Chapter 2
Chapter two
Kneeling hadn’t always hurt this badly. Before Spain, before the nuns and their lessons in obedience, I’d kneeled in church the way any fourteen-year-old girl did—restless, distracted, thinking about homework or friends or whatever boy sat three pews over. Not pain. Not submission. Not survival.
Tonight, my knees burned because I chose to be here.
The thin cushion on the kneeler did nothing to soften the press of bone against the hard surface beneath.
I shifted my weight a millimeter at a time, ignoring the pain the way I’d been conditioned to—ignoring the pressure, the heat, the dull throb building behind my kneecaps.
It still wasn’t as bad as the Catholic boarding school in Spain.
They made us kneel on bare stone, rice, and even gravel that bit through skin until it broke. I spent hours kneeling while a nun with kind eyes and a hard mouth reminded me that obedience was love, and that disobedience meant I didn’t love God enough.
Tonight was nothing compared to that.
I wasn’t actually praying.
My hands were folded in front of me, fingers laced, thumbs crossed, but my thoughts were all over the place.
My gaze was aimed at the votive candles.
I even moved my lips once in a while, soundlessly pretending to recite my prayers.
From the back of the church or for any cameras spying on me, I was sure it looked heartfelt enough.
It was an act. Every inch of this day had been a performance.
I’d asked to come for night prayers, not because I needed God, but because I needed a break from my father.
I needed away from the suffocating air in Gracie Mansion.
Away from the donors, the political aides with their tight smiles, the Secret Service wannabes, the assistants with their tablets.
Everyone pretending Father was holy and good.
This was the only way I could get ten minutes without someone hovering over me.
The guard my father had hired to keep tabs on my every move was posted outside the front door, useless as ever.
I’d noticed how inept he was from the moment he picked me up at the airport.
Typical rent a cop, counting the minutes until he could go home and tell his wife he’d protected the mayor’s daughter by doing nothing at all.
If I wanted to, I could probably slip past him.
But that wasn’t my plan. I didn’t have the energy to run tonight. I just wanted the day over with.
I stared at the candles, letting my thoughts slip back to the years when life had been easy.
When I was little, this church felt enormous—the smell of incense wrapping around me, choirs echoing off the vaulted ceilings, sunlight painting the pews in rainbows.
The pageantry of it all had left me breathless, certain God Himself lived somewhere in the beams of colored light.
My father’s hand had swallowed mine as we walked up the steps.
He always sang too loudly and slightly off-key, but he smiled while he did it, and my mother would squeeze his arm as if it were charming rather than embarrassing.
She’d wrap an arm around me, her perfume drifting around us while she rocked softly, listening and praying.
Now when I closed my eyes, I didn’t see color. I just saw the back of my eyelids.
The world believed Mother had died in a car wreck, just a tragic accident on a snowy Manhattan road.
That was the story my father’s people fed the press.
It let him play the grieving father, a husband who’d suffered, a man who understood loss in a way voters could relate to—all while keeping the people actually at fault far from accountability.
I remembered the truth clearly.
Construction scaffolding boxed in the sidewalk beneath a gray winter sky. We were arguing about something small—my skirt length, my friends, a boy I’d kissed in school. Street noise blurred in my ears, the way sound sometimes does right before something bad happens.
Then the world crashed down.
I heard the crack and scream of metal giving way. The roar of collapsing scaffolding. My mother’s hands were on my shoulders, shoving me sideways with more strength than I thought she had. I felt the shock of pavement against my palms and knees. Heard the sound of her body being crushed.
A slab of concrete had pinned her, dust rising around us. Her eyes went wide and wild for a heartbeat, searching for me, finding me. Then nothing.
The company that owned the site had money. A lot of it. The kind that bought lawyers, bought silence, bought inspectors—and bought my father.
He agreed to the car-wreck story and accepted their large check.
I wasn’t in the room when they made the decision, but I heard enough through doors and walls later.
They talked about optics, about how a man’s response to tragedy could make him look stronger, more dependable.
Someone suggested a simple line—“Shannon lost control; the weather was awful”—and the room agreed.
Clean, sympathetic, believable. Good for the campaign.
He chose ambition over truth. Image over justice. Himself over her. Over me.
Not long after that, halfway through my sophomore year, he had decided I was too much of a risk to have around.
Too loud. Too angry. Too much of her face walking his halls when he needed to be focused.
He said it was for my safety. His people said the city wasn’t safe for the daughter of a rising mayor. “We can’t risk another tragedy.”
My father sold Spain to me as an escape—a chance to get away from the grief, from the city that reminded me of everything I’d lost. It was supposed to be a fresh start in a place he said would keep me safe while he stepped into the responsibilities of the mayor’s office.
He called it a place to heal. But the place he sent me to didn’t deal in mercy or healing.
It dealt in discipline, submission, and quiet cruelty wrapped in the language of virtue.
Spain wasn’t about my safety but his convenience, and in the end, it became a prison.
The boarding school sat on a hill above the beautiful city of Madrid.
We wore uniforms and learned what not to be.
Every infraction had a consequence. The word disobedient was used as a weapon if I didn’t stand, sit, speak, or breathe quite right.
And if I pushed back too hard, there was always the convent next door.
“Real Carmelites dedicate their whole lives to submission,” the headmistress had said once, her voice sweet and poisonous. “If you can’t behave with us, perhaps you belong with them.”
Silence. Simplicity. Isolation. No doors out.
No thanks.
I’d learned early that purity was never about God. It was about control. Cover the girls. Break their wills. Shape them into something quiet enough that powerful men could take advantage of them.
My knees burned, snapping me back to the present.
I’d donned this ridiculous costume and dragged myself to this place tonight, desperate for some mental space. The brown wool was itchy; the long scapular and mantle were uncomfortable. The veil rubbed my forehead, and heat clung to my skin under all the layers.
Part of me wanted to stand up and tear the whole thing off, right here in front of the altar. To set the habit on fire and watch it burn.
I wouldn’t, but damn, I wanted to.
This day had already done a good enough job of making me want to torch the world.
We were at St. Patrick’s this morning. Watched from every angle, there was no escaping the constant scrutiny from the cameras or the crowded church.
My father and I had sat in the front pew with his hand wrapped over mine, as though he owned my soul.
Reporters whispered about how special it was that his daughter had given her life to God.
I kept my eyes lowered, my hands still, my jaw clenched so tight it hurt.
Then we were shuffled back to Gracie Mansion for the rest of the day for holiday festivities. Donors, caterers, staff—old money, new money, and all the dirty money in between—poured into one building dressed in twinkling lights and white tablecloths.
He introduced me to everyone as if I were some saint. “This is my daughter, Scarlett. She’s chosen a spiritual calling.” As if he hadn’t shipped me off to silence me.
He went on and on about integrity, cleaning up the city, standing up to organized crime, and the brilliant future he thought he deserved.
This was his last week in Gracie Mansion. A new mayor would be sworn in on January first. But he wasn’t afraid of losing power. He was already pivoting toward bigger things: a special election, a vacant Senate seat. A bigger stage. Bigger donors. Bigger devils.
His staff had been preparing us to move into The Peregrine Hotel & Residences after the holidays, a penthouse with a park view and staff on call.
It was a beautiful place, but not meant for me.
Soon enough, I’d be sent back to Madrid, to the secret life I’d carved out the hard way.
I had an apartment there, a small slice of freedom I’d scraped together from the cracks of my father’s lies.
And I had the files I’d collected—lists of names and little bombs of truth, the kind that kept certain people far too terrified of what else I might have.
Enough to make them think twice about trying to lock me up again.
Father would lose his mind if he knew.
Too bad he wasn’t someone I could ever trust to help me burn the monastery down.
I shifted my weight, trying to give my knees some relief. As I moved, a shiver crawled up the back of my neck.
The feeling hit me all at once.
Someone was watching me.
I went still. No flinch, no turn of my head.
There were prickles along my arms, the sensation of being scrutinized.