Chapter 22 #2
My voice collapses to nothing.
“And I didn’t know how to survive that.”
The Moment She Admits She Fell First
I force myself to hold his gaze even though every instinct in me is screaming to look away.
“I didn’t mean to fall for you,” I say, my voice stripped raw between us.
My throat tightens. My chest aches.
“I didn’t mean to care if you slept,” I whisper. “If you ate. If you prayed to a God who never showed up.”
The words come slower now—delicate, dangerous—like they’ll shatter if I press them too hard.
Santino doesn’t move.
Doesn’t blink.
He watches me with that lethal stillness, like he’s bracing for impact… or deciding whether to become it.
“It happened anyway,” I say, quieter. “It crept in through cracks I didn’t know were there.”
My fingers curl around the rosary again—not in prayer.
In confession.
“In the confessional,” I murmur. “In the way you listened when I spoke. In the way you never rushed me. Never made me feel small just because I was bleeding on the inside.”
I swallow.
“In the way you fought men twice your size like they were nothing when they touched me wrong.”
My voice trembles.
“And in the way you remembered things, I didn’t think mattered enough to matter to anyone.”
His jaw tightens.
Not anger.
Control.
Memory crashes into me without warning—the alley behind the church where he shoved his jacket into my hands like it was the only warmth left in the world; the vault door trembling under his palm; the wild, violent hope in his eyes when the ledger proved real; the way his voice broke in that warehouse when he thought death was seconds away and said I love you like a truth he never meant to survive.
“All of it,” I whisper. “Every fucking moment—”
My lungs burn.
“By the time I had the evidence, I didn’t know what to do with it anymore.”
He shifts.
One step.
Not toward me.
Not away.
Balanced on the knife-edge between.
“Because if I used it,” I say, “you would hate me.”
Air leaves my chest in a sharp ache.
“And if I didn’t… my father’s ghost would never let me sleep again.”
My mouth twists into something that might once have been a laugh.
“So I did what I always do,” I whisper. “I ran.”
My eyes sting.
“I tried to save you by leaving you.”
There it is.
The truth beneath the ruins.
Santino finally straightens.
Slow.
Deliberate.
Every motion controlled like it could shatter the world if he let it slip.
He steps away from the counter.
Then again.
Not threatening.
Not gentle.
Resolved.
“Pia,” he says, my name a wire pulled tight between us. “Look at me.”
“I am,” I whisper.
“No,” he murmurs. “Really look.”
Something fractures open in my chest.
I do.
Not the scars.
Not the violence.
Not the shape his father tried to carve out of him.
I see the man underneath.
The boy who learned too early how disposable love is.
The priest who prayed until silence nearly murdered him.
The son molded into a weapon before he ever chose a faith.
The man standing here bloodied and breathing—and still refusing to let me sink alone.
“That’s who you fell for,” he says softly.
Not a question.
A verdict.
And he’s right.
“I didn’t fall in love with your name,” I whisper. “Or your bloodline. Or your power.”
I move closer without realizing it.
“I fell in love with
the man who never asked me to break myself smaller just to fit his world.”
My nails dig into the rosary.
“I fell in love with the part of you that still hurts.”
His eyes darken.
Not dangerous.
Wrecked.
“And I was terrified, because if that part died—if Giovanni killed it—so would I.”
The room contracts.
Like it’s closing in on us.
“There was never a version of this where I walked away clean,” I whisper. “I just never expected to walk away in love.”
Silence floods the space between us.
Thick.
Waiting.
And I stand there with my heart in my hands—
daring him to drop it.
This Is the Last Lie
I take a breath that feels like it might rip my lungs apart on the way in.
“This is the last lie,” I say.
My voice barely makes it across the space between us, but it lands. I see it in the way his shoulders tense, the way his eyes sharpen just that fraction more.
“The last thing I haven’t told you.”
He doesn’t move.
He doesn’t fill the silence with holy bullshit or a Rivas threat. He just waits, arms folded, blood drying down his forearm, giving me nothing.
The quiet stretches.
Carlo’s voice floods the cracks in it.
Your mother. Your father. Giovanni. All of it.
The warehouse comes back in a rush—the stink of gunpowder and dust, Santino on those stairs with a bullet carving fire across his arm, Carlo laughing like the entire world is a joke only he understands.
I could bury it.
The thought slithers through me, slick and tempting.
Just one thing. One piece. Keep it back. Protect yourself. Protect him. Pretend that enough truth is the same as all of it.
But that’s exactly what Giovanni did to everyone he owned.
One more secret.
One more weapon.
One more sin.
If I keep this, I’m not just in his world—I’m his echo.
“My father died because Giovanni needed someone to take a bullet for him,” I whisper.
The words scrape my throat raw on the way out.
Santino’s jaw tightens—just a twitch—but I see it. I feel the air shift, heavy and electric, like I just dragged a ghost into the room and sat it between us.
“And my mother…” My voice shakes, then breaks. I force it back together. “She was leveraged. Giovanni used her to keep my father in line. He dangled her like a threat and a prize all at once. Smile pretty, obey, or watch her suffer.”
The memories hit hard—the sound of my mother crying through walls too thin to matter, my father’s voice low and desperate, Giovanni’s men in the doorway like they were family dropping by for coffee and execution orders.
“Your father destroyed my family long before I ever walked into your church,” I say.
The kitchen light hums above us like it’s listening.
There it is.
The root of everything.
My throat closes, but I push through it.
“And I still chose you anyway.”
That confession hurts worse than any knife I’ve taken.
Because it isn’t just about revenge. Not anymore. It’s about the part of me that could’ve kept hating Rivas blood and didn’t. The part that betrayed my own ghosts the second I let Santino touch me and didn’t flinch.
His eyes darken—storm, not rage. He doesn’t look away.
“I came into your world to ruin it,” I choke out. “To set it on fire from the inside and walk away while it burned.”
My fingers curl around the rosary like I could strangle it.
“And somewhere along the way, I realized I can’t fucking survive outside it without you.”
The admission tears something open in my chest. It feels pathetic and dangerous and truer than anything I’ve ever said.
“I don’t know when it happened,” I say, voice rough.
“Maybe it was the night you bled all over that goddamn confessional because you wouldn’t let go of me.
Maybe it was the first time you said my name like it was a prayer instead of a problem.
Maybe it was tonight when you went to war with your own blood for me. ”
Tears sting my eyes. I let them.
I’ve bled for less.
“If you hate me now,” I say, and the words shake, “say it. If you’re done, walk away. If you want me gone, I’ll leave tonight. I’ll disappear. You won’t have to confess that you were ever stupid enough to let me close.”
My chest heaves.
“But you deserve the truth, all of it. And now you have it.”
The safe house goes quiet in a way that feels hostile.
The old fridge ticks in the corner. A pipe knocks somewhere inside the walls. Outside, a car passes, tires hissing on wet pavement. Up here, there’s nothing but my heartbeat in my ears and the brutal stillness of the man standing across from me.
He doesn’t speak.
Doesn’t curse.
Doesn’t move.
The silence turns heavy. Almost unbearable. It presses on my ribs from the inside.
I see it in my head—the sound of his footsteps walking out of the safe house and out of my life. The door opening, closing. The hollow afterward. The way my lungs will have to remember how to breathe without the weight of him in the room.
I brace for it.
So when a sound finally cuts through the quiet, I take a second to understand it.
A chair scrapes against the floor.
Slow.
Deliberate.
Not retreating.
Coming closer.
My grip tightens on the rosary until the beads bite into my skin, and I keep my eyes up, locked on him, as Santino Rivas closes the distance between us one step at a time.
Santino’s Forgiveness… and One More Secret
Santino stops right in front of me.
So close, I can see the small cut on his lip I hadn’t noticed before. So close I can smell blood and smoke and the faint ghost of soap from a life that’s already burned down.
He reaches for the rosary in my hand.
I don’t resist.I don’t breathe.
He takes it from my fingers like he understands what it costs me to hold it—like he knows it isn’t just beads and thread.
It’s a grave marker.
He wraps it around his knuckles instead of his wrist, winding it tight the way men wrap chains when they plan to break something with their hands.
Then he cups my face.
Not like he’s claiming me.
Like he’s steadying me.
His thumbs wipe beneath my eyes, slow and deliberate, as if I might crack if he pushes too hard.
“I don’t hate you.”
The words land wrong at first—like they belong to someone else.
My body refuses them.
My chest locks around them.
“I never will.”
Something inside me collapses.
Not a fracture.A failure.
“You should,” I whisper.
The truth comes out like a dare.
If he hates me, I know how to live with that. I grew up fluent in accusation. In being the thing people never stayed for. In the look that says you’re already guilty before you ever speak.
“But I won’t,” he says.
It isn’t loud.
It isn’t a vow the world will honor.
It’s just real.
“You came to steal. Fine,” he continues. “You lied. Fine. You wanted revenge. Fine.” His thumbs trace my jaw, grounding, unyielding. “You think any of that is worse than what my family’s already done? Than what I’ve done?”
My throat burns.
I don’t answer.
I don’t know how.
His eyes darken—but not with fury. With certainty.
“You saved my life,” he says. “You warned me when you didn’t have to. You put your body between me and a fucking bullet. You let me see you. And you told me the truth when you could’ve used me and disappeared.”
He rests his forehead against mine.
Warm.
Solid.
Impossible.
“I forgive you, Pia,” he murmurs. “Instantly. Completely. I’m not leaving.”
Relief hits like an ocean.
It steals my breath.
My knees weaken.
My hand flies to his chest because I need to feel his heart or I’m going to shatter at the edges.
He doesn’t step back.
He leans in.
And I breathe him like oxygen.
I’m right there—right at the edge of saying his name like a prayer that might stitch something in me back together—
When his voice changes.
Not louder.
Lower.
“There’s something else.”
The temperature drops.
Ice in the middle of heat.
“And you need to hear it before you decide if you can forgive me.”
My pulse stutters.
I pull back just enough to see his face.
His eyes look—
Haunted.
I’ve seen that stare before.
On men who don’t sleep.
On people who touched something the past didn’t want found.
“Giovanni didn’t just destroy your family,” he whispers.
I forget how to inhale.
“He destroyed mine too.”
The room narrows.
“And what I learned,” he continues, voice rough with something old and dangerous, “about Romeo… about that night…”
Every nerve in my body catches fire.
The late drives.The half-answers.The way Romeo held his gun in the warehouse like it extended his arm.
Santino swallows.
“It might tie your father’s death to my brother’s hands.”
The words don’t echo.
They explode.
My vision bleaches out.
My stomach caves.
The room tilts like God shoved it sideways.
“No,” I whisper.
It comes out broken.
Bare.
Unwilling.
Santino doesn’t look away.
Doesn’t soften it.
Doesn’t take it back.
“I don’t know the full truth yet,” he adds. “But I know this—whatever happened back then, Romeo’s fingerprints are on it. Giovanni buried it inside him the same way he buried everything else.”
The walls close in.
My father’s face crashes through my mind—laughing, bleeding, reaching.
My mother’s voice.
My scream lodged somewhere in my body that never let it escape.
And now it isn’t just my past.
It’s his.
And it isn’t just Giovanni’s ghost between us anymore.
It’s his brother.
I stagger back.
Santino reaches for me.
I don’t know if it’s to catch me—or keep me from falling into something neither of us can survive.
My heart slams against my ribs like it wants out.
Because loving him isn’t just dangerous now.
It’s war.
And the man I may have to destroy—
Is his blood.
And standing in a safe house that feels anything but safe, with tears drying on my face and Santino’s shadow curled around my soul, one truth claws up my spine and locks into place:
The truth didn’t set me free.
It armed me.
We will not fight future battles with secrets. We will fight them in blood.