Chapter 20 Pia #2
“And we know,” he continues easily, “that when he walks through that door… he dies.”
My body betrays me.
It shakes.Not from pain.From terror with teeth.
Carlo sees it.
Consumes it.
“That,” he murmurs, reverent. “That was the only blade we needed.”
He advances. The knife catches the warehouse light and throws it back in sick gold.
I lift my chin and drag my voice up from somewhere scorched.
“Touch him,” I tell him, slow and lethal, “and you won’t live long enough to remember what you tried to take from me.”
His laugh is quiet. Delighted.
He raises the blade.
And I seal my mouth shut.
If this is the price—I pay it in blood.If this is the cost—I bleed without sound.
Because Santino is still breathing somewhere outside this room.
And I will not lead him to his demise.
Santino’s Roar
The first shot cracks like God slamming a door.
The metal table jumps under my ribs. Chains chatter at my wrists like they’ve learned fear. Dust sifts from the light in a thin gray veil, and the air changes—gunpowder and panic slicing through the old stink of blood and oil.
Another shot.
Then shouting.
Not commands. Not control. Just men unraveling out loud.
Carlo snaps toward the door. His mouth opens and something filthy spills out—then the third shot eats the rest of it. He stabs the air with his hand. “Move!”
Boots thunder. Two of his men rush the door.
They don’t make it.
The door doesn’t open.
It explodes.
Steel shrieks as it caves inward, hinges tearing like wet cartilage. One guard lifts clean off the floor and slams into the wall hard enough to forget breathing. The other staggers back, screaming—then stops. The sound cuts off mid-note like a wire snipped.
And there he is.
Santino doesn’t step through the doorway.
He arrives.
Heat rolls off him like a storm front—hair dark with sweat at his temples, jaw set hard enough to powder bone, eyes wild and locked on me as if the rest of the world can burn. His knuckles are split. Blood slicks his hands.
I don’t care whose.
The guards surge.
He moves first.
The nearest one goes down with a sound like a branch under a boot. Santino doesn’t wait for the body to finish falling. His elbow drives backward into another throat—wet and final—and that man collapses like a puppet stripped of strings.
A third comes fast with a knife.
Santino catches the wrist and twists.
Hard enough that the scream turns into an animal.
Then he buries the man’s own blade into his thigh and shoves him backward. Concrete and paperwork explode as he smashes into Carlo’s desk, sending papers and lies skidding across the floor.
Someone fires again—wild.
The round cracks past my ear and bites the wall.
I flinch.
Santino doesn’t.
He turns on the shooter like violence has a favorite child.
The guard barely realizes he made a choice before Santino slams into him—shoulder to chest—driving him flat. Something inside the man gives with a noise like broken furniture. When Santino straightens, the guard doesn’t.
Carlo backs away, calculating.
Wrong math.
Santino doesn’t advance.
He hunts.
Every step measured.
He never looks at Carlo.
He looks at me.
And something inside my chest caves so hard I almost black out from relief.
“Santino,” I breathe.
His mouth moves.
No sound.
Then he sees my wrists.
The blood.
My face.
The change is immediate.
Not loud.
Not dramatic.
But terminal.
He drags a breath like he’s about to tear the ceiling loose—and what comes out isn’t my name. Not a prayer.
It’s a roar.
Not human.
Not holy.
The air bows to it. The men still standing freeze as death brushes their necks.
Santino takes one swift step, and they scatter.
Run.
Trip.
Fall.
One doesn’t make it past the threshold before Santino hauls him back by the collar and drops him with something that looks like mercy compared to what he deserves.
And then—
Nothing.
No more shots.
No more screaming.
Just the echo of ruin.
Santino stands in it—wrecked and unbreakable, chest heaving, eyes still burning holes through the dark.
He crosses the room.
Straight to me.
He came.
For me.
And he isn’t leaving without me.
The Rescue: Rage, Relief, and Devotion Twisted Together
Santino reaches me like he’s tearing himself out of a fire.
His hands shake when they find the cuffs at my wrists, metal loud in the sudden quiet. He fumbles the knife once, swears under his breath, then sets the blade with surgical focus. The cut is clean. One link gives. Then another. The chains hit the floor with a weight that feels heavier than iron.
“I’m sorry they hurt you.”
His voice is sandpaper and smoke, a prayer dragged through broken glass.
I try to respond. My mouth opens. Nothing.
When I push to stand, my legs fold like they’ve been waiting for permission to quit. The floor lunges. Pain detonates—hot and blinding—
And then I’m not falling.
Santino catches me before my knees ever kiss concrete. His arms lock around my waist and haul me up against his chest like gravity is a negotiable thing.
“Easy,” he murmurs, lips brushing my hair, my temple, the blood on my skin. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”
The words break something that’s been clenched inside me for hours.
I press my face into his shirt and breathe like a drowning person who has finally found air. He smells of smoke and sweat and violence—and beneath it, something softer that belongs only to him.
“I told you to run,” I whisper into his heartbeat.
My voice dies on the second word.
He tightens his hold until my ribs ache. “I don’t run from the woman I love.”
The confession tears itself out of him raw and unfiltered—and the moment it lands between us, he goes still, like he expects the words to paint a target on his chest.
I don’t step back.
I cling.
My breath shatters inside me, fast and violent, and I can’t make it stop. I press my forehead to his chest. His heartbeat drums, keeping my heart calm.
“Santino… I didn’t want you to come.”
He exhales like it costs him something.
“I didn’t want to breathe without you.”
He lifts me without warning—one arm under my knees, one at my back—and carries me through the wreckage like the world doesn’t weigh a damn thing and neither do I. We move over bodies that will never stand again. Blood slicks the concrete. Shell casings grind under his boots like broken prayers.
Carlo is gone.
I know it without looking.
“The bastard ran,” Santino growls. “I’ll find him.”
Later.
Not now.
Not when he’s holding me like this.
He cuts into a dark corner of the warehouse where the shadows are thick enough to swallow sound. We vanish into it together, chaos sealing behind us like a door slammed shut.
He sets me against cold brick but never lets the space open between us.
Instead, he cups my face.
Both hands.
Careful.
Too careful.
His thumbs trace the edges of my bruises with reverence instead of fear. His eyes burn with it—rage and relief braided so tight I can’t tell which one will win.
“You’re bleeding,” he says, wrecked. “They… they—”
“Not like you think,” I whisper.
It’s a lie.
It isn’t.
It’s both.
My silence splits him anyway. I see it in the way his jaw tightens, like he might bite steel in half if it looks at me wrong.
“I need to feel that you’re alive,” he breathes, our foreheads touching. “Please.”
The word kills something in me.
I raise my shaking hands to his face and hold him like I’m afraid he’ll vanish if I blink.
“Then take me,” I whisper.
It isn’t about skin.
It’s about gravity.
It’s about pain loosening its grip when his breath tangles with mine and my heartbeat finally answers to his palm. He kisses my forehead first. Then my cheek. Then the corner of my mouth like he’s afraid I’ll shatter if he moves too fast.
His hands slide to my back.
Press.
Anchor.
“I’m here,” he says into my hair like a vow. “I’m right here.”
I nod against his chest.
I believe him.
For now.
For as long as this heartbeat holds.
The Aftermath That Breathes Like a Wound
They don’t move toward each other.
They collide.
Not slow.Not careful.Not like people who expect tomorrow.
Santino’s mouth crashes into mine like he’s trying to haul my soul back into my body by force. My hands fist his shirt, nails biting through soot and blood, sweat—because if I don’t hold him, he’ll dissolve. He’ll turn into smoke again, the way he almost did.
I press my forehead to his throat and breathe him in like the world is running out of air.
He wedges a knee between mine and pins me to the wall in the dark—brick cold against my spine, his heat the only thing keeping me from splintering.
“Don’t disappear,” I whisper into his skin.
He groans like the words tear open something that never healed.
His hands climb my sides, unsteady when they reach my ribs. He cups my face—thumbs dirty, touch reverent, eyes wrecked—as if he can memorize me through ruin alone.
He drops his forehead to mine.
“You’re mine,” he says.
Not possession.
Protection.
Grief trying to anchor itself before it drifts away and drowns.
“You’re mine,” he repeats, broken this time. “I almost lost—”
I steal the rest of the sentence with my mouth. If he finishes it, it will kill him.
My body fits his like it knew him before my mind ever got the chance. My breath stutters. My knees soften. The world shrinks until there’s only heat and heartbeats and the way his hands are everywhere at once—like he’s trying to convince himself I exist by touch alone.
He kisses every place I know I’m bleeding.
Every place I tried not to feel.
Every place that doesn’t belong to fear anymore.
He buries his face in my neck. His breath shakes like a confession he’s waited his whole life to give.
“I thought you were gone.”
“I’m here,” I whisper, fierce enough to mean it. “I’m not going anywhere.”
He slips one arm under my knees, the other behind my back like he might carry me through hell if it opens again—
Then lowers us to the floor instead.
Concrete bites cold through my bones. He folds around me like he’s hiding a flame from the storm.
My fingers hook into the back of his neck. “Look at me.”
He does.
God help me, he does.
His eyes are fever-bright, burned raw. No priest left inside them. Only the man who almost lost the one thing he would have burned the world to keep.
“I’m alive,” I tell him. “You got to me.”
His jaw locks like it hurts.
“You shouldn’t have had to survive tonight.”
I press my forehead into his. “But I did. And you’re here. That matters.”
For one heartbeat—
Mercy.
Then—
Footsteps.
Not one.
Too many.
Steel boots.
Commanded voices.
Gunmetal clacking against bone.
Santino goes still.
His head lifts, slow.
The sound coils around the warehouse like a noose drawing tight.
I push at his chest. “We have to go.”
He doesn’t move.
Not yet.
He laces our fingers together instead.
Hard.
Like the world will have to break him to pull me away.
“I’m not leaving you again,” he says.
Not a vow.
A truth sharpened to steel.
The footsteps close in.
From the corridor.From the dark.From everywhere.
The warehouse exhales.
Hungry.
And we are standing in its mouth together.