Fabrizio continued to go on about the sandwich shop while Leo half listened, his attention now turned to his sister, Gemma: the reason he knew about covering bruises. She shot him a disgusted look and went back to her cannoli, coffee, and conversation, pretending he wasn’t there at all. If there was an easy way to be with the whole family where Leo wasn’t involved, she would have taken it in a heartbeat.

He couldn’t blame her, but he’d done what he’d had to do. Her husband had been beating her and nobody had stood up to protect her. It wasn’t their business. It was between Gemma and Emilio. But she was his kid sister and he couldn’t follow the unspoken rules.

Emilio’s body now rested in pieces in some garbage bags in the bottom of a harbor three states over. Leo’s handiwork. If the body were to be discovered, there was unlikely to be enough evidence left for an ID. It had happened more than a decade ago, after all.

Leo had been a week outside taking his final vows and being inducted into the order when he’d found Gemma, standing on the doorstep of his small apartment, trembling in the middle of a harsh winter snow, with mascara trails going down her cheeks and those angry bruises and broken jaw. He’d taken her in and cared for her like a broken bird. He’d given her sanctuary from Emilio.

Six days later, the man was gone. No one suspected Leo, despite the scar Emilio had given him. Leo had explained it as a freak gardening accident, and the family accepted it. Maybe they accepted the story so readily because it was what they’d been trained to do: accept ridiculous lies to keep their delusions safe, to believe their men were good.

Or maybe it was the fact that he’d been practically a man of the cloth, and no one had seen the darker edges inside him that he kept carefully under wraps. The priesthood had been meant to divert his urges. The fantasies that twisted and gnarled inside him to own a woman, to dominate and subjugate her, to watch a whip make a bright red line across her flesh and the strange sense of serenity the idea brought him as it took him over the edge to orgasm. He’d been disgusted with himself. The priesthood would lock all that up in a cage and keep him from doing damage to anyone or to his own soul.

But Emilio changed that plan. Leo had caught him alone, knocked him out, and taken him to an abandoned warehouse where he’d spent the next forty-eight hours torturing him. Leo had taken the once powerful bully and turned him into a quivering lump of terror who could barely speak his own name. He’d finally killed him and taken apart the body piece by piece with a kind of glee that had scared him.

Once the evidence was gone, he’d locked himself away in his apartment. He couldn’t finish taking his vows. He was no longer a potential monster who hadn’t yet attacked. However he might justify it, he was tainted beyond the repair of the priesthood. And nothing could have convinced him otherwise. It had taken years for him to go back inside a church. He’d gone to medical school, intent on making amends, healing instead of harming. And along the way, he’d found healthier outlets for his sadism.