Chapter 23
Santino
Returning to the Kingdom's Grave
The Rivas mansion isn’t a house anymore.It’s a carcass picked clean by time and cowardice.
My boots crunch over gravel that used to be a polished drive, over shards of marble and glass that once reflected my father like a king in a fairytale mirror.
The east wing is a blackened rib cage against the sky, charred beams reaching upward like fingers begging God for mercy and getting silence instead.
Windows gape open or stare blindly from behind plywood bandages.
The wrought-iron gate hangs crooked on one hinge, like it tried to flee and failed.
Pia walks beside me with her coat drawn tight, shoulders hunched against the wind that slices straight through fabric and bone.
She doesn’t ask for my hand. She just stays close enough that our shadows knot together across dead leaves and fractured stone.
The woman who walked out of hell with me doesn’t flinch now — but I feel every step she doesn’t say out loud.
“This place feels wrong,” she murmurs.
Soft. Sharp.
I don’t look at her. My eyes stay on the front doors, splintered and sagging — one hanging open like a jaw punched loose. “It is wrong,” I say. “It always was. We just dressed it in gold and called it a home.”
The air stinks of ash and rot and something sweet gone sour. Jasmine used to climb these walls. Zina loved it. My father hated it because it grew wild where he couldn’t command it. Now it’s strangled in black ivy and neglect, a green noose tightening around stone shoulders.
We step inside.
The foyer swallows us whole.
Once, there were lights here. Music. Laughter that never reached the eyes.
Now silence sits thick and wet in my ears.
Debris litters the marble floor like the bones of a party no one survived — shattered frames, half-strangled curtains, the great chandelier nothing but a skeleton of metal and glass sagging in defeat.
This is where men begged.Where deals were sealed with bloodless smiles.Where terror wore cologne.
Now it wears dust.
Pia stops at a fallen mirror. Her reflection fractures into a dozen versions of herself — pale, bruised, eyes too old for her face. She touches the glass like she’s checking whether one of those ghosts might reach back.
“He kept records here,” I murmur. “More than he dared hide anywhere else.”
Her gaze lifts to mine. “He trusted this place that much?”
I breathe out mildew and memory.“No. He trusted nothing. That’s what made him dangerous.”
We move deeper into the corpse of the house.
Every hallway leads somewhere that used to matter.The dining room where Zina fought him with her eyes and lost with her smile.The stairwell where Romeo once bled and laughed because pain hadn’t figured out how to frighten him yet.The gallery where our faces stare down from gilded frames like proof we’d been born into sin instead of love.
Pia falters at the top of the stairs. Her fingers curl into the sleeve of my jacket.
I stop without turning.“You don’t have to be here.”
She swallows. “Neither do you.”
I huff something that almost sounds like a laugh.“This house thinks I still belong to it. I’m just here to prove it wrong.”
We step over glass and into memory.
The floor groans beneath us. The walls whisper every secret ever screamed into them. And with each footstep, something coils tighter in my chest —
If there is proof Romeo’s hands are dirty…If there is proof they aren’t…
It will be here.
In the private rooms of a dead king who never stopped ruling.
Wind claws through a shattered window and drags a curtain with it — the sound like a sigh from something that died waiting to be claimed.
That’s when it hits.
Not fear.
Grief.
The kind that crawls into your lungs and dares you to breathe anyway.
This place was never a home.
It was a grave.
And I’ve just climbed in after my father to see what he left behind.
Pia slips her fingers into mine without a word.
I don’t pull away.
We walk deeper into the ruins together — two survivors picking through the bones of a kingdom that devoured its own —
And I know, with the sick certainty of a man about to bleed truth:
Nothing in this house is going to let us leave clean.
Giovanni’s Office: Where Lies Were Written
Giovanni’s office waits at the back of the house like a bad memory that never learned how to die.
We move down the side corridor past walls stained with smoke and time.
My hand glides along the paneling out of habit, counting grooves I used to trace when I was small and trying not to exist. The air back here is colder.
Heavier. The rest of the mansion rotted loudly.
This part learned how to rot in silence.
His library door is gone — ripped clean off, maybe the night everything burned.
Inside, the shelves are mostly hollow. A few ruined books lean sideways, spines warped by water and ash.
Once, this room smelled like leather and ink and my father’s cologne.
Now it stinks of plaster and mold and the aftertaste of ghosts.
At the far end, the office door is still there.Heavy oak.Thick enough to stop bullets.
Still scarred near the handle where someone tried to kick it in and failed.
“The lock used to be unbreakable,” I say.
Pia studies the gouges. “Looks like someone disagreed.”
“They disagreed with the man behind it.” My fingers curl around the knob.
The lock turns without resistance.
Figures.
Even his defenses gave up once he was gone.
I push inside.
The room hits like a body blow.
The desk lies on its side, gutted and overturned.
Drawers torn open, their contents spilled and abandoned.
Papers have melted into the floor, ink bled out into shapeless bruises.
The chair that once supported his arrogance split down the middle, with stuffing bursting out like organs.
The liquor cabinet stands open and empty — bottles gone, glass frame left standing like bare ribs.
It looks like a crime scene after the body’s been dragged away.
“Someone really hated him,” Pia murmurs.
I step over a shattered decanter. Glass sighs under my boot. “He earned it.”
And still my chest tightens.
Because for all the destruction, the room hasn’t released him. The layout. The light. The way dust floats into the same shapes it always did when I was seventeen and hiding under that desk, listening to him decide who lived and who bled.
“Someone tried to erase the King,” Pia says.
I breathe out something almost like a laugh. “He never believed he could be.”
She crosses to the shelves, fingers brushing warped spines and empty spaces. One sags in the middle from weight it no longer carries.
“He had a safe in the wall,” I tell her quietly. “He thought no one knew.”
Her head turns. “You did.”
“Of course I did.” My body remembers before my mind does. “When he was in a good mood, this was where he ruled. When he wasn’t…”
I stop myself.
“I learned where the shadows live.”
How do we get in? She asks.
I stop in front of the painting — some limp-wristed martyr staring up like my father ever worshipped suffering.
“Three knuckles left of his holy face.”
My fingers find a flaw in the wood. Press. Twist.
Nothing.
For a half second, I think the bastard finally won — that time ate the last secret before I could.
Then a soft click answers from the wall.
The panel slides open.
The safe sits inside, unassuming and black — the kind people store passports in.
Giovanni kept souls.
Pia steps closer. “You remember the code.”
“It’s carved in.” My mouth goes dry. “Some things don’t come out.”
Giovanni’s birthday.Zina’s.My baptism.
The keypad beeps tiredly and slowly.
Green.
The door unlocks with a dull final sound, like a coffin shifting.
Inside is all order.
Of course, it is.
A stack of black notebooks, elastic bands intact.A flash drive scraped bare of any name.And right in front — placed like an accusation — a single envelope.
Cream paper. Crisp edges.
My father’s handwriting.
ROMEO.
My pulse slams into my teeth.
Pia goes still beside me. “That’s him.”
“That’s my brother.”
I reach in.
The envelope weighs wrong — heavier than paper, lighter than guilt.
My hand trembles. It doesn’t stop.
Because this is what I do.
I carry the things meant to break me and pretend my spine was built for it.
Pia doesn’t look at the letter. She looks at me.
“Are you sure you want to open that?”
I meet her eyes.
Then, I look back at the name.
Romeo.
The brother who laughs like nothing can touch him.The brother who drinks like he’s trying to forget himself.The brother who might’ve opened the door for a king to die.
“I don’t think we get to be sure anymore.”
I slide my thumb under the flap.
The paper tears open with a sound too small to be that loud.
I break the seal —
and my father talks from the grave.
Giovanni’s Letter: The Accusation and the Fear
The envelope opens with a dry sigh, like the house itself is exhaling.
I slide the page out carefully. The paper’s thick, expensive. Giovanni never spent money on mercy, but he always paid top shelf for anything that touched his hands.
His handwriting slashes across the page in sharp, impatient strokes. No flourishes. No softness. Just control.
My throat tightens.
Pia stays close but doesn’t crowd me, one hip against the wreck of the desk, eyes on my face instead of the letter. She knows this is going to be a wound, not a document.
I start reading.
“Romeo,” I say quietly.
His name feels wrong here. Too naked. Too alive.
“If you are reading this, I am either dead, or you are more reckless than I believed.”
The line lands like a backhand. Classic Giovanni — no affection, just insult braided into inevitability.
I keep going, voice low. I’m not reading it for Pia. I’m reading it so the words have somewhere to go besides rotting inside my skull.
“You think I do not see you. You think I do not know where you go at night, who you meet, what you trade in the dark. You have been warned.”