Epilogue - Tone #4
Inside the confessional, the woman made no sound.
The church held its breath.The priest in me prayed.
The scarred man reached the end of the pew.
My grip tightened.
For one breath, Father Demitri Marco disappeared.
He was there, and then he was not.
In his place stood the man I had buried under scripture, service, and years of quiet obedience.
A man who knew the body as a structure of weaknesses.
A man who knew how easily a throat closed under pressure; a man who had once listened to another man beg for mercy and felt only a clean, terrible calm.
The old me rose like I was being pulled from deep water. Cold. Patient. Ready.
The scarred man turned his head toward the confessional curtain.
I shifted my weight.
Then the tall man snapped, “We’ve wasted enough time here.”
The scarred man paused.
The tall one’s face had tightened with caution. Perhaps some long-dead instinct had warned him that stepping closer would turn a search into a confession.
“We are disturbing the Father,” he said.
The scarred man looked annoyed, but he obeyed.
Slowly, my fingers loosened around the brass.
The tall man faced me again and bowed his head. “Forgive us, Father, for the disturbance.”
“There is nothing to forgive if your intentions are good.”
His mouth tightened.
“We will leave you to your prayers.”
“I will pray for the woman you are looking for.”
The young one made the sign of the cross again.
The tall one held my gaze for one long moment before turning away.
They walked back down the nave, their footsteps echoing beneath the high, damp ceiling. None of them spoke. The rain grew louder as they opened the doors. Wind swept in, making the sanctuary lamp flicker wildly.
Then they were outside.
The doors closed.
I listened to their footsteps on the stone outside.
Three car doors slammed. The engine idled.
Still, I waited. A minute. Two.
The car pulled away too slowly. I crossed to the nearest window and stood just out of sight, watching their headlights slide across the wet road. They paused at the corner, watching the church.
I remained still until the red glow of their tail-lights vanished beyond the bend. Only then did I breathe. The breath hurt.
I looked down at my hand.
The candle snuffer was still there.
My knuckles were white around the handle.
I set it down carefully, as though I could still do something foolish with it.
Then I moved. The confessional curtain opened with a soft scrape.
The strange woman was slumped against the wall, her head tipped sideways, her dark hair stuck to her cheek with blood and rain. In the dim red light, the bruises on her throat looked almost black.
“Signorina.”
There was no response.
I knelt in front of her and pressed two fingers beneath her jaw.
Her pulse fluttered against my skin.
It came fast but fragile. She was still alive.
“Can you hear me?”
Nothing.
I checked her pupils as best I could in the poor light. One eye was swollen almost shut, but she reacted faintly when I lifted her lid. Her breathing was shallow, uneven, and far too quick.
Shock. Concussion, perhaps. Blood loss. Exposure. Fear that had pushed her body beyond its limits.
I looked toward the church doors.
The Coccicos would not go far.
Not if they had tracked her here. The young one had seen the smear near the pew. Shame had driven them out, but suspicion would bring them back. And when they returned, they would not ask politely.
I slid one arm beneath her knees and the other behind her back, lifting her from the booth. Her head fell against my chest.
For years, that strip of white at my throat had been a wall. Between past and present. Between sin and service. Between the man I had been and the man I had made myself become. Her blood crossed it without effort.
I carried her toward the side door, away from the nave, away from the saints with their peeling eyes and silent judgment.
At the threshold, I stopped. I looked down at the woman in my arms. She was a stranger. A life placed in my hands without my consent. I should have called the police or my bishop. I should have done any number of clean, lawful, holy things.
Instead, I carried her into the night through the side passage, locked the church behind me, and went to the one place I knew men like Coccico still feared enough not to enter carelessly.
CHAPTER 3: Demitri
The woman lay across the back seat of my car, wrapped in the old wool blanket I kept in the trunk for winter visits to the sick.
Her blood had already seeped through the fabric in dark patches.
Every few seconds, I glanced at her through the rear-view mirror, watching for movement.
For proof that I had not carried a dead woman out of my church.
Her chest rose. Fell. Rose again. But it wasn’t enough.
The wipers scraped across the windshield with a dull, frantic rhythm. Rain lashed the glass. The road curved between cypress trees and low stone walls, silver and black beneath the headlights. Beyond them, the countryside stretched quiet and indifferent to the night I was having.
I took the bend too sharply. The tyres slid.
I corrected without thinking, one hand steady on the wheel, the other braced against the gear stick. The old instincts were still there, buried beneath years of prayer and fasting and sermons on mercy and forgiveness.
In the back seat, the woman made a small sound.
I looked up at the mirror.
Her head had rolled toward the window.
I tightened my grip on the wheel until the leather complained beneath my palm.
“Stay with me,” I whispered.
Santa Caterina sat on the hill beyond town, older than the road that led to it and less welcoming than most people expected a convent to be.
It had been built from pale stone that had darkened with age and weather, its walls high, its windows narrow, its iron gate crowned with rust and thorns of climbing roses.
In spring, the roses made the place look soft.
At night, in the rain, it looked more like a fortress that had once been considered beautiful and now merely survived.
I drove up to the gate and killed the headlights. For a moment, the world went black.
The woman’s breathing rasped in the silence behind me.
I stepped out into the rain, crossed to the intercom, and pressed the buzzer. Static crackled.
Then a woman’s voice came through, brittle with sleep.
“Yes?”
“It’s Father Demitri.”
A pause.
“At this hour, Father, you had better be dying or bringing someone who is.”
I looked back at the car.
The woman had not moved.
“I need help.”
The gate buzzed. I pushed it open and drove through.
By the time I reached the courtyard, the convent doors were already opening. Light spilled across wet stone. Three figures stood beneath the archway in grey habits, their veils dark against the yellow glow behind them.
Sister Marina was in front.
She was seventy if she was a day, with a face carved by years of prayer and eyes that made grown men reconsider lying. I had once seen her reduce a wealthy donor to embarrassment because he called the women in her care “unfortunates.”
“They are not unfortunates,” she had said. “They are survivors. The unfortunate ones are the men who mistook them for weak.”
The donor had not returned. Sister Marina had not missed him.
She took one look at me as I opened the back door of the car. Then she saw the woman.
Her expression did not soften, and instantly I knew she understood the situation for what it was. Delicate women gasped at violence. Women like Sister Marina measured it.
“Bring her in,” she ordered.
I slid one arm beneath the woman’s shoulders and the other beneath her knees. She was colder now. Her hair clung to my wrist, wet with a mixture of rain and blood.
The sisters moved around us quickly, without panic. One held the door open. Another shut it behind me and threw the bolt. A third hurried down the corridor ahead of us, calling for blankets and hot water.
The convent hallway was narrow, lit by wall lamps that threw soft pools of gold over cracked plaster and framed icons. Somewhere deeper in the building, a woman coughed. Somewhere else, a child whimpered in sleep.
Santa Caterina did not advertise what it was.
To the town, it was a convent.
To women with nowhere to run, it was a door that opened when every other door had become a roadblock.
The sisters ran a small medical refuge in the east wing.
Not officially, because official things attracted official questions, and official questions too often led frightened people back into the hands they had escaped.
The women who came here were abused wives, undocumented migrants, girls who had fled farms and factories and men with locked rooms. The sisters treated wounds, arranged documents, hid names, fed children, and lied to anyone who came looking.
They lied better than most criminals I had known. Perhaps because they did it for the right reasons.
“Here,” Sister Marina said.
She led me into a small infirmary with two iron beds and a locked medicine cabinet. A wooden crucifix was mounted high on the wall between the two beds.
I laid the woman on the nearest bed. Her hand slipped from the blanket and fell limp against the mattress.
Rope marks circled both wrists, something I hadn’t noticed before.
I stared at them.
The skin was torn in places, possibly from struggling against her restraints. It was obvious she had struggled long enough to bleed.
“Father,” Sister Marina said.
I looked up.
Her eyes flicked to my hands.
I had not realised I was still gripping the edge of the bed. I released it.
“Sister Joanne,” Sister Marina called.
A woman in her late fifties entered with a medical bag in one hand and spectacles perched low on her nose. Sister Joanne had been a nurse before taking vows. She still moved like one.
She glanced at me. Then at the woman.
“What happened?”
“She came into the church,” I said. “Men were following her.”
“What men?”
“Coccico.”
The room changed.
Sister Joanne’s mouth tightened.