Chapter 24 #2
His hand slides from my wrist to my arm, up my skin like he’s tracing every place I’ve broken and claiming it as something holy instead. His palm settles high on my shoulder—grounding. Steady. Possessive in the way only safety ever is.
“I’m not a good man, Pia,” he whispers, and I hear the scar beneath every word. “I’m violent. I’m angry. I’m full of things that would make decent people turn away.”
He leans in until our foreheads meet.
“But I am yours.”
My knees nearly buckle.
It isn’t a confession.
It’s a surrender on his knees without ever kneeling.
My face breaks open anyway.
Tears fall before I can stop them—hot, quiet, unstoppable. He wipes them away without comment, thumb rough, touch steady.
“Santino…” I whisper. “I don’t deserve you.”
The words come from somewhere ancient inside me. A voice built by men who taught me love always came with a ledger. With interest. With pain.
He answers without slipping.
Without softening.
He takes my face in his hands like he’s anchoring me to this moment and will not let me drown backward.
“You’re wrong.”
Not sharp.
Not cruel.
Certain.
“You’re the only thing I’ve ever wanted that wasn’t a sin.”
The world tilts.
Not because I’m unsteady.
Because something inside me just rearranged itself around that truth.
I close my eyes.
Not to hide—
To survive.
“And I’m afraid,” I admit, voice finally allowed to fracture. “Not of you. Of what it means if this is real. Of what happens if I stop bracing for everything to be ripped away.”
His hands slide to my ribs, gentle over the ache, arms circling me like he would suture me into his body if I asked.
“Then lose it with me,” he murmurs into my hair. “If it burns, it burns together. If it breaks, it breaks on both of us.”
I breathe in the truth.
Smoke.Soap.Warm skin.
A trace of blood and pine and ruined faith turned into something alive again.
“I don’t know how to be safe,” I admit against his throat.
“I do.”
His voice doesn’t shake.
His hands pull me closer.
“Because I’ll be it.”
Not by force.
By staying.
By choosing.
By bleeding in ways that heal instead of destroy.
My fingers knot into his shirt like letting go might erase me.
He doesn’t loosen.
He holds me like I’m not fragile—
Like I’m fire.
And he’s willing to burn.
And for the first time—
Fear doesn’t speak louder than love.
The Future He Offers
By the time the sun finally rises over the treetops, we’ve moved inside.
The “sanctuary” still isn’t finished. Santino keeps calling it “The Sanctuary” — like he’s daring God to argue.
It’s one wide room off a narrow hall: exposed beams overhead, whitewashed walls, no altar, no pews.
Just dark floor pillows, a low table he built himself, and a battered lamp in the corner bleeding warm honeyed light across the boards.
It doesn’t feel like a church.
It feels like a place you crawl into after almost dying too many times to count.
I’m half-curled against him on the pillows, his back braced to the wall, my head tucked beneath his chin.
I throw my legs over his, and a blanket tangles around us from the waist down, as if we forgot where it began and ended.
The window beside us turns the outside world into soft smears of green and gray.
His heartbeat thuds beneath my ear.
Slow.Solid.Unforgiving in its proof that he’s still here.
I track it like a lifeline.
One-two.One-two.Still alive.
My fingers worry the hem of his t-shirt—nervous habit more than flirtation—as the last twenty-four hours strobe behind my eyes. The tunnels. The blood. The look on his face when he finally walked out from under his father’s ghost. Every time my body tries to loosen, memory drags it tight again.
He’s quiet.
Too quiet.
When Santino’s calm, he either goes utterly still, or he talks shit—soft jokes, dark humor, smart-mouth commentary about saints with martyr complexes.
Right now, he’s neither.
He’s coiled.
Thinking.
I feel it in the way his hand rests on my hip—loose but not relaxed. His breath sits too high in his chest. In the tension riding his jaw when I tilt my head just enough to study his face.
“Okay,” I murmur into his shirt. “You’re doing the silent brooding thing. That’s either a migraine or a plan—and I really fucking hope it’s not the first one because I just got you back in one piece.”
A breath ghosts through my hair. “Not a migraine.”
“So.” I lift my head enough to see him. “A plan.”
“Trying,” he admits.
Quiet settles again, thick and watchful—like he’s lining words up inside himself, deciding whether to set them loose or let them rot.
“I’m not going back to the old house,” he says.
The sentence lands heavily between us.
I shift so that I can see his face properly. His eyes are on the window, on the slice of sky caught between glass and pine.
“It needs to die,” he adds. “Or be rebuilt. But I’m done living inside his bones.”
Giovanni.
He doesn’t say the name.
He doesn’t have to.
The mansion flashes in my mind: ash in the air, overturned furniture, the weight of secrets pried from a dead man’s safe. Santino standing in the grave.
“Good,” I say. Anything else feels too soft for a place like that. “That house always felt like it was waiting to eat everyone who walked through it.”
His mouth tilts, agreement shadowing his face. “It already did.”
Silence hums again.
Not empty.
Dense.
“And the church?” I ask.
The word tastes wrong now. Like a blade I used to worship.
He finally looks at me.
“I’ll serve,” he says slowly, testing each syllable like it might break. “But not as a priest. Not as anyone’s weapon. I’m done being their blunt instrument in God’s clothes.”
Something in my chest pinches hard enough to ache.
“What does that even look like?” I whisper.
“I don’t know yet.” His thumb circles my hip, absent, restless. “Outreach, maybe. Confession without absolution for men who think they can buy it. I’ll do more damage with truth than I ever did wearing a collar.”
I can picture it too easily—the way people will keep coming to him, even without black fabric as armor. The way they’ll talk because his eyes don’t blink first. The way he’ll stand between them and the hell they’re building and make them look at it.
“But it’ll be mine,” he adds, jaw setting. “On my terms. Not Giovanni’s. Not the Church’s. Not the fucking Rivas legend.”
My throat tightens.
“And your brothers?”
Something sharp crosses his face and disappears.
“They’ll follow the truth I give them,” he says. “Not the truth that kills them.”
He doesn’t explain.
He doesn’t need to.
Romeo’s secret curls in the air between us—loud and invisible. The letter. The footage. The way Santino walked out with a new lie on his spine and his brother’s life stitched into it.
I feel it beating inside him like a second heart.
“Does that mean telling them everything?” I press, because I’ve never known how to leave wounds alone.
His gaze breaks first, back to the window. “It means telling them what won’t destroy us.”
Not an answer.
Exactly an answer.
I swallow it and pivot before we both start bleeding.
“And me?” I ask.
That pulls him back instantly.
Now there’s something wary in his eyes—not of me. Never me. Of what I might say. Of the door he’s just opened and whether I’ll run through it.
“What about you?” he asks.
The question shouldn’t break me.
It does.
No one has ever let me choose anything that mattered. Men chose. Power chose. Giovanni chose. Emiliano chose. My body, my future, my pain—always carved up by someone else’s appetite.
“Santino…” My voice thins. I hate it. I clear my throat and try again. “I don’t know how to be safe. I don’t know how to live without running… without tracking the exits every time I step into a room.”
He nods once, like he’s been waiting for that answer since the day he met me in confession and heard every lie ring true.
“Okay.”
Just that.
I handed him a problem, and he already knows how to solve it.
My eyes burn. “Okay?” I echo. “That’s it? I dump all my brokenness on you, and you just… say okay?”
He shifts, untangling our legs with a quiet firmness that isn’t rejection—it’s repositioning. His hands catch my waist, and I’m pulled into motion before I can think.
Guided.
Claimed.
Set right where he wants me.
I end up straddling his lap, blanket slipping, knees bracketing his thighs. My palms land on his shoulders to steady myself.
My heart trips.
“This isn’t me pretending it’s easy,” he says, voice steady as stone. He rests his forehead against mine, our breaths tangling. “It’s me saying I’m here for all of it.”
His hands settle on my hips, heavy and sure, thumbs digging just above bone like he’s bracing a storm.
“Then I’ll run beside you,” he murmurs.
The words vibrate through him into me.
“As long as you come home to me.”
Home.
The word shatters something inside my chest.
Not a place.
Not a house.
Him.
For a heartbeat, a future flickers—dangerous and bright and terrifying as hell. This room full of laughter. Dante pretending not to guard every door. Romeo alive. Guido safe. Zina with a glass of wine and a blade within reach.
Me on this man’s lap again and again.
Not because I have to be.
Because I choose to be.
He’s offering a life.
Not a fantasy.
Better.
Real.
“I want that,” I whisper.
The truth tears its way out of me, raw and too big for the words trying to carry it.
His eyes slide shut as the confession hits him in the chest.
“I know,” he breathes.
His fingers tense on my hips.
“And I want you.”
There’s hunger there.
Not just for my body.
For every crooked, sharp-edged piece of me nobody else ever wanted unless they were getting something back.
Something finally gives.
A last defense I didn’t know I was still holding.
It collapses.
All the way.
“Then you’ve got me,” I say.
His eyes open. They show no priest, judge, or soldier.
Just a man staring at the one thing he never thought he could keep.