Chapter 21 Santino
Santino
Surrounded, Not Afraid
Footsteps.Too many.
They roll through the warehouse like distant thunder, hammering closer, stacking on top of each other until the air itself feels like it’s counting down.
Pia’s breath catches against my chest.
Mine doesn’t.
I move before fear can get dressed.
I step fully in front of her, body to body, putting myself between her and the dark mouth of the corridor where the boots are coming from. Her fingers snag the back of my shirt—small, shaking, furious—and I spread my stance, heels planted, shoulders loose.
My heart doesn’t race.
It slows.
Everything sharpens.
The overhead light flickers in a sick rhythm.Concrete grit scours my boots.Gunpowder and old oil rot the air.Her blood ghosts my throat.
Each footfall maps itself inside my skull—three heavy, two lighter, one dragging.
Someone’s injured.
Good.
This isn’t fear.
This is instinct.
I tilt my head just enough to see her in the corner of my eye.
Hair matted with sweat and blood. Jaw bruised with the memory of Carlo’s hand. Eyes blown wide with a violence of emotion she refuses to name.
Terror.
Rage.
Defiance.
Her pulse pounds frantically and wildly in her throat—but she stands.
She doesn’t hide.
She doesn’t beg.
My anchor.
Not the cross I burned out of my chest.Not the God who watched and did nothing.Not Giovanni and his throne of bones.
Her.
“Stay behind me,” I murmur.
My voice comes out wrong in the best way—low, quiet, dead calm. It doesn’t sound like a priest. It doesn’t sound like a son.
It sounds like something pulled from the earth and sharpened for one purpose.
Her grip tightens on my arm. “If they take you—”
“They won’t.”
No room for doubt.No room for argument.
I didn’t survive Giovanni’s fists—his loyalty lessons carved knuckle-deep into my ribs—just to die face-down on someone else’s concrete. I didn’t wear a collar for four years, confessing sins I didn’t regret to a God who never answered just to let Carlo’s leftovers write my ending.
If death wants me tonight, it can fight for the privilege.
I ease back half a step so her chest meets my spine. I feel her breath through my shirt. Feel her heat.
Real.
Anchoring.
The footsteps close in.
Left.
Right.
Behind the crates at nine o’clock.
They think they’re circling prey.
I roll my shoulders once, loosening muscle, feeling every old wound wake up—Giovanni’s temper, street lessons, alter guilt—everything tightening into something cold and lethal.
The priest who walked into this building already died downstairs. Somewhere between Carlo’s gun and Pia’s scream, the last of him burned out.
What’s left isn’t holy.
“Santino.”
Just my name.
It’s enough.
I swallow the last ragged scrap of hesitation like bad wine.
“Listen to me.” My eyes stay on the dark ahead. “If they shoot, you drop first. Stay low. Crawl if you have to. You don’t stop unless I tell you—or unless you’re outside.”
She shakes her head hard. “I’m not leaving you. I’m not—”
“Pia.” I cut her off. “You are not dying here for me. That’s not how this story goes.”
Her nails dig into my arm. “And you’re not dying in here for me either. I’m done watching men make martyrs out of themselves and calling it love.”
A humorless sound scrapes out of my chest.
“Good,” I say. “Because I’m not here to die.”
Boot steps again.
Closer.
The shadow of a rifle barrel drags across the far wall as they stack near the entrance.
I breathe in through my nose.
Slow.
Count.
One.Two.Three.Four.
The fear that used to rot under my tongue doesn’t rise.
It’s gone.
Burned out of me the moment I chose her over God.
I angle my head back just enough to put my breath in her ear. “You remember what I told Carlo?”
She hesitates. “You declared war.”
“Exactly.” My mouth twitches. “You don’t declare war if you plan to lose.”
A broken almost-laugh slips out of her and dies halfway through.
It still lands like a blessing.
The boots stop.
Silence snaps tight.
A voice barks an order in the corridor. I barely hear it over the drum in my blood.
Not panic.
Readiness.
The thing I crushed beneath prayer for years rises now and settles into my bones like it’s always belonged there.
Giovanni tried to turn me into a weapon.
The Church tried to dull the edge.
Both failed.
I straighten.
Chin high.
Back locked.
Like I’m walking into a sanctuary again—except this time, I know exactly who I’m offering myself to.
Not an altar.
Her.
Whatever steps through that doorway.Whatever Carlo still has left.Whatever bullets are waiting—
None of it terrifies me more than the thought of her chained to a chair again.
The man who walked into this warehouse wore guilt like armor.
The man standing here now?
He’s something else.
Boots shift.
Metal scrapes.
Someone swears under his breath.
I smile.
Small.
Sharp.
“Stay with me,” I tell her.
She presses closer. “Try and get rid of me.”
The first shadow breaks free from the corridor.
I move to meet it.
And for the first time in my life, ringed in enemies—
My blood is clear.
My head is clean.
I am not afraid.
The Antihero Emerges: Santino’s Ruthless Calculus
The first guard rounds the corner, boots scraping concrete, gun already coming up—
I move before the thought finishes forming.
My fist detonates against his jaw with a sound like wet marble splitting. Bone meets bone. His teeth clap together once—sharp, obscene—and then his body folds like someone yanked the power cord. He drops without ceremony.
No prayer.No mercy.Just gravity and blood.
The second charge, already shouting.
I pivot, catch his wrist mid-swing, and twist until the joint gives way with a sound a human body should never make.
He screams. The gun clatters free. I kick it into the dark without looking, metal skidding away like a secret trying to escape.
I drive my elbow into his throat hard enough to erase the noise and let him sink to his knees, coughing red.
Cold slides through my veins.
Not fear.Precision.
A third comes at me with a pipe raised high, haloed by flickering light like some warped saint armed with faith in steel.
I duck. Metal scythes air where my head was. My hand snaps up, seizing the pipe mid-arc. Rust bites my palm, heat flaring, but I flip the weight and bury it in his ribs—once, twice—until cartilage caves and his breath explodes out of him in a sucked-in scream.
Then I bring it up.
And across.
The impact rings through my arms.
He folds sideways, mouth working like he wants to apologize to God and can’t find the words.
I don’t give him time.
I never give them time.
Every movement becomes a prayer now.
Not to God.To survive.
I move through them with Giovanni’s hands ghosting over mine, correcting my stance in a shooting gallery under stained glass. Like I was born for churches and coffins in equal measure. Like a blade stitched into vestments.
A fourth tries to flank me.
I throw the pipe and hear it meet face with a wet, hollow thud. He topples into a crate and disappears behind it with the sound of a sack of meat hitting the floor.
Breath.
Slow.
Control.
I feel nothing.
That’s how I know I’m dangerous.
This is the version of me I starved inside confessionals.The son of a king fed on blood instead of lullabies.The student of a killer who learned mercy is a privilege.The heir who finally stopped pretending holiness saves anyone.
I step over the first guard’s twitching body and wrench the fallen gun from the floor. Checked the chamber from muscle memory.
Loaded.
Of course, it is.
I level the gun just as another man stumbles out from behind a forklift, eyes blown wide, mouth open, panic inked all over his face. He’s younger than the rest. Twenty, maybe. A boy trying to be a corpse in a world that eats kids for breakfast.
“Please—” he starts.
I don’t let him finish.
One clean shot.
He drops like God cut the strings.
The echo hangs longer than the smoke.
I don’t look at him.
I turn.
Pia stands at the mouth of the corridor, caught between flight and faith. Her hands tremble. Her lips part like she forgot the rest of a prayer. Her eyes track me the way storms find shore.
Terrified - not of me.
For me.
That’s the part that lands where I forgot I still had flesh.
Because she sees it.
The animal under the cassock.The man Giovanni bred in a church to hide a kingdom’s sins.
I stalk back with the gun low at my side, slick with someone else’s blood, every nerve lit and violent under my skin. She doesn’t move. Doesn’t run. Doesn’t scream.
She just waits.
Like a woman who always knew what she was walking into.
“Santino…” Her voice shatters on my name.
I reach her and close around her wrist.
Not rough.Not gentle.
Possessive.
The way you touch something you survived for.The way you touch something you might lose.
“We’re not done,” I tell her, low and absolute.
Not here.Not tonight.Not with the dead stacked between us and still breathing.
Her fingers curl into mine like it’s a choice.
Like she’s already mine, whether or not she admits it.
I turn toward the dark with her in my wake like a secret I’m ready to ruin myself to keep.
And the war inside me smiles.
Carlo’s Trap & The Final Trial
The silence after the last body hits concrete doesn’t last.
It splinters.
One slow clap cracks through the warehouse, deliberate and lonely, echoing off steel and shadow like applause at a funeral.
“Fuck,” I breathe.
I know that voice before my eyes catch up.
Carlo.
He lounges on the mezzanine above us, one shoulder slouched into a rusted beam like this is a show he paid good money to see. There’s blood smeared up his sleeve, shirt half untucked, hair damp with sweat. The bastard looks pleased with himself.
Like this is a joke.
And I’m the punchline.
“You’re full of surprises, Bishop,” he drawls, words lazy and venom-thick. “But you won’t leave here alive.”
He smiles when he says it.