Description 

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Luca Santino is a young Italian still trying to find his footing in America. Once a bright and lively man who sought to make everyone around him smile, Luca was known for his selflessness, always the first to take a risk if it meant protecting those he cared about. He made friends easily and carried guilt heavily, often feeling responsible for the unhappiness of others.

But after the fall of The Leone’s and the collapse of The Cards, that part of him dimmed. Time in hiding hardened his spirit. Now, while traces of that sociable, good-natured Luca remain, the man who’s returned to New Alexandria is far more cautious, jaded, scarred, and weary. Family has always been Luca’s anchor. He would do anything for them, and he holds his friends, those few he truly trusts, in the same regard. To Luca, the bond between comrades isn’t just physical or emotional; it’s spiritual. He’s risked his life countless times for those he calls kin, earning more scars than he can count and a permanent spot in the Doctor’s Office for his troubles.

He’s easily recognized by his youthful face, a feature he often jokes about, claiming he can’t grow proper facial hair. That changed somewhat during his time on the run; his hair grew long and unkempt, with faint mutton chops creeping in, a scar runs across his left eye, a lasting reminder of the bloody day that tore The Cards apart and nearly cost him his life. Usually, though, he prefers his hair styled in a neat quiff and his face clean-shaven. His wardrobe is sharp and deliberate, waistcoats, smart trousers, and polished shoes, though he’s rarely seen without a hat, his collection so large that he wears a different one nearly every day.

And, of course, no one sees Luca without a cigarette. He burns through multiple packs a day.

Early Life 

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Luca Santino was born in 1879 in Rome, Italy, alongside his twin sister, Luciana “Lucy” to those close to her. Their father, Vittore, worked at a small restaurant, while their mother, Floriana, served as a barmaid at the Pontrelli Bar. The Santino household was cramped but full of life: Luca’s grandparents, three older sisters, and three cats all shared the same small home in the poorer quarters of the city. Much of Luca’s childhood was spent in and around the Pontrelli Bar, where his mother worked. He and his sisters often played under the watchful eyes of the regulars, bringing laughter to the smoky, crowded room. But one day, when Luca was just seven, he saw something that would quietly shape the rest of his life.

A wounded man, riddled with bullet, was carried into the bar by two others. His mother hurried the children out, but Luca lingered by the door, peering through the gap. He watched as Floriana calmly took out a medical kit from behind the counter and began tending to the man. It was the first time Luca realized there was more to his mother’s job than pouring drinks.

As the years passed, more and more men came through those doors bleeding, limping, or hiding. By the time Luca turned seventeen, curiosity overcame him, and he confronted his mother about what she was really doing. Before she could answer, the bar’s owner, Ubertino Pontrelli, intervened. A plump man with slick hair and a smooth voice, Pontrelli told Luca that Floriana was doing “God’s work,” helping those harmed by “bad men.” He painted a noble picture of loyalty and family, conveniently leaving out the truth: that this was an organized crime syndicate. Pontrelli saw potential in Luca. Using the boy’s innocence and family ties, he drew him in, and within two months, Luca was sent on his first job.

The job was simple on paper: recover money from a debtor. But when they arrived at a small bakery, the two older men he accompanied mocked Luca’s nervousness before forcing a mallet into his hand and ordering him to crush the old baker’s hand. Trembling, eyes wet, Luca obeyed. The screams haunted him long after the job was done, and though the baker paid, Luca returned to the bar changed.

Over the next seven years, Luca worked under the Pontrelli Family, gradually piecing together the truth. His mother was a medic for the family, his father a quiet helper, and the Don himself, Ubertino Pontrelli, became like an uncle to him. Luca learned to stomach the darker parts of the work. By twenty-four, he was a trusted earner.

Then, one afternoon, while running an errand for his father at the market, he lost himself in a crowd. The streets swelled with people, pushing him forward until he suddenly found himself on the deck of a departing ocean liner. By the time he realized what had happened, Rome was vanishing on the horizon, and Luca Santino was bound for America.

When the ship finally docked, he stepped onto the soil of a strange new land: the city of Saint Denis, in the State of New Alexandria.

Present Life 

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1903

Alone and far from home, Luca fell back on the only thing he truly knew: crime. Using the alias “Roma,” he survived by robbing stores across the state, landing himself in Sisika Penitentiary more than once.

Eventually, word reached him of a new organization forming in Saint Denis, The Leone Crime Family, led by a man named Ash Smith. Intrigued, Luca sought him out. After several weeks of cautious meetings, Smith made him a Caporegime within the family. For the first time since Italy, Luca felt a semblance of structure, a family again. It was during this time that Luca began to work as security for the failure of a politician Jack King. Fending off outlaws and scum who wanted to get their hands on him for his gruesome past deeds.

Luca Santino alongside two members of the Leone Crime Family. Florence Tully (L) and Marcu Ghilloti (R)

It was during this period that Luca met Roland Cyril, a wandering soul with a quiet brilliance and an understanding gentleness that disarmed him in ways he didn’t know were possible. Cyril slowly drew out Luca’s softer side, coaxing warmth from a person who had spent years chiseling themself into stone. Their connection deepened into a quiet, intense romance, one built not on grand gestures, but on shared silences, knowing glances, and the rare safety of being understood. Even after they drifted apart romantically, their emotional bond never broke. They remained bound in a way that defied simple labels: sometimes companions, sometimes confidants, always family. Cyril was the one who reminded Luca he still had a human heart, even when he tried to bury it.

It was also around this time that fate, cruel, strange, impossibly deliberate, steered him into the path of a masked outlaw named Saffron Humblecut. Their connection should’ve been fleeting, the kind of encounter lost to city noise and strangers’ footsteps. But when a gunman tried to rob her inside a post office, something in Luca snapped into motion. He didn’t think. Didn’t question. He simply moved, stepping between danger and the woman he barely knew, as though some unseen hand had already decided this was the moment his life would pivot.

After that, their bond only deepened. Saffron reminded him that good things still existed in a world that had taught him to expect nothing but disappointment. She softened the iron around his ribs. She made him feel human again. Luca found steady work as security aboard The Grand Korrigan River Boat, serving under Dante Leone, the Consigliere of the Leone Family. Life aboard the floating palace was supposed to be predictable, velvet carpets, stacked chips, the hum of cards and coin. But nothing in Luca’s story stayed peaceful for long.

One night, the Korrigan’s gilded calm shattered when Ocelot Red, an egotistical, unstable, attention-starved wannabe gunslinger, stormed aboard, firing wildly. His grievance? Dante Leone had tossed him from the poker table after he lost $700 and tried to bully the dealer into giving it back. Red shot down civilians, hog-tied one poor soul, and dragged him into the suite where Ash Smith and Dante were conducting business. From a balcony above them, Red held Ash at gunpoint, ranting, pacing, unpredictable as a lit fuse. Luca moved through the shadows like smoke. Silent. Controlled. Deadly.

The moment he was close enough, he lunged, tackling Red in a blur of violence. Ash, Dante, and the rest of the security scrambled for their guns as the two men crashed to the floor. The brawl was vicious and claustrophobic: Red slashing at Luca with a knife, stabbing him again and again in the arm and gut. Blood hit the carpet. Luca’s vision tunneled. But he refused to die on some gaudy riverboat by the hands of a delusional loudmouth. With his last strength, Luca drew his sawed-off and blasted Red’s head apart, ending the threat in a single thunderclap.

Weeks after that, trouble found him again.

Ryker Dawson, a failed deputy and sniveling errand boy for The Callahan Gang, captured Luca in the alleyways of Saint Denis. Ryker accused him of aiding an attempted killing of a Callahan man. Maybe it was true. Maybe it didn’t matter. What mattered was the torture that followed: brutal, needless, performed with the sadism of someone who’d been waiting his whole life to hurt a man braver than himself. When Luca finally escaped, broken and bleeding, he went straight to Ash and Dante. He didn’t demand revenge, he asked for the right to seek it. But the heads of the family feared a war with the Callahans. They told him to let it go.

So he did... outwardly.

Inwardly, he rotted. Luca spent weeks locked in his room, healing alone, feeling every fracture of betrayal. The family he had bled for, nearly died for, now expected him to simply swallow the humiliation.

And while he suffered in the dark, Marcu Ghilloti, a walking disaster clothed in arrogance and incompetence, somehow gained Ash’s favor and rose to Caporegime, matching Luca’s hard-earned rank. Marcu brought nothing but conflict and external heat, and Luca couldn’t understand why he was being rewarded while Luca was left to disappear into his own wounds.

Cracks split the Leones from the inside.

Then the Cards Gang, sensing weakness, disorder, and opportunity, began a ruthless war against the family. Sabotage, ambushes, territory grabs. The Leones were slipping, and everyone with sense could see it. Distrust seeped into Luca like poison.

And so he left.

Walking away broke every vow he had sworn. Breaking omertà meant only one thing: death. Ash Smith signed the order himself. The Leones hunted him like an animal. But Saffron, loyal, fierce, and already intertwined with the Cards, stepped forward. She negotiated his passage, convincing the gang to take in their former enemy. Luca adopted the alias Roma, returning to a name that once meant survival and rebirth. Even Huey Lewis, a former Deputy and Leone informant, followed him, choosing to abandon the family and become a Card. Among the Cards, Luca found what he had lost in the Leones: loyalty without conditions, freedom without lies, and a family that would burn the world if it meant protecting one of their own.

And burn they did.

It all culminated in the Great Fire of Saint Denis, when the Cards rode into the Leone heartland from every direction, firebombs, torches, dynamite, and set every Leone-owed business and safehouse ablaze. The night sky turned orange. The city screamed. The Leones learned what happens when you push a man like Luca Santino too far.

And Roma rode among the flames, unafraid, reclaiming the pieces of himself the Leones tried, and failed, to destroy.


Luca, as Roma, playing guitar in The Cards secret camp in New Austin

That pride ended in Autumn 1903.

Strawberry sat quiet beneath a swollen grey sky, the air heavy with the smell of wet pine and gun oil. The townsfolk had been quietly herded indoors by a warning they didn’t quite understand, shutters pulled closed, lamps snuffed out. By the time The Cards rode in, the whole place looked abandoned, a set piece arranged by an invisible hand.

And that invisible hand belonged to disgraced politician Jack King.

King’s cowardice had a smell to it, sour sweat and whiskey. Seeing an opportunity to claw his way back into relevance, and possibly line his pockets, he’d slithered to the idle remnants of the Leone Crime Family and whispered a promise: I can deliver Luca Santino to you. Whether they paid him, or whether the didn't, it hardly mattered now. But Luca believed it. Every Card believed it. And the lawmen King alerted certainly believed it. The meeting was supposed to be in the Strawberry hotel. Luca walked into the lobby first, boots echoing in the hollow silence. Something felt wrong, too still, too empty, but before he could voice it, King’s reedy voice called down from the second floor:

“The door’s jammed! I can't seem to get it open!”
A lie delivered with shaking breath.

He wasn’t stalling for talks. He was stalling for the trap to spring closed. And it did.

Lawmen erupted from alleyways, from the tree line, from behind wagons, rifles raised, boots pounding like distant artillery. They poured into the hotel from every angle, the air filled with shouts:

“DOWN! HANDS UP!”
“DROP THE IRON!”
“SHERIFF’S OFFICE!”

Luca, Huey Lewis, and Jonathan Booth were overwhelmed by the mass of bodies, wrists wrenched back, irons clapped on tight. Their guns were tossed on the desk in the Sheriff’s Office like trophies. They weren’t dead yet, only because the law wanted to savour it.

But the rest of The Cards had been watching from the cliffs above town, rifles trained downward. When they saw their people frog-marched in shackles, they ghosted down into the town, slipping through alleyways and behind outbuildings, taking up positions like wolves encircling a bear. They waited. Patient. Silent. Ready.

Inside the Sheriff’s Office, the air tasted of dust, sweat and dread. Lewis began shouting, not in panic, but as planned. Loud, barking, aggressive. “Get these damn things off me! You hear me?! You ain’t got nothin’ on us!”

The three arresting officers shifted toward him, attention pulled like moths to flame. Behind them, Luca and Booth were already moving. Luca twisted his thumb sharply, a wet pop as it dislocated, and slid his wrist free of the cuff with a hissed groan. Booth met Luca’s eyes for half a heartbeat, understanding passing silently between them. Luca shoved Booth’s revolver toward him, grabbing his own sawed-off shotgun from the desk.

Booth took a single step forward and spat:
“Hey, law dog—!”

One officer turned his head just slightly, just enough for Booth to put a bullet between his eyes, snapping it back like a kicked door. The second lawman lunged for his belt, fingers fumbling uselessly at a buckle he’d never get open. Lewis wrapped his cuffs around the man’s throat from behind, bracing a knee in his back and hauling hard. The chain bit into flesh. The officer gurgled and thrashed but went down hard and didn’t get up again.

The last officer froze as Luca barreled toward him, blood already pumping, adrenaline roaring in his skull like a locomotive. He slammed the man against the wall so hard the room seemed to lurch. With a cruel calm that contradicted the chaos around them, Luca shoved the barrel of his sawed-off between the man’s teeth. “Ciao, my friend" he snapped.

The blast turned the wall behind the officer red.

For half a second, the world went eerily quiet... a suspended breath.

Then hell opened.

Bullets screeched through the walls from outside, shredding wooden planks into splinters. Glass exploded inward like icy rain. The Cards outside opened fire from behind buildings, creating a murderous crossfire as the lawmen swarmed from every angle.

Lewis staggered back, wounded by a bullet to the shoulder, Booth forcing him to retreat out the back door as they provided him covering fire. Two of the three assisting Cards from before were cut down almost instantly, their bodies slamming into the wet mud. Booth and Luca braced themselves in the front office, firing through shattered windows and gaps in the wall, returning fire in brutal, desperate bursts. The entire building shook with each rifle shot. Ricochets screamed. Wood shrieked. Blood soaked into the floorboards in spreading pools.

Luca leaned out to fire again when a stray bullet struck the window frame inches from his face. The glass detonated into a thousand glowing shards, carving across his skin. One long, agonising sliver ripped from brow to cheek, opening the familiar slash that would mark him forever. Hot blood poured into his left eye, blinding him on that side. He stumbled but stayed standing, firing blind, firing furious. "WE GOTTA GO!” Booth roared, voice raw. Their people were routing, fleeing into the rocks and trees of the wilderness. Luca didn’t argue. With blood running down his jaw, hearing ringing and vision halved, he followed Booth through the back door, stumbling into the cold night air as bullets chased them into the dark.

The law declared him dead within hours.
They buried his name alongside the others.
But the mountains kept him alive.

Whether out of mercy or punishment, no one could ever say.


The Missing Year (1903-04)

When the gunfire started in Strawberry, Luca thought that might be where his story ended. The Cards were surrounded, the law was closing in from every direction, and the streets echoed with thunder. Luca stayed inside the Sheriff’s Office with Jonathan Booth until nearly everyone else had slipped out the back. He was reloading when a bullet shattered the window beside him, glass tore across his face, slicing deep above his left eye.

Dazed, bleeding, and half-blind, Luca stumbled out the rear door and into the dark. He ran until the sound of gunfire faded behind him, the rain washing blood from his face as he disappeared into the woods. By the next morning, the law declared The Cards finished. Luca Santino, Roma, was listed among the dead.

But he wasn’t.

He dragged himself north into the mountains, delirious with blood loss and pain. For days he wandered through snow and pine, hunted by nightmares and the ache of loss. He finally collapsed near an old hunter’s cabin tucked deep in the Grizzlies. The man who lived there, a quiet recluse named Virgil McCready, found him barely conscious at his doorstep.

Virgil patched his wounds and offered shelter. In exchange, Luca helped with whatever he could: cutting firewood, repairing traps, hunting small game. He said little of who he was, giving only a false name, Cesare Spadaro, a drifter from Lemoyne who’d lost everything to the law. Virgil never asked questions. Winter swallowed the mountains. The days were long, the nights endless. Luca spent those months healing in more ways than one. The man who’d once lived loud and laughed easy now learned silence, how to live without being seen, how to let the wind fill the empty space where a family used to be. He thought of Saffron often. Of The Cards. Of every bad choice that had led him here. Each scar that healed seemed to take a piece of the old Luca with it.

By spring, the snows thawed, and Virgil’s health began to fail. When the old man finally passed, Luca buried him beneath a pine overlooking the valley, carving a small wooden cross and saying nothing. Then, with a revolver, a worn coat, and a new name, he rode off alone.

He drifted through the summer of 1904 as Cesare Spadaro, a quiet laborer who never stayed in one town for long. He worked odd jobs, slept under the stars, and kept his face turned from anyone who might remember him. For the first time in his life, he wasn’t running toward anything. He was simply surviving.

But ghosts don’t rest forever.

By early autumn, rumors reached him through a passing trader, talk of an outlaw woman seen traveling through the state, matching Saffron’s description. That was all it took. Whatever peace he’d found in the wilderness shattered. Luca knew he couldn’t stay gone.

As the leaves began to fall, Luca returned to New Alexandria in late 1904.

He came back rugged, scarred, and quieter than anyone remembered, his once-pristine clothes replaced by weatherworn fabrics, his hair longer, his eyes sharper. The easy grin of Roma was gone, replaced by something heavier, a tired sort of resolve. He no longer cared about power, family names, or reputations. The Leone’s were gone. The Cards were gone. All that mattered now was Saffron, the one person who still tethered him to the world.




Luca as his alias, Cesare Spadaro, following his return to New Alexandria


The Return of Roma

Luca had spent weeks plastering Saffron’s face across every crooked lamppost and saloon wall from Saint Denis to Valentine. No name, no signature, just a telegram line scrawled under the simple words: “A concerned family member.”

And the replies came. Dozens. All strangers, all strangers singing the same terrible chorus.

"She’s passed."
"She was hanged."
"She was shot."
"She was executed."

Rumours woven with different threads, but every one of them pointing to the same grim tapestry. He didn’t believe it, he couldn’t. But he followed the directions anyway, clutching roses in a trembling hand, half-convinced he’d find nothing but bad tips and empty dirt. He walked slow, cautious, as though moving too quickly might make the lie real.

And then he saw her name carved into a wooden cross, stuck into the ground.

The roses fell first.
Then Luca followed.

He hit the ground hard, knees sinking into the wet soil as rain opened above him like a punishment from God. The sky cracked, water beating down on his shoulders, mixing with the dirt and the tears he’d held back since the day The Cards were torn apart. He pressed his forehead to the earth, fingers clutching at the mud as his breath broke into ragged, helpless sobs. He cried for her. He cried for what they were supposed to be... what they had tried to be.

She’d kept him grounded, and he’d done the same for her. Two broken kids who held each other together. And apart… they’d both drifted into the void. But she was the one who never came back. He stayed there for what felt like hours before finally pulling a folded letter from his coat, the one he’d written three nights earlier when the dread first started growing teeth. He laid it gently at the base of her grave, weighed down with the roses that had fallen from his useless hands.

Before he left, something inside him shifted. Hard. Cold. Purposeful.

Jack King’s name rose in his mind like a spark in dry brush. If that Strawberry setup had never happened, The Cards would never have scattered. If The Cards hadn’t scattered, maybe... just maybe... they would’ve been here to protect her.

But Luca wasn’t a man built for “maybe.” He needed certainty. And certainty required action.

That night, long after the mud had dried on his boots, he travelled to King's bank office, and stabbed into his door a death threat with a lance knife; the unmistakable calling card of The Cards.

The message was short and sharp...

Luca was coming for him.

And for the first time since he’d collapsed at Saffron’s grave, Luca felt something.
Not comfort.
Not peace.

But direction.

Affiliations 

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The Leone Crime Family (FORMER)

Luca joined the Leone Family at a time when he was searching for structure, purpose, and a place to funnel the violence he’d spent so long trying to steer. Under Ash Smith and Dante Leone, he found what he thought was stability, a disciplined, orderly world where loyalty had weight and every job had meaning. His early days were promising: he proved himself quickly, earning respect as reliable security aboard the Grand Korrigan riverboat and becoming one of the few men Dante trusted for dangerous work.

But the longer he stayed, the more he saw the rot creeping in from within. Internal politics, questionable promotions, and the rise of liabilities like Marcu Ghilloti soured his faith in the family he had bled for. The breaking point came when he was kidnapped and tortured by Ryker Dawson, and the family refused him permission to retaliate. Feeling abandoned, undervalued, and betrayed, Luca walked away from the Leones. By breaking omertà, he condemned himself to death in their eyes, and Ash soon ordered the hit that forced him into hiding.

The Cards (FORMER)

Luca’s path to the Cards was never planned, it was born from desperation, survival, and the one person he still trusted: Saffron Humblecut. After the Leones branded him a traitor and began hunting him down, Saffron negotiated on his behalf, convincing the Cards to take in their former enemy. With the alias Roma, Luca joined their ranks not out of ambition, but because they offered something he had been denied in the Leones: genuine loyalty without deception.

Life among the Cards rekindled his sense of belonging. Here, he fought beside people who valued him, who defended him, and who didn’t treat him as expendable. The Cards became a surrogate family, and Luca rode with them through escalating conflict with the Leones, a war that culminated in the Great Fire of Saint Denis, where the Cards burned Leone property to ash. He remained with them because they never betrayed him. But after being set-up by Jack King, the Leone's and the law men of Strawberry, The Cards fell apart, going into hiding after many of their members were slaughtered. Leading Luca into his hiding in the Grizzlies, after narrowly escaping with his life.

Quotes 

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• "Ciao Ciao"
• "That feels like an aggression"
• "I don't speak English very well?"

Trivia 

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• Luca goes through around 6 boxes of cigarettes a day
• He has never seen a dead body
• He learnt a few things from his mother in helping injured people
• Luca rarely takes part in fist fights
• He hates going to New Austin and Valentine
• The Roman Trading Co. was owned by Luca and heavily focused on lumber trade
• His favourite shirt is his pink one
• Luca spends 2 hours to perfect his quiff each morning
• The most facial hair Luca has managed to grow is stubble
• He meticulously cleans his revolver whenever he can
• He knows how to play multiple instruments including the piano, guitar, and concertina
• The main reason Luca joined The Cards was due to seeing how well they treated his sister, Saffron. Something the Leone's never did.
• Luca was not aware of Saffron's execution
• He can, in fact, grow some facial hair