Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
Shae
The chapel smells like old wax and incense, a heady scent that sets my teeth on edge.
I explored the bell tower yesterday, following a draft that tasted like ocean salt even this far inland.
There’s a narrow staircase that spirals up like a seashell.
The hinges on the old iron door that was meant to keep intruders out is rusted and easy enough to push through with my shoulder.
The wood of the banister was worn smooth where hands have slid over it for decades: priests, sisters, girls sent here with swollen bellies and secrets, women who came to hide from men and found themselves hiding among the cloisters.
It’s funny, the way silence feels holy to people who’ve never had to be quiet to survive.
The chapel sits below the bell tower, accessible through a side door that’s supposed to stay locked. It isn’t locked. Of course it isn’t. People who rely on God for protection tend to get sloppy about actual security.
Old candles line the aisle in glass sleeves, the wax still pooled and layered like old tears.
Rows of pews face forward in obedient lines. The altar sits at the front, raised two steps, flanked by statues—Mary with her sweet blank face, Jesus with his ribs and his devotion fetish, saints with their serene suffering.
The pulpit stands to the left, carved wood, polished by touch. I walk down the aisle, slow, letting my shoes click on the stone. When I reach the pulpit, I step up, one foot on each shallow step, and I stand where the priest stands, above everyone, looking down.
I can see why they love it.
Power is intoxicating in any costume.
I place my palms on the lectern. The wood is cool. There are tiny grooves where someone’s rings have scratched it over time. I slide my fingers along the edge, and the front panel shifts.
A hidden hinge.
Of course.
The lectern door opens with the faintest click, like it’s relieved to finally confess. Inside is an old leather-bound Bible. Thick. Heavy. A relic. The cover is dark, cracked at the corners, like it has been carried through wars and baptisms and funerals.
Etched into the leather is a pomegranate.
I pause.
That’s… interesting.
It isn’t a cross. It isn’t a dove. It isn’t a lamb. It’s a fruit.
A fruit with a myth.
I lift it out carefully. The leather is warm from the trapped air in the compartment. I run my thumb over the pomegranate’s etched seeds. Each seed is a tiny oval, precise, deliberate.
Someone took their time with this.
Someone wanted it to be recognized.
I open the book.
The pages are not printed.
They’re written.
Ink, faded in places, bled through in others. Different slants, different pressures. Handwriting changes like personalities. Some letters are elegant loops, some are sharp scratches, some are neat like a teacher’s.
This is not scripture.
This is something else.
The first page makes my throat tighten, not with emotion, but with a familiar kind of alertness—the way you feel when you spot a threat across a crowded room.
In the center of the page, in thick, dark strokes, it says:
DAUGHTERS OF PERSEPHONE
The words look like blood.
Not literal blood. I’m not stupid. I know the difference between theater and reality.
But whoever wrote it wanted the illusion of blood.
Wanted the drama.
Wanted the warning.
Below it, smaller, in a different hand:
Part manifesto.
Part case study.
Rules.
Corrections.
Commandments.
In the margins, there are scribbles, arrows, little boxes like someone was editing a legal document.
Whole lines are crossed out in such heavy strokes the paper is torn.
Some sections are blacked out with what looks like charcoal.
There are smudges that aren’t ink. Rust-colored stains that could be anything and still feel like a dare.
I flip a few pages. Titles appear. Dates. Locations.
A hotel suite in Miami.
A private school in Connecticut.
A villa in Santorini.
A hedge-fund gala in Manhattan.
Every setting glossy, exclusive, expensive—beautiful enough to hide rot.
Elegance and violence. The oldest pairing.
Each entry is written like a file.
Not confession.
Not diary.
Observation.
There are headings:
Weakness.
Witness.
Collateral.
A crime justified.
The words sit on the page like bones.
My mouth twitches. Not a smile. A recognition.
“Pretty,” I murmur, alone in the chapel, my voice swallowed by stone. “Polished. Psychotic.”
It echoes faintly. The saints don’t react. Mary keeps staring past me like I’m not worth her suffering.
Good.
I don’t want an audience.
I want proof.
I turn until I find an entry that feels… familiar. Not because it matches my crimes. Because it matches my shape.
The handwriting is smaller, cramped, furious. Like the writer had to fight for every inch of space on the page.
The entry begins with a plain line:
She called it therapy.
Then:
She called it help.
Then, in the margin, someone else has written:
She called it ownership.
A third hand has underlined that word twice.
I read on.
It’s about a girl who grew up in a house where love was conditional and silence was currency. A mother who disappeared. A father who performed regret like an actor. A mentor who watched her bleed and took notes.
I turn the page.
There’s a list, and it’s so simple it’s insulting.
betrayal
rage
opportunity
a body no one will miss
Under it, a question in a different ink, softer, almost careful:
What happens to women like us?
My eyes linger on the words.
Not because I feel seen.
Because I feel challenged.
There’s a difference.
People always want a myth. They want to take a woman like me and make her either a monster or a victim, because those are easy boxes. Easy stories.
But this isn’t a story.
This is a system.
This is a lineage.
Someone else has been doing this longer than I have.
Heirs to darkness.
Queens of secrets.
Victims turned executioners.
I don’t shiver. I’m not that kind of girl.
But something in my chest tightens. I flip backward and forward, skimming. Names are absent. Everything is coded. No full identities, just first initials, occupations, “husband,” “patron,” “sister,” “the girl with the scar,” “the one who prayed.”
Whoever built this wanted it to survive discovery.
And whoever hid it here wanted it to be found.
By who?
Someone like me?
Someone who’d recognize the pomegranate and think: Underworld. Descent. Seeds.
Persephone ate the seeds.
She became queen of the place nobody wants to go.
I close the journal slowly, my fingers pressing into the leather cover.
The chapel is silent.
But it feels… crowded.
Not with ghosts.
With women.
With intent.
I tuck the journal under my arm like it belongs to me—which, honestly, it does now. Finders keepers. God should’ve put a better lock on the door.
I pass framed photos on the wall near the entrance—old black-and-white shots of sisters with stern faces, girls in uniforms, the convent garden in bloom. Everyone looks clean. Everyone looks saved.
I wonder how many of them were just hiding.
I leave the chapel with the calm of someone carrying contraband through an airport. Smile on the inside. Nothing on the outside.
Back at the house, I make peppermint tea and curl up on the sofa with my mug, the journal open on my lap.
The leather creaks as if it’s stretching after a long sleep.
I find the question again.
What happens to women like us?
Who wrote that?
Who needed an answer?
I stare at it until the letters blur slightly, not because I’m emotional, but because my eyes are tired. Being a symbol is exhausting. So is being underestimated.
My pen is on the coffee table. I pick it up and hover the tip over the page.
The obvious answers come first. The ones people want.
We die.
We get caught.
We get worshipped.
We get punished.
We become cautionary tales.
We become Netflix specials.
We become hashtags.
We become jokes men tell at dinner parties when they want to pretend they’re not afraid of us.
I could write any of those.
But I don’t like obvious. Obvious is for people who get caught.
I don’t answer.
Instead, I put the pen down hard and draw a thick line through the question—one brutal stroke. Then another. Crossed out so aggressively the paper dents.
Because the question itself is sentimental.
It assumes we’re a category.
A type.
A doomed sisterhood in matching black dresses, trading knives and trauma like recipes.
No.
I lean in and write in the margin, neat and small, as if I’m correcting a student’s work:
Outcome-dependent.
That’s it.
No confession.
No philosophy.
No justification.
Just the truth that matters.
If you win, you’re a survivor.
If you lose, you’re a cautionary tale.
If you’re lucky, you’re both.
I sit back, sip my tea, and listen to the house settle around me. I run my thumb over the pomegranate again, over the etched seeds.
Someone started this.
Someone curated it.
Someone wants it continued.
I shut the journal and rest my hand on top of it like a promise.
“Queens of secrets,” I murmur to the empty room, amused. “How dramatic.”
And yet.
I can’t deny it.
There’s a comfort in finding proof that you’re not alone in your particular brand of wrong.
Not comfort like warmth.
Comfort like a weapon fitting perfectly in your hand.
I finish my tea. I leave the mug on the table without washing it, because I’m not here to be a good girl. I’m here to understand the game that was being played long before anyone bothered to invite me.
As I stand, the journal heavy under my arm, my gaze flicks to the window. Outside, the convent grounds are dark, the garden statues pale shapes in moonlight. The bell tower rises above the roofline, silent.
Watching.
I smirk to myself.
“Fine,” I whisper, as if the building can hear me. “I’m watching too.”
And then I take the journal back to my room, close the door, and slide it under my mattress like a secret that has teeth.
The next morning I show up at Hearth & Hands looking like a Hallmark card. The director waves from her office window, mouthing You’re an inspiration. I mouth Thank you back, teeth gleaming.
Inside, I organize donations, talk to a girl named Marissa who’s trying to escape her abusive ex, and file it all away. Not the clothes—the stories.
I think of the journal I found last night.
The Daughters of Persephone.
I think about how every woman at Hearth & Hands thinks I’m their ally.
And I am.
Until I need something else.