Chapter 9
Chapter nine
ISABELLA
The locks on my door were engaged last night—I heard all seven click into place.
But this morning, when I test the handle, it turns freely.
Supervised freedom, Daphne explains with that too-bright smile when she arrives.
Guests are welcome to move about during daylight hours, as long as they stay within designated areas.
Franco and Manuel have been given the same arrangement, apparently. I see them at breakfast, seated at a table near the kitchen where they can watch the exits. Their weapons are gone—confiscated "for everyone's safety"—but they're mobile. Present. That will have to be enough for now.
I find a quiet alcove near the library—or what passes for quiet here, where even the silence feels curated. I'm about to slip inside when voices drift from an open doorway down the hall.
Theos. And someone crying.
I should keep walking. Should find Franco, find my room, find anywhere that isn't here. But my feet carry me closer instead, pressing myself against the wall where I can hear without being seen.
"—don't understand why it's taking so long." The Calabrian's voice, thick with exhaustion. "You said the proximity would help. You said being here, with the others, with the energy of belief—"
"Healing doesn't follow our timeline." Theos's voice is different than I've heard it before. Softer. Almost tender. "Your nephew's body has been through tremendous trauma. The conventional treatments failed because they were fighting the disease instead of listening to it."
"Listening to it?" The Calabrian sounds desperate, grasping. "It's cancer. What is there to listen to?"
"Everything." A pause. I can almost hear Theos leaning forward, that intense focus he brings to every interaction.
"Cancer isn't random. It's the body trying to communicate something it can't say any other way.
A wound that never healed. A grief that was never processed.
A truth that was buried so deep it had to claw its way out through the cells themselves. "
I should roll my eyes. Should file this away as pseudoscientific nonsense, the kind of thing desperate people pay thousands to hear.
But something in my chest tightens.
Because I remember the months before my diagnosis.
The way I pushed through exhaustion, ignored every signal my body sent, danced until my feet bled because stopping meant thinking, and thinking meant feeling, and feeling meant drowning in everything I couldn't control.
My father's coldness. My mother's grave.
Missing Antonio. Missing his mom. The growing certainty that I was performing a life instead of living one.
What if my body had been trying to tell me something?
No. I shake my head, pressing my palms against the cool stone wall. That's insane. Cancer is cell mutation, genetic damage, biological bad luck. It's not metaphor. It's not message. It's just disease.
Cancer happens to even the calmest of people.
But Theos keeps talking, and his voice is like warm water, like the feeling of finally being understood after years of being looked through.
"Your nephew is learning to listen," he says.
"To trust his body's wisdom instead of fighting it.
The blood work we're doing—Isabella's contribution—it's not magic.
It's medicine the conventional world hasn't accepted yet.
The antibodies in her system learned something during her survival.
Something we can teach other immune systems to learn. "
"And the ceremonies? The meditation? The—" The Calabrian's voice drops. "The faith?"
"Faith is just focused intention. When a room full of people believe something is possible, they create a field of expectation that the body responds to.
Placebo effect, if you want the clinical term.
But I prefer to call it what it is: the power of being seen.
Of being believed in. Of having people hold space for your healing when you're too exhausted to hold it yourself. "
I think of Naomi, sitting beside my hospital bed, refusing to leave even when the doctors' faces said we now had to wait. I think of the way Antonio watched me during the SVT, like he was willing me to survive through sheer stubborn force.
I didn't call that faith. I called it love.
But maybe they're not as different as I thought.
Footsteps. Someone moving. I slip back around the corner before I can be seen, heart pounding, mind racing.
Theos is good. Better than I expected. He's not selling snake oil—he's selling something far more dangerous.
He's selling the feeling of being understood by someone who sees your pain and doesn't flinch.
He's selling community to the lonely, meaning to the grieving, control to people who've lost everything.
And wrapped inside all that genuine comfort, hidden like a razor blade in an apple, is whatever he actually wants from me.
I need to remember that. Need to hold onto it, even when his voice makes something in me want to believe.
Because I've been someone's miracle before. I know what it costs.
As I walk around the compound, I find the Irish woman—Mrs. O'Brien, though she insists I call her Siobhan—pruning roses in the garden.
"They grow wild here," she says without looking up. Her accent is lilting, musical—Irish, though something about it feels practiced now, worn smooth by repetition. "Dr. Theos says they respond to intention. To love."
I crouch beside her, ignoring the twinge in my knee. "That's... romantic."
"Isn't it?" She finally looks at me, and her eyes are bright with something that might be hope or might be fever. "My daughter loved roses. She had a garden at our estate—grew seventeen varieties, could identify each one by scent alone." Her voice catches. "Before."
Before. That word again. Everyone here has a before.
"I'm sorry," I say, because what else is there?
"áine was a violinist. Seventeen. She had a scholarship to Juilliard—same as you had for dance, I understand, before the cancer.
" Siobhan's hands still on the pruning shears.
"Meningitis. From diagnosis to death in thirty-six hours.
I didn't even get to say goodbye. She was practicing Vivaldi when I left for work that morning.
By the time I got to the hospital, she was already—"
She can't finish. Doesn't need to.
"Dr. Theos says she's not gone. Not really.
" Siobhan's voice takes on a quality I recognize—the fervent brightness of someone who's found something to believe in.
"He says the soul lingers, waiting for the right conditions to return.
The blood of someone who's already beaten death.
.." She looks at me, and her eyes are wet with terrible hope.
"You came back from cancer, Isabella. Why couldn't she come back from this? "
I don't have an answer. How do you tell a grieving mother that the hope keeping her alive is almost certainly a lie?
"The treatments help," she continues, not waiting for my response.
"The meditations. The ceremonies. I can feel her sometimes, during the rituals.
Feel her close." She touches her heart. "Dr. Theos says when the conditions are right—when we have enough believers, enough faith, enough of the right kind of blood—she'll return to me. Whole. Alive. Like she never left."
I think about what I would have believed during chemo. What lies I would have swallowed for one more day, one more hour.
"How long have you been here?" I ask carefully.
"Eight months. Since I sold the estate." She returns to her pruning, movements precise, automatic. "Dr. Theos says the proximity to other believers strengthens the connection. So I stay. I wait. I tend the roses áine would have loved."
Eight months. She sold her home to fund this.
"And the others? The Calabrian, the Russian woman—they're all here for similar reasons?"
"We all have our dead, Isabella. We all have someone we'd do anything to see again.
" Siobhan's smile is peaceful, certain, and utterly heartbreaking.
"You're here for your mother. I'm here for my daughter.
You don't believe yet," Siobhan says softly.
Not accusing—just observing. "I can see it in your face. "
"I think you're grieving."
"Same thing, isn't it?" Her laugh is gentle. "Grief makes fools of everyone. The only question is what kind of fool you choose to be. I'd rather be a fool with hope than a wise woman with nothing."
She returns to her roses, humming something that sounds like a lullaby. Or a requiem.
I think about what Stefanos said on the plane. Marco was a researcher. Immunology. And now he's dead, and Theos is running ceremonies for grieving families who'll pay anything for miracles.
What happened to Marco's actual research? Where did the real science end and the theatrical nonsense begin?
I stand slowly and look around the garden with new eyes. The white-clad staff moving with purpose. The flowers arranged in patterns that seem almost ritualistic. The faint sound of chanting from somewhere in the compound.
This isn't a medical facility. It's not even a wellness retreat. But what is it, exactly?
Daphne finds me in the library an hour later, pretending to read.
"Dr. Theos would like you to join the afternoon meditation," she says, that too-bright smile firmly in place. "It's optional, of course. Everything here is optional."
"Who's the Russian woman?" I ask instead of answering. "The one who never speaks. Madame Pushkova.”
Daphne's smile falters. "She's been with us the longest. Almost five years now."
"What's she here for?"
"Her sons. Twin boys, killed in a car accident." Daphne's voice softens. "She was driving. A truck ran a red light. She survived. They didn't."
"And she thinks Dr. Theos can bring them back?"
"She knows he can. She's seen the signs. The visions during meditation. The messages in dreams." Daphne leans closer, eager to share the faith. "Last month, during the full moon ceremony, she heard them. Their voices, calling to her. Saying they were waiting."
I think about what guilt does to the human mind. The stories we tell ourselves to survive unbearable loss.
"How much has she paid?"
"I don't discuss finances." But Daphne's eyes flicker toward Alexandros's office. "Though I understand she's been... very generous."
“Everyone is.” And there’s awe in her voice as she stares at me with a smile that sends chills down my spine.