Chapter 19 Santino #2
Not fast.Not careful.Forward.
Toward the part of the city no one claims—the industrial rot where Giovanni once buried men and called it business. Warehouses gutted and stitched back together. Factories turned into mausoleums for the people who disappear without paperwork.
His enemies live there now.
Rot doesn’t die.
It just moves.
A bus wheezes at the end of the block. The driver glances my way and then deliberately looks anywhere else. A woman dragging her kid to school takes one look at my face and crosses the street without checking the light.
Good.
They see something dangerous.
They’re right.
My hands flex at my sides—empty. No Bible crushing my palm. No rosary cutting my skin. No collar whispering instructions into my blood.
Just fists that learned how to break bone long before they learned how to bless.
And a rage sharp enough to catch light.
Pia’s voice leaks into the fog like smoke.
From the vault—breathless, nails digging into my arm when she whispered I saved her.
From the courtyard—wrecked when she forced herself to walk away like loving me was a sin she refused to commit.
From the phone—her scream slicing through static until something inside me tore open and stayed that way.
I see her every time I blink.
Lip split.Defiant.Eyes bright with fury even when she was terrified.
They took that.
They laid hands on what’s mine and assumed the priest would come to bargain.
They do not know who they summoned instead.
My boots slap cracked pavement as I cut toward the river. The air thickens—oil, rust, water left too long in broken pipes. The streets narrow. The lights fade. Shadows stretch like hands.
Perfect territory for an execution.
Giovanni loved it here.
I pass one of his old drop points—a sagging dock, graffitied over with trash tags that half-heartedly tried to erase the Rivas crest. Memory muscles its way in any way: me at fifteen, knuckles already ruined, standing two steps behind him while he spoke through men instead of to them.
Giovanni taught me to read fear like scripture.
Fear looks the same on everyone.
Even God’s men.
Especially them.
Not tonight.
The only fear that matters is hers.
I picture Pia in concrete coldness, wrists burning, mouth sharp even when someone splits it open. I picture Carlo’s smile—greasy, pleased. The way he’ll circle her like a collector admiring a stolen relic.
The image tightens my jaw until something threatens to break.
He doesn’t get the pleasure of this.
He doesn’t get the air.
I cut across an empty lot, glass snapping under my boots. The factories loom closer—giant carcasses with windows like rotted teeth. Somewhere inside that maze, they’ve wired her straight into my nervous system.
Not for Giovanni’s sins.Not for Romeo’s secrets.Not for the ghost of a ledger-keeper who loved his family too much.
She doesn’t die on an altar she didn’t choose.
My brother’s name crawls up my spine like poison.
Romeo.
The ledger. The shipments. The way his eyes lied even when his mouth didn’t.
Did he sell something he couldn’t retrieve?
Did someone decide she was the price tag?
Does it matter?
No.
I shove in a breath that tastes like metal and rot and river oil.
If she dies because I hesitated—because I stayed on church stone begging a silent God for direction instead of listening to the girl bleeding my name into the pavement—
Then I become Giovanni.
A man who feeds other people to his beliefs.
I stop at the edge of Vescari territory.
The road stretches ahead—straight, narrow, unforgiving. Warehouses stacked like coffins. Cameras tucked into corners like insects with lenses. Guns leaning in shadows owned by men who think God retired.
I roll my shoulders, feeling the scarred history of a body that has carried coffins, secrets, and more lives than heaven ever tallied.
“If they wanted a priest,” I murmur, voice ugly and settled, “they should’ve killed me before I learned how to love.”
The word sits heavy in the air.
Love.
That’s the ugly truth, isn’t it?
Not mercy.
Not an obligation.
Not a sacrifice.
Love.
The kind that ignores commandments.
The kind that spits at heaven.
The kind that walks into a kill box because a woman with sharp teeth and haunted eyes is inside it.
I step onto the road.
Every footfall is a vow.
To Pia.To myself.To the men waiting with guns and bad timing.
I am not here to negotiate.
I am not here to plead.
I am not here as Father, Bishop, or anything they think they can push onto its knees.
I am walking into hell alone—
so it remembers my name.
Inside the Rival Compound
Two men plug the mouth of the warehouse like rotted teeth—thick necks, dull eyes, guns hanging low but already hungry.
The door behind them is steel, eaten with rust, graffiti clawed across it like something tried to die there and failed. A camera blinks red above my head.
Watching.Logging.Choosing.
I stop three feet out and lift my hands.
Empty.
No surrender.
An Invitation.
“I’m here for her,” I say.
My voice comes out clean. Sharper than I feel. A blade that’s already drawn blood and wants more.
The guards trade a look—deciding whether to laugh or lower me into the floor.
One of them squints at my throat.
“No collar,” he mutters.
Like that makes me harmless.
It makes me honest.
“Go tell your boss,” I say quietly. “Now.”
The closer guard jerks his chin. The other disappears into the dark, gun brushing his thigh. The door cracks open, and the building exhales—oil, iron, old blood. Under it all, a generator thrums, and somewhere inside a voice carries that sounds bored with killing.
I don’t move.
I count heartbeats.
I think about Pia’s hands on my face in that vault—soft, shaking, stubborn as hell when she told me I saved her.
Nobody saves anyone alone.
The door opens again.
Carlo Vescari fills the frame like a well-dressed sin. Hair slicked just enough to look earned. Smile milky and mean. Eyes that don’t light up unless someone is about to break.
“Bishop,” he says, stealing the title like a souvenir. “You came alone?”
I don’t nod. I don’t bow.
“I didn’t come to negotiate.”
His grin twitches. “Then you came to die.”
“I came to trade.”
He steps closer, jacket swinging open.
The gun rests high and neat near his ribs—close enough that if I wanted it, my hand could grab metal and end my life loudly.
“Trade what?”
I lift my chin.
“My life.”
The laugh that rips out of him is bright and delighted and sharp enough to flag men down to the joke underneath.
“You think we want you?” he scoffs. “A fucking priest?”
I step in.
Close enough to smell cologne and rot.
Close enough that the guards stiffen, thumbs sliding off lazy and onto triggers.
I stop an inch from him.
“I know what Giovanni told you.”
His eyes snap at the name.
“I know what’s in that ledger,” I continue softly. “Every burial. Every shell company. Every ghost he used to scrub blood into money.” I tilt my head. “And you don’t want her.”
Carlo’s smile slips like it hit ice.
“You want what she knows.”
A muscle jumps in his jaw.
I press further—quiet as a confession, sharp as a threat.
“You want his secrets. His inheritance. The keys to a kingdom he burned down so you could never touch it.” I lean closer. “You want the heir.”
He holds my stare a half-beat too long.
Then, he pastes himself back together.
“You’re not an heir,” he sneers. “You’re a broke little boy in a dead man’s costume.”
“Take me anyway.”
The air tightens.
Holds.
“And she walks.”
Carlo studies me like meat.
“You’d die for her?” he asks, curious now.
My mouth barely moves.
“I already did.”
Something flickers across his face.
Fear.
Recognition.
He hides it badly.
“Giovanni lied to you,” I say quietly. “About who I am. About my purpose.” I don’t blink. “He trained me to kneel, so I’d know exactly where to stab when men like you thought I was praying.”
Carlo laughs, but it doesn’t reach anywhere real.
“Big speech,” he says. “Still just one man.”
I lift my empty hands higher.
“Kill me,” I tell him. “Hang me from this door. Make me a warning.”
Then I lean in.
“But you touch her again, and this city wakes up screaming in our name.”
He glances at my throat.
The place the collar used to live.
His voice drops.
“You’re offering yourself like a martyr.”
“No.”
“I’m offering you a war you don’t survive if you refuse.”
He looks past me.
Then back.
“Bring her.”
My spine goes wire-tight.
Two guards peel away and disappear inside.
I don’t breathe.
Don’t flinch.
Carlo smiles like he bought tickets to something beautiful.
“Let’s see what she thinks of your offer.”
And when I hear boots deep inside the building—when the air shifts, when something in my chest recognizes her before my ears do—
I know something with a clarity that burns.
This was never about my life.
It was about whether I’d still have one after I saw her.
The Truth Changes Him
Carlo flicks two fingers in the air.“Bring her.”
The word cracks across the entrance like a match.
Metal scrapes somewhere inside the warehouse. A grunt. A scuff that could be a shoe catching on concrete—could be pain. My spine locks. My hands curl, empty and useless.
Then she appears.
Dragged.Not walking.
Her body stumbles between two men like they took her apart and put her back together wrong.
Her wrists are chained behind her back, metal biting into skin that was never meant to carry this much weight.
Her lip split, and a dark red line sliced her mouth in half.
Blood glistens under the industrial light.
Her hair is a tangled mess on one side, the snarl you get when hands grab and pull just because they can.
And her eyes—
They find me.
Not dim.Not broken.
Alive, like a fire that’s been feeding on smoke and finally got a mouthful of oxygen.
“Santino,” she whispers.
It barely leaves her throat. It doesn’t need to. The sound knows the way through my ribs; it cuts straight in, like it’s been waiting for this opening.
Everything narrows to her.