Chapter 7 #3
Renzo’s gaze flicks to me – your choice – then back to the doctor with warning etched into the set of his jaw. For once, the warning isn’t for me. It steadies me more than any prayer has in weeks.
‘I’ll try,’ I say.
The doctor slides a card from a folder. A church. Not the convent chapel; this one is bigger, older with vaulted arches and a rose window. My chest tightens. I know this place without knowing it; my heart walks its aisles while my head insists I’ve never crossed the threshold.
He watches my pupils, my breath. ‘Does this mean anything to you?’
‘Light,’ I say, before I can swallow the word. ‘There’s always light here when I see it in my dreams.’ My eyes sting. I blink it away.
‘Good,’ he murmurs, encouragement without pressure.
‘Where is it?’
‘It’s a church. In Manhattan,’ Renzo replies.
A glance at him shows a ferocity that sends shards of alarm through me. But within that ferocity, I catch a fleeting glimpse of something else. Something like sorrow.
I want to ask why. I want to hug him. I want to—
The doctor produces another card. A silver pistol lies on a velvet cloth. ‘And this?’
My mouth goes dry. My palm prickles, like I’ve held something cold for too long. ‘No,’ I say, too quickly. ‘Nothing.’
Renzo’s gaze darkens.
The doctor moves on. Photographs of cities, of faces I don’t know but feel the ache of, like names on the tip of my tongue.
He asks about food, and I say fennel and orange in winter, and the taste lands in my mouth like a long-forgotten meal.
He asks about smells, and I say petrol and lilies, and Renzo lets out the smallest breath, as if a string inside him has loosened by a hair.
‘I’d like to try a sound prompt,’ the doctor says gently. ‘May I?’
My hands knot. I nod.
He presses a button on a small player. Choir – men’s voices, Latin, the Kyrie – rises, holy and lucid.
The notes carve my chest open with the care of a surgeon and the savagery of a thief.
I’m on my knees in a cathedral again, or still, and I can feel the cold of the stone and the heat of breath against my ear and the way a heartbeat can drown out God.
I make a small and startled sound. Renzo’s hand grips the sheet so hard his knuckles blanch. ‘Enough,’ he barks at the doctor. It’s not loud, but it ends the hymn like a fired bullet.
The doctor clicks the player off. The silence aches and I breathe in, slow. Out, slower.
‘Thank you,’ he says, writing something I can’t read. ‘That’s enough for now.’
I want to be angry with him for stopping when some part of me wanted more, for pushing when some part of me needed less. Instead I’m angry with God for putting me here in the middle of this man’s gravity, and with my own body for wanting what my vows called ruin.
‘Why do you think you can order everyone around?’ I ask suddenly, voice sharper than I intended. The question bursts out like I’ve been holding my breath for years. ‘Doctors. Soldiers. Me.’
He doesn’t blink. ‘Because it’s my right.’
My mouth falls open. ‘Your what?’
‘Power,’ he says simply, as if he’s defining a word for a child. ‘Mine was forged before you put on that habit. It doesn’t vanish because a man in a lab coat frowns at me.’
‘You can’t talk about people like they’re—’
‘Pawns? Weaponry?’ His eyes glint. ‘You’d be surprised how necessary it is in this life, angel.
’ He stops, breath hissing through his teeth as he shifts his leg.
Something softer enters his voice, at odds with the arrogance.
‘And don’t mistake me. I’m not proud of what got me here.
Well, fuck it, that’s a lie. I am what I am.
A Salvatore in blood and bone. But I’ll use it to keep both of us alive. ’
The doctor clears his throat again, a diplomat stepping between warring states. I feel the oddest relief that he’s here, that someone exists in this room who isn’t tethered to me by history or feral hunger edged in rage.
‘Later,’ he says to me, lowering his voice. ‘If you wish, we can discuss therapy options… privately.’
Privately. A small word, but it throws doors open in my mind that I hadn’t noticed until now. Choice. Agency. Words that weren’t in the Madre Superiora’s vocabulary unless they were followed by a lecture on obedience.
I nod, almost imperceptibly. ‘Thank you.’
Renzo sees it. He doesn’t like it. He leans back as if to put distance between himself and his own temper. ‘You’re not cutting into her head.’
‘No one suggested—’ the doctor begins, flustered.
‘I’ll choose who does what to me and when, thank you, Signore,’ I say, harsher than intended.
The room goes still. And yes, it’s borderline ridiculous to say this to the man who had me kidnapped and is keeping me prisoner here.
So I’m stunned when something passes across Renzo’s face.
Surprise first, then something that looks a good deal like pride. He tips his head, conceding the point with a little flick of a smile.
‘Good girl,’ he says. ‘I prefer you with teeth.’
I flush. ‘I’m not your pet.’
‘Unfortunately,’ he murmurs, almost too low to hear. ‘But we’ll get there.’
I push to my feet, needing air even where there isn’t any. The habit whispers, betraying my agitation and aggravation. ‘What do you want from me?’
‘Everything,’ he says without shame. Then, softer, ‘But I’ll start with your time.’
‘That’s not yours to ask for, not when you’ve taken me against my will.’
‘Then whose?’ he asks, clearly intending to ignore the kidnapping part of my accusation.
‘God’s,’ I say, because it’s the only answer I know how to give that doesn’t slice me apart.
‘Then tell Him to invoice me.’ His mouth crooks. The arrogance should repel me. It doesn’t. It terrifies me because it doesn’t.
I turn away before he can see the wobble in my mouth. The stainless-steel crucifix on the wall catches the light and throws it back at me. For a wild second I want to tear it down and ask aloud why I was saved whatever atrocity befell me only to be thrown to this.
‘Anger is not a sin,’ Sister Teresa once told me, when I confessed to resenting the way the wind crept under the shutters and made my bones ache. ‘It’s the direction you point it that matters.’
Where do I point this? At God? At this man? At the nuns who gave me a name I’ve been choking on ever since I found out it doesn’t truly belong to me?
‘Sit,’ Renzo says, gentler now. ‘Please.’
The word knocks something loose – the ‘please’, not the ‘sit’. I return to the chair. He doesn’t gloat and I’m thankful for that.
‘What’s the most important question on your mind right this second?’ he asks.
I don’t even need to think hard. And it’s not the looming ‘what happened to me?’ I’m nowhere near ready to face that.
I feel my fragile mind might break if Renzo decides to give me a taste.
‘Tell me more about my sisters. My brother.’
‘Your sisters,’ he says after a moment, and his voice has changed again – lower, cautious, as if the topic has weight even for him.
‘Maddelena married Cesare. Sofiya married Rafa, who I know for sure is an undiagnosed psychopath. They’re good men, for unhinged bastards.
They love hard. Sometimes wrong. But they won’t let harm come to their wives.
Or to you, once we… get to the bottom of a few things. Once they know the full picture.’
Once they know…
The phrase chills me. It is not a promise; it is a weather report. Storms approaching. Seek shelter.
‘Jacinta is a lawyer. We haven’t interacted much but she seems decent. Now Narciso. He’s a little shit who thinks he rules the world. Dante and I take pleasure in proving otherwise. I daresay he’s learning his lesson.’
‘And you?’ I ask before I can stop myself. ‘What kind of man are you?’
He doesn’t answer quickly. His eyes lower, then lift. ‘The kind who thought hating you would save him.’ A pause. ‘The kind who learned it only made the need louder.’
The need.
It flares between us, undeniable as a raging fire. I hate that it makes my skin aware of itself, every inch suddenly with a pulse.
The doctor scribbles more notes, trying to look like he isn’t witnessing a sacrilege. I want to laugh and cry and perhaps faint, which I refuse to do on principle.
‘Enough for now,’ the doctor says, closing the file.
‘Sister, you’ve done well. We’ll schedule the scan for late afternoon.
You may rest, or… sit.’ He glances down and I realise at some point, Renzo’s taken my hand again, that my rosary is once again draped over them, like our wrists are tied. He wisely looks away.
But I can’t. Not until someone knocks on the door.
Renzo’s mouth flattens in dissatisfaction. ‘Enter.’
The door swings wide. Six men file in, different from the ones who escorted me to my room and back this morning, moving with the sort of casual menace you can’t learn. You’re either cursed with it or not.
These men wear dark suits and close-cropped hair with eyes that collect a room in a second and file it under locked. They carry no visible weapons because they don’t need the advertisement.
‘Capo,’ the first says. Not Signore. Not sir. Capo. The word lands like another thunderclap. I know what it means.
Mafiosi.
That strikes something cold and instinctive inside me, a childhood ghost rising from smoke and whispers.
Even cloistered girls hear things – rumours of men who rule cities from the shadows, who settle debts in blood, who make entire villages bow with a single command.
Sicily has always carried those stories like scars beneath its sun-drenched skin.
And now I’m standing in a room with one of them.
One who came for me.
One who says I’m from the very soil where men like him are made.
Renzo doesn’t look at them first. He points at me.
‘You don’t let her out of your sight,’ he says, voice gone flat steel. ‘Not even to’ – he stops, glances at my habit with a flicker of wicked humour that still doesn’t soften the threat – ‘blink. The other men are here to secure the grounds. She is your sole priority.’
A couple of them almost smile. They swallow it when he doesn’t.
I rise before they can move towards me, the rosary tugging our joined wrists. ‘This is overkill.’
‘No, angel. It’s actually far less than what I want.’
‘Why are you doing this? What’s so special about me?’
He meets my eyes, and the strange thing is…
the answer hurts him. I see it in the way his mouth softens, in the exhale he doesn’t intend me to notice.
But beneath the ache, something darker flickers.
Contained elation maybe? A feral kind of possession barely held in check that drags electricity low in my belly.
Renzo Salvatore looks like he’s been starving for years and suddenly remembers what food tastes like.
‘Ah, tesoru miu, besides the carnage heading our way? If we had infinity itself it wouldn’t be enough time to list all the reasons you’re special.’