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I looked down at Vittorio Neri’s body and understood why men in the underworld had begun calling me The Saint. Because I made death feel like judgment. I let men confess before I delivered them to it.

The name had started as a joke, I think. Men used jokes when they were afraid to name their fear directly. Then it became a warning. Then a whisper. A kind of blasphemous respect.

“The Saint is coming.”

“Tell the truth if he asks.”

“Pray if he listens.”

I had hated the name. I had also answered to it.

One of our men approached. “What do you want done with him?”

“Leave him where his people will find him.”

The man hesitated. “Atlas said⁠—”

“I know what Atlas said.”

He stopped speaking. Everyone did, eventually. I looked at the dead man one last time.

“Send the names on the recorder to Raze. I want them all dealt with as soon as possible.”

I left the warehouse before the cleanup began.

Outside, the night air was colder, washed clean by rain. The floodlights painted the docks in hard white angles. Water dripped from stacked containers. Somewhere nearby, a radio played softly from the cab of a truck. The sea moved as it always did, black and patient, receiving everything men threw toward it and giving back only salt.

Tone called as I walked toward my car. I asked her about the fourteen year old.

“She asked if the bad men are gone.”

“And what did you say?”

“I told her one of them is.”

One of them is. There was one crooked thing straightened. One monster removed. One child still likely to wake screaming for years, if she slept at all.

Still, it was never enough. That was the other truth violence taught a man. Killing one evil did not empty the world of it. It only made a small clearing in the dark and dared something else to step into the space.

I drove to a small apartment my family kept near the port for men who needed to sleep nowhere official. It had one bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom with cracked tiles, and a view of a brick wall. I went straight to the sink to wash my hands. But they looked clean. That was the strangest part.

There was blood on my cuff, a few faint spots near my wrist, but my hands themselves looked clean. Still, I washed them.

Hot water first. Then hotter. Soap. Scrub. Between the fingers. Under the nails. Across the knuckles. Again. The water in the basin turned pink, then clear, then pink again when I found blood dried beneath the edge of my sleeve. I kept washing.

The mirror above the sink was old, silvered at the edges. My reflection stared back at me through the steam.

Young. Controlled. Feared. A Cavalho son. The Saint.

I looked nothing like a monster. Monsters should have announced themselves. They should have come with twisted faces, blackened eyes, something to warn the innocent not to sit beside them at dinner or trust their hand at the small of the back.

But I looked like any other man. A man who could wear a suit. Kiss his sister’s cheek. Stand beside his brothers. Say grace before a meal if required. A man who had just killed another man and felt peace.

The water ran over my hands until the skin reddened.

I thought of Vittorio’s voice when he said, “I confessed”.

I thought of Livia, fourteen years old, alive in Tone’s medical room because we had found her before the sea or some locked room could swallow her away.