Chapter 22
Pia
After the Warehouse, in Someone Else’s Silence
The safe house doesn’t feel safe.It feels like a throat someone stopped singing in.
The apartment is a corpse of a place—one narrow kitchen above a closed bakery, dust welded into the corners, cracked tiles like chipped teeth.
A single bulb over the sink flickers sickly yellow, stuttering shadows across flaking paint.
There’s an old table jammed against the wall and exactly two chairs that don’t match.
Someone left a rosary on the scarred wood years ago.
Santino brought me here.Romeo drove.
No music. No talking.
Just the city bleeding past the windows in streaks of neon and oil-slick rain while the war I walked out of throbbed behind my eyes like a second heartbeat.
Romeo’s gone now—“to make calls,” which in his mouth can mean anything from lining up surgeons to lining up funerals. The door slammed ten minutes ago and took the last scrap of outside noise with it.
Now it’s just us and what didn’t die with the bodies.
Santino leans against the counter with his arms folded, his body tight and closed off like a chest that doesn’t give up its valuables. There’s dried blood at the corner of his jaw. His sleeve is stiff with it. He watches me the way men watch an unexploded bomb—careful, calculating, unblinking.
I hover by the table, not sitting, not moving, my fingers resting on the rosary. The beads are cool, gritty with age and dust. It feels wrong to touch them. Like I’m trespassing on a grave.
My throat tightens.
I told myself I would leave him to protect him.
Then he walked into hell and dragged me out by the throat.
There’s nowhere left to run from the truth.
My lungs finally remember how to work. Breath scratches in and out of me, loud in the unnatural quiet. Every nerve is still buzzing, like the warehouse carved its name into my skin and didn’t bother to apologize on the way out.
Santino doesn’t move.
He just… waits.
That’s worse than shouting. Worse than Carlo’s voice in my ear. A man yelling wants something. A man waiting already has it.
I drop my eyes to the rosary and rub my thumb across one bead until it warms under my skin. I can feel my pulse inside it—panicked and alive. The thought hits hard and clean:
This could’ve been the last thing I ever touched.
The apartment smells of old oil and burned sugar and cold bread. It presses on my ribs from the inside. I shift once. Then again. Then finally drift to the narrow window over the sink and look three stories down into an alley where trash piles into crooked cardboard cities.
“So,” I whisper.
It’s not a question. Just a sound. A fracture in the quiet.
He doesn’t answer.
Of course he doesn’t.
My chest aches with everything I didn’t say in the car—with every confession rehearsed and strangled.
I turn back to him and force myself to stop moving.
He’s changed since the warehouse. Not the way men usually change after blood. He’s quieter. Colder. Like a blade laid in snow.
I hate that I did that to him.
I hate that I love him enough to do it again.
My fingers tighten around the rosary. The beads bite into my palm like witnesses.
There it is.
The moment.
No more shadows. No more script.
The last lie is already sweating under my skin, begging to be born.
And for the first time since I walked into his church wearing innocence like a costume, I understand exactly how much this truth can burn.
I lift my eyes to his.
I don’t flinch.
“I’m done running,” I say softly—to the room, to God, to the man who tore a kingdom open for me.
Silence answers.
But it’s watching.
Pia Pulling the Thread
He cuts the silence open.
“Did they hurt you more after I came?” Santino asks.
His voice sounds wrong—hoarse, shredded, like someone dragged it over concrete and glass before handing it back to him.
I swallow, my throat scraping raw. “Not… like before.”
His eyes move over me, slow and surgical, like he’s cataloguing evidence. He reads every bruise, every shadow, every place my body still carries fingerprints.
“They just… talked,” I add.
His jaw flexes once. “About what?”
My stomach knots so tight I have to brace my hand against the table to stay upright.
About Giovanni.About my father.About Romeo.About the ledger under his church.About the fact that I’ve been lying since the second I crossed his fucking threshold and called it sanctuary.
I don’t say any of it out loud.
Not yet.
Instead, I reach for the rosary between us.
The beads are cold, gritty with old dust. They click softly as I let them slide through my fingers one by one, like I’m counting down to my execution.
It feels wrong in my hands—too heavy, too intimate.
It should be his. A priest’s. An heir’s.
Not the girl who walked into his life with a matchbook and a map.
“I need to tell you something,” I say.
The words come out quiet.
The room still hears them like a gunshot.
Santino doesn’t move.
Doesn’t flinch.
Doesn’t ask me to spit it out faster.
He just watches me with that flat, unblinking focus that makes it feel like the entire world abandoned me in this one rectangle of air.
“Then tell me,” he says.
No comfort.No softening.Just an invitation to hang myself with my own rope.
My mouth goes dry. My tongue tastes like rust.
“I didn’t come to the church for God.”
His eyebrow twitches, barely. “I know that much.”
“I know you do.” My laugh fractures. “You’re not stupid.”
He doesn’t argue.
He just keeps looking at me like he’s stripping paint off my bones.
“But I also didn’t come for you.”
That one lands wrong in my chest, sinks where it shouldn’t.
Not at first.”
His eyes sharpen.
Not in surprise.
In concentration.
“Go on,” he says.
The rosary digs into my palm until the skin pulses.
“I came to steal something.”
There.
The first blade.
His shoulders go even stiller. “What.”
“Evidence.” I can hear my heartbeat in my ears. “Giovanni’s ledger. The proof he framed my father and had him killed.”
The sentence leaves my mouth and hangs between us like smoke.
Thick.Poisonous.Impossible to take back.
The room changes.
Not louder.
Not colder.
Heavier.
Santino’s gaze goes lethal-quiet. Like I just said something he’s been circling and refusing to speak out loud.
“How long,” he asks, voice dropped to ash, “have you known about the ledger?”
I drag in a breath that tastes like dust and regret. “Long enough that walking into your church wasn’t an accident. Long enough that I mapped you before I ever touched you.”
There.
Another thread torn.
His eyes flick to the rosary clenched in my fist. Then back to my face.
“And you thought you could just walk in and take it from under Giovanni’s nose.”
“Not just his.” Bitterness slips through before I can stop it. “Yours.”
“You came to my altar to rob me.”
“Yeah.” My voice trembles, but I don’t look away. “I came to rob you blind.”
One bead slips from my grip. Bounces once against the wood. Sounds too loud in the silence.
“What they talked about in that warehouse…” I swallow. “It was all of this. My father. Giovanni. The ledger. They wanted to know how far I got. How close I came. How much I would destroy to finish it.”
My chest clamps tight.
“And the worst part?” I whisper.
He doesn’t interrupt.
“I didn’t have to lie when I told them I’d already gone too far.”
The Full Confession: Why She Really Came
I don’t stop talking because if I do, I’ll fracture clean through.
The silence in this room weighs too much. It’ll crush me if I let it.
“Giovanni picked my father’s crew apart piece by piece,” I say, my voice already tearing under the weight of it.
“Not all at once. He didn’t blow them apart with one order and call it finished.
He was patient. Precise. He turned men against each other.
Paid cops to blink at blood. Bought loyalty in small enough pieces that nobody realized they were being sold. ”
Santino doesn’t interrupt.
That makes it worse.
“He used your church as both shield and snare,” I go on. “Laundered money through saints’ mouths. Smuggled hell into confession boxes. Acted like God himself stamped approval on his sins.”
My throat burns like it’s being flayed open.
“When my father outlived his usefulness, Giovanni stopped pretending. He made sure someone else took the fall. Wrapped it in a respectable story. A clean execution.”
My vision buckles.
“They shot him in front of me.”
The words don’t break.
They flatten.
Die.
Like that’s what part of me did when I watched my father stumble backward, red blooming across his chest like some sick fucking flower. His eyes never left mine. Like he was trying to apologize for dying.
Santino’s jaw tightens.
His hand curls once at his side and doesn’t loosen.
"I found out later," I forced out, "that someone buried the only proof that showed my father was innocent—the ledger that showed Giovanni arranged everything—under the church." Locked away with all your father’s other sins. Entombed like holy relics.”
I lift my gaze to his.
No shelter left.
“I came to you because you were the key.”
The confession tastes like copper.
“The priest’s son. The unwanted heir. The man who stood with one foot in faith and the other in blood. You were the lock. The church was the door.”
My hands are shaking so hard around the rosary that the beads bite through the skin.
“I lied to get close,” I say. “I practiced being soft. Practiced being harmless. I memorized your routines. Learned the tunnels. Counted the steps from altar to vault. Listened when your brothers talked like I wasn’t even standing there.”
My mouth trembles.
“I was going to seduce you just enough to get what I needed and disappear.”
There it is.
The rotten truth.
The one I never believed I’d say out loud.
“I came to steal from you and leave you bleeding,” I whisper. “That was the plan. That was all I was ever supposed to be.”
I breathe in, and it almost destroys me.
“But then you looked at me like I wasn’t poisonous.”