I’m sorry,” I murmur to her absence.
Sorry won’t save her.
But who will?
He won’t be wearing this collar when he walks into hell.
Removing the Collar: A Ritual of Rebirth
My hands shake when they rise to my throat.Not a weakness.Voltage.The kind that hums right before something dies.
The collar is still damp from fog and skin, edges curled where my body tried to claim it like it knew it was leaving. It’s obscene how small it is. How light. How easily I could rip it away like any other scrap of cloth.
But that’s the lie, isn’t it?
This isn’t fabric.It’s history.It’s obedience carved into bone.It’s Giovanni’s voice muttering scripture into my blood.It’s kneeling in red and calling it holy.It’s being shaped into something useful instead of something alive.
I clamp my hands around it.
It’s supposed to release neatly. There’s a clasp. A ceremonial surrender built for decor, not defiance.
I pull.
It doesn’t give.
Of course it doesn’t.
I tighten my grip and yank again, tendons in my forearms singing as pressure bites into my throat. The collar digs in like a parasite, like it knows it’s starving.
So did my father.
My jaw locks.
Then I tear at it.
Hard.Ugly.No prayer in it.
The snap is wrong.
Not clean.Not dignified.
It breaks like a joint tearing loose. Like something with a pulse just split inside me.
A brutal sound—fabric, plastic, years of obedience giving way all at once.
It doesn’t fall free.
One edge clings to my throat like it still thinks it owns me.
Good.Let it hurt.
I rip it the rest of the way off and fling it across the steps.
It lands with a thin, brittle click.
Small sound.Big funeral.
I stare at the wreckage.
This worthless identity.This borrowed name.This lie I wore like skin.
The priest is dead.
Not someday.Not slowly.
Now.
Something in my chest fractures open, and what pours out isn’t shame.Not fear.Not even grief anymore.
It’s release.
Sharp.Bright.Ugly.
Freedom soaked in rage.
The heir isn’t standing up.
He’s waking.
I rise without thought.
My heel settles on the collar.
Gently at first.
Just enough to feel it under my boot—light, pathetic, barely there.
Then—
I grind.
Bone on stone.
The collar snaps, plastic warping and snapping like cartilage.
I push harder.
Not to break it.
To erase it.
To make damn sure it never remembers my throat.
When I lift my foot, it lies in two jagged pieces, twisted like something that tried to breathe and failed.
Good.
I tip my face to the sky.
Still gray.Still blank.Still unmoved by what men shed on church steps.
Fog beads on my lashes. The morning is cruel and clean—exactly what it should be.
No angels.No choir.No mercy drifting down.
Just air.
Real air.
I drag it deep into my lungs.
They burn.
Not from smoke.Not from fear.
From oxygen.
Like my body just clawed its way free from underground.
I breathe again.
And again.
And again.
Each inhale louder than the one before, like something inside me is finally too big to be contained.
No one is watching.
No priest.
No brothers.
No God.
Only the ghosts.
And they can choke on what I’m about to become.
I drop my gaze to the empty street.
Not heaven.
Not hell.
Her.
“Pia.”
The word comes out rough. Possessive. Prayer and promise in one.
“I’m coming.”
Not hope.
Fact.
Not a wish.
A vow written in blood.
The man who knelt here is finished.
The boy Giovanni broke is finished.
The priest who begged God to fix what men destroyed is finished.
I turn away from the church and don’t look back.
Every step from that door — every breath of this unblessed air — carries me farther from salvationand closer to something that will tear this city open to get her back.
Whatever I was—
It’s gone.
What matters is what’s walking into hell now.
And hell?
Hell is not ready.
Walking Into Hell Alone
The street feels wrong without the collar.Colder.Louder.Honest in a way I’ve never learned how to survive.
Fog curls around my boots like it’s trying to trip me, low and hungry against the pavement.
The city is half-dead in that ugly hour between night and consequence—steel shutters locked down, neon signs flickering outside bars that never really close.
Somewhere close, a siren starts and then cuts itself off.
A drunk yells from an alley. A door slams like a warning shot.
I walk.