Chapter 21 Santino #3
I rip myself away and turn before Carlo can carve another inch of spine out of me.
For her.
Not for revenge.Not for rage.
For the woman who dragged me out of my grave with a shaking hand and a smoking gun.
I take the stairs three at a time.
Above me, Carlo’s smile carves wider when he sees me coming.
Good.
Let him watch what he dies for.
Let him see the truth I just woke up in:
I don’t need to be protected.Neither does she.
Together, we are something holy and catastrophic.
And Carlo?
Carlo is just another confession that ends in blood.
Carlo’s Last Gambit: The Truth About Giovanni
The metal stairs scream under my boots as I take them in a blur of heat and momentum. My arm is on fire now—skin swelling, nerves screaming, pain leaking into everything.
I welcome it.
Pain means upright.Breathing.Moving.
Carlo is already retreating at the top, pistol braced in both hands, eyes bright and hungry like a man about to cash in a bet.
“Easy, Bishop,” he says, voice slick as oil. “You think killing me fixes anything?”
I don’t answer.
I hit the mezzanine, and the air between us goes electric.
“I know what Giovanni did,” Carlo snarls. “I know what he planned. I know Romeo. About your mother.” His grin is obscene. “About Pia’s father. All of it. And if you kill me—no one will ever hear the real truth.”
The words hit harder than a bullet.
Not because I believe him.
Because part of me already does.
Boots thud behind me—one more soul climbing into hell. I know she’s there before I feel her.
Pia stops at my side, breath ripped ragged, eyes tracking Carlo like he’s prey and poison at the same time.
Her fingers brush mine.
Ground.
Carlo clocks it instantly.
His gaze flicks to her.
Lights.
He smiles like a man who’s finally found the artery.
“That’s right,” he croons. “You don’t know the half of it. Giovanni ruined her family. He made sure her father died.” His eyes never leave mine. “He lied to you about everything. He lied until the night he finally fucking died.”
The world shrinks.
Everything funnels into sound—
Blood.
Pounding.In my ears.In my skull.In my past.
Romeo.My mother.Her father.
He names them slow. Careful.Stacks them like knives.Waits to see which one bleeds me first.
“Shut up,” I warn, my voice dragged up from somewhere hollow and deep.
He steps closer.
Deliberate.Measured.
Like a man closing on a wild horse who doesn’t realize the animal is already deciding where his bones will break.
“You’re not a priest,” he continues softly. “You’re not a king. You’re just a pawn in Giovanni’s final game.”
And there it is.
Not the revelations.
Not the blood.
The poison hides in the prettiest sentence.
Pawn.
Expendable.
Disposable.
A piece moved by a dead man’s hand.
Something breaks.
Not loud.Not clean.
It tears like old leather inside my chest.
My vision clears.
Sharpens.
Cold floods where fire used to live.
I see it all now—the twitch of Carlo’s trigger finger…The swallow in his throat…The fear of wearing a mask of confidence.
He thinks the truth will save him.
Giovanni taught me what truth really does.
I move.
Not fast.
Final.
I slap my arm inward, just enough to spoil his aim. The shot screams wild and detonates steel behind us.
Then I’m inside him.
My knee drives into his gut with the sound of something breaking that should not break. All his air leaves in one ugly rush.
My elbow follows—bone against bone—crunching across his face.
His head snaps sideways.
The gun skids across the metal floor with a useless, pleading clatter.
Carlo collapses.
Not dead.
Wheezing.
Spitting blood.
He crashes to his knees and claws at air like a man drowning in God’s dry land.
I stand over him and feel nothing.
No anger.No sorrow.No confusion.
Only precision.
“You’re right,” I murmur.
He tilts his face toward mine—eyes glassy, mouth ruined, hope flickering weak and stupid.
“What?” he rasps.
“I’m no priest.”
The words settle into place like a blade in bone.
Not an apology.
A verdict.
Silence swells between us.
Pia’s breath behind my shoulder.
My pulse everywhere else.
“And I will never be my father.”
Carlo opens his mouth.
He never finds the word.
My fist caves into his jaw.
One blow.
Total.
The sound is deeper than before.
Hollow.
Finished.
His body pitches sideways like God cut the strings, and he slams into the metal in a useless heap.
Not dead.
Unconscious.
Breathing.
Alive enough to confess.
For now.
I stand there, chest heaving, blood tracking down my arm and dripping from my elbow like a quiet clock counting something ugly.
My knuckles pulse with the impact.
Behind me, Pia doesn’t speak.
She doesn’t need to.
I feel her there like a heat on my spine.
Alive.
Watching.
Choosing.
I close my eyes for exactly one second.
Not to pray.
To decide.
Giovanni’s shadow stretches long where my future should be.
Carlo tried to cut me with it.
Instead, it showed me exactly where to strike back.
I open my eyes.
And I know—
This war isn’t over.
It’s just done pretending.
Santino’s Oath, Not to God — to Pia
The warehouse finally shuts up.
No shouting.No gunfire.No metal screaming under bullets.
Just the slow, steady drip of water in the dark and the soft tick of cooling steel. The silence that shouldn’t exist over this much blood.
Carlo lies facedown on the mezzanine behind me, out cold, breathing shallow. Below, bodies are scattered like broken rosaries on concrete. The air tastes like gunpowder and rust and something that might pass for victory if I were stupid enough to trust it.
I’m not.
Pia’s hand finds mine in that quiet.
Her fingers thread through my bloody knuckles like she isn’t afraid of what they’ve done—or what they’ll do again.
I turn to her.
Slow.
Because I know what I look like right now.
Blood is drying on my cheek, a smear along my jaw I didn’t bother to wipe.
Dust clings to my clothes. Sweat runs cold down my spine.
My arm throbs in a brutal rhythm where the bullet kissed me, sleeve soaked, fingers tacky.
My heart is still punching adrenaline through my veins, and under all of it—
Something new.
Something ugly and holy at the same time.
Not devotion.Not faith.
Choice.
It burns more than the wound.
Her eyes drag over me, cataloguing every cut, every bruise, every place I might be broken. There’s a tremor in her shoulders she can’t hide, but her gaze doesn’t flinch.
She looks like a woman who walked through fire and decided hell doesn’t scare her anymore.
Something shifts between us.
Not subtle.
A click. A lock sliding into place.
“I swore my life to God,” I hear myself say, voice low and roughened by smoke and shouting. “And he never answered.”
The confession hangs there, blasphemous and bare.
Pia swallows hard. Her throat works around my name. “Santino…”
I step closer until there’s barely air between us.
My hand rises before I think better of it, fingers curving around her jaw. Blood and grime smear her skin where I touch, but she doesn’t pull away.
She leans into my palm like it’s the safest place in this whole rotting building.
“But you—” My thumb skims the line of her cheek, over dried tears and a smear of someone else’s red. A flash of her with the gun in both hands detonates behind my eyes—shoulders braced, eyes burning as she puts a bullet into the man aiming at my spine. “You came back for me.”
“You fought for me,” I say, the words scraping out of places I don’t open. “You saved me.”
My voice cracks on the last word.
Fuck.
The sound is small, but in this silence it hits like a shot. Everything inside me tightens, because I don’t slip like that. Not in front of anyone.
Not even in front of God.
“There hasn’t been a single day in my life,” I force out, “where someone chose me over their fear.”
Giovanni chose the empire.The church chose the story.Everyone else chose survival.
Pia chose me.
Her breath trembles, warm against my mouth. Tears gloss her eyes, but they don’t fall. She’s too stubborn. Too hard-won.
“What are you saying?” she whispers.
I don’t answer with words yet.
I lean in, closing the last inch, and press my forehead to hers.
Our noses brush. Her lashes tick against my skin.
I feel every ragged breath she drags in, every hitch, every spike in her pulse through the thin distance between our chests.
She smells like gun smoke and sweat and the faint ghost of whatever she wore the first night she walked into my church and lied to my face.
“I am yours,” I tell her.
The statement lodges in my ribs, heavy as any vow I’ve ever made at an altar.
“Not the Church’s. Not Giovanni’s. Not anyone’s.”
My thumb slides down, finding the soft bow of her lower lip. I trace it once, slowly, feeling the shiver that rips through her.
Her eyes shine. “Santino…”
“I swear loyalty to you, Pia.” The words are knife-sharp, absolute. “Whatever comes next—death, family, war, all of it—I don’t face it alone. We face it together.”
Her chin wobbles. She blinks hard, one tear breaking free and slicing a clean line through the dirt on her cheek.
“That’s not how this world works,” she breathes, even as she leans closer. “People like us don’t get—”
“I don’t give a fuck what people like us are supposed to get,” I cut in. “I’m done letting dead men decide what I owe and who I belong to.”
Her lips tremble under my thumb.
“Say it again,” she whispers, like she’s asking for a sin.
“I am yours,” I repeat, slower. “Whether you want the blessing or the curse.”
She exhales like I just reached into her chest and squeezed.
Then I kiss her.
Not a brush. Not a question.
I take her mouth with mine, slow and deep and viciously careful, claiming her like territory I’ve been bleeding toward for years. Her gasp spills into me. She fists my shirt and drags me closer, opening for me like she’s been balancing on this edge as long as I have.
Her lips are soft, but nothing about this is.
I taste salt and iron and something sweet buried under the ruin. Her teeth catch my lower lip. I groan into her, hand sliding to the back of her neck, holding her while I devour the last distance between the man I was and the man I’m choosing to be.
The kiss isn’t clean.
It’s a vow.
An oath written in breath and blood and the press of her chest to mine while bodies cool around us.
Heat rolls through me, dark and hungry, dragging my thoughts into places I don’t have time to go. I want her against the railing, fingers bruising her hips, her moaning my name like a prayer she finally means.
I yank myself back from that edge before I cross it here on this floor.
We break for air—barely. Our mouths hover close, breaths colliding, hearts pounding in a fucked-up, tangled rhythm.
“You’re insane,” she whispers, voice wrecked. “Swearing yourself to me.”
“Too late to talk me out of it,” I murmur against her lips.
That’s when it hits.
A soft mechanical click slices through the moment.
Gun.
Not from the mezzanine.
From the far end of the warehouse.
Every muscle in my body locks. I turn my head, keeping Pia tucked tight to my side, my body between her and the sound.
A shadow stands in the open mouth of the main entrance below, framed by the sick yellow wash of streetlight leaking in.
Boots.Dark clothes.A familiar way of holding a gun—easy, confident, bored.
“Brother.”
The voice is calm. Unhurried. Edged with something I can’t read.
Ice spills down my spine.
Romeo.
He steps fully into the light and looks up at us, one hand steady on the gun aimed in our direction. His face is a blank slate—no rage, no grief, nothing I can use to predict which way he’ll fire.
His gaze flicks from me to Pia.
Back to me.
The silence stretches—thick, strangling.
“Step away from her, Santino,” he says at last, voice smooth as a blade. “We need to talk about our father.”