Bad Bishop chronicles a woman’s reclamation of agency within a violently patriarchal system that seeks to render her voiceless. Lila begins the novel as a pawn, her identity and autonomy sacrificed to her family’s machinations. Her journey from being passive to assertive argues that true agency isn’t granted by others but is manufactured, sometimes through defiance. By confronting her abusers and asserting her own desires, Lila demonstrates that power can be reclaimed not by escaping systems but by learning to manipulate the rules that once confined her.

Lila has grown up experiencing powerlessness masquerading as a form of protection. Her mother’s scheme to feign a developmental disability has saved her from being married off into another crime family but strips her of her ability to speak, make choices, or form an identity. She’s treated as her father’s “pretty little burden” (14), an object to be managed rather than a person with desires. This enforced helplessness makes her a target; the rape that she survives reveals a brutal consequence of being isolated and perceived as incapable of resistance. Her life is a carefully constructed cage, and the attack proves that this cage offers no real safety, only the illusion of it.

Lila’s path to empowerment begins with physical acts of defiance. On her wedding night, she shoots Tiernan, fearing that he’s going to rape her. It’s the first time she uses violence to reject victimhood and assert control over her body. While Lila’s experience of rape and subsequent forced marriage are profoundly traumatic, they also spur her out of passive acceptance. She vows that she will never be victimized again.

Her second major act of reclamation is choosing to speak to Tiernan, breaking years of silence. Her first words to him are a confrontation: “Go ahead. Fuck her. I’ll go find myself a plaything, too” (159). This verbal defiance is as significant as her physical resistance. By speaking, she shatters the lie that has defined her and forces Tiernan—and, by extension, the world—to acknowledge her as a sentient, intelligent individual with her own will. Moreover, she refuses to passively accept her husband’s infidelity, even though most of the women around her, including her own mother, have spent their entire marriages mutely tolerating infidelity.

Ultimately, Lila’s agency is solidified through her control over her own narrative. In the novel’s final chapters, she reveals that her memory has returned and that she knows that Tiernan’s brother, Fintan, was her rapist. Tiernan kills Fintan to avenge her, but Lila’s power comes from her choice to keep this truth a secret from the rest of her family. This decision protects the fragile peace of her new life with Tiernan and their son, Gennaro. Her private reflection that if Tiernan hadn’t killed Fintan, “[she’d] have done it [her]self” (427), marks her complete transformation. No longer a victim awaiting rescue, she is a woman who is prepared to enact her own justice. By choosing what to conceal and what to reveal, Lila demonstrates that true agency lies not in escaping her world but in mastering it.

In the brutal landscape of Bad Bishop, love is a liability. Part of why Tiernan is so resistant to acknowledging his growing feelings for Lila is because loving her puts both of them in danger. Given this context, love must manifest as protection. In a world defined by cruelty, the most powerful expression of love is a willingness to both kill for and be remade by another, showing that destruction and healing are two sides of the same coin.

For a man like Tiernan, built on emotional detachment, love is depicted as an unnerving and destructive surrender. He has lived his life as “Deathless,” a man who feels nothing and fears nothing. Falling for Lila threatens this entire identity. When he finally confesses his feelings, he frames it as an all-consuming force, telling her, “I love you with a force that could destroy planets and universes, Lila” (353). This isn’t love as a peaceful sanctuary but love as an overwhelming power that shatters his carefully constructed nihilism. For Tiernan, to love is to allow a vulnerability that feels like self-annihilation, yet this very destruction gives him his first true reason to live, canceling his long-planned “self-destruction project” (a plan to die by suicide one year after killing Igor Rasputin). After a deli worker assaults Lila, Tiernan has the man’s penis cut off—a grotesque act framed as a twisted form of justice enacted out of love. This reframing argues that in their world, violence is a primary language, and its use in defense of a loved one is love’s most sincere expression.

The manifestation of love as ferocious protectiveness occurs in contexts other than Tiernan and Lila’s relationship. During their time as children in a Siberian work camp, Tierney and Tiernan forged a deep bond that continues into adulthood. Tiernan adores his sister, and his love for Lila is all the more striking because it’s the first time his care for someone else eclipses his sense of care toward Tierney. When he visits his sister in the hospital, she points out that he went to Lila’s room first, gracefully accepting that Lila is now his first priority. Chiara’s love for her only daughter manifests so powerfully as protectiveness that she makes flawed decisions to lie about Lila. Her elaborate deception is ultimately harmful to Lila, but it originates with Chiara’s awareness that girls and women are unsafe in the violent and patriarchal world of organized crime. The decisions that characters make when driven by love and a desire to protect are sometimes the wrong ones, but they’re shaped by a context where no one and nothing is truly safe.