Chapter 8 #3
The way that softening, edged by hard speculation, feels on my body, inside my body, like a weather shift, a pressure I cannot read. Heat gathering at the horizon.
I try to redirect my mind, think of the convent. Think of the sisters.
Have they missed me?
Sister Teresa will have knocked at my door after the invasion and found the room cold, the bed still tucked.
Sister Alba will have frowned over the morning bread and scolded herself for humming if no one is there to hear.
The bell will have rung and rung. Despite the helicopter and the soldiers, I like to think they will have searched for me.
In the laundry, the chapel, the orchard where the wind combs the trees.
It’s both worrying and comforting to imagine them searching.
Perhaps I’m just deluding myself but it keeps the loneliness from sharpening into a blade.
But then I think of the Madre Superiora.
Has she done anything to find me?
Has she reported the black-clad men who took me and my kidnap to the authorities, or has she told the story that costs the least – Sister Benedetta has been called elsewhere; God’s will is mysterious; pray for her discernment? It would be so easy to tuck me into a parable and wash her hands.
Renzo’s words haunt me: Convenient. Protected herself. Or someone else.
I have no proof. Only a feeling I keep trying… and failing… to drag into the light.
Are the things he says about her true? Did she keep things from me? If so, why?
Because I asked? Because I begged? Because wanting is dangerous and control is easier than comfort?
I bow lower. ‘Forgive me,’ I whisper, though I’m not sure for what. Doubting a woman who clothed me, or believing a man who undresses me with his eyes.
Flashes press at the edges of my sight the more I pray.
They’ve been doing that these five days, like pictures projected on the ceiling when I blink too slowly.
A girl’s laughter I know is mine. A smell: petrol and lilies, sweet and sharp, funeral and festival at once.
Knocked knuckles against a pew, the sting blossoming into a kiss I don’t remember and remember in my bones.
A gun, cold and heavy, not in my hand – near my hand – someone else’s breath ragged with fear or fury, I don’t know which. I try to catch each fragment, pin it with words, but they dissolve when I look straight at them. Like my prayers lately, memory prefers the side glance, not a full-on scrutiny.
I rise and go to the mirror with the crucifix above it.
Only a handful of days and yet the habit makes me someone I recognise and don’t at once. The veil frames a face I would not pick out of a crowd if she were wearing another woman’s clothes.
I touch the edge of the wimple at the exact place where Renzo’s fingers touched it too, and the fabric remembers better than I do.
My cheeks heat. I hate the blush and love it.
That’s the worst of it. This fracture between hate and love feels like the crack in fine china that will never be repaired.
I think of my oldest sisters – Maddelena and Sofiya – and the way the names gain familiarity now, ever so lightly, as if they’ve been circling, waiting for permission to land. They are married to his brothers.
The knowledge sits on my tongue like a sacrament I’m not sure I’m allowed to take just yet. If they are bound to the Salvatores, then what am I? A lost piece, a missing stone in a dangerous mosaic. Is this divine design… or a net?
‘Lord,’ I say, speaking to the glass because the glass seems less stern than heaven, ‘if You’re answering prayers, can You be clearer? I am trying to be good. I am trying to be Yours.’
A thought rises, unbidden, insolent: And yet you are his.
I flinch as if I have slapped myself. It isn’t true. It cannot be. I belong to God. I belong to the life that saved me when my mind was ash.
I belong to—
You belonged to me first.
—his voice across the room, low and rough, saying those charged, possessive words, saying ‘come closer’ and the way my body obeyed before my mind had a chance to protest. The way relief and elation flared when the guards walked me back the second night and we said nothing, we just existed, breathing the same air like it was consent.
I press my palms to my eyes until stars bloom red then white. ‘No.’
I say it to the room, to my thoughts, to the girl in the mirror who blushes like she’s lit from the inside.
The days have slid into a pattern I’m afraid to admit I like: prayer, tests, Renzo’s growled demands made bearable by his softer questions, my refusals unconvincing even to me.
There’s a chair by his bed that has learned the weight of my doubt.
There’s a bowl he refuses to eat from unless I feed him.
And most disgustingly, there’s a look we share when the doctor speaks too gently or the nurse too loudly, a look that says this is ours even when nothing is.
What does that say about a woman about to promise herself to God?
Nothing good. Nothing simple.
Footsteps in the corridor snap me out of the spiral.
I grasp the interruption with shameful relief, and I stand, too quickly, hands folded as if recital will save me.
A firm knock, once after a low exchange between my guards; I’ve learned their cadence.
The door opens and the taller one steps in, the other behind like a shadow.
‘Time to go, Sister,’ he says, not unkindly.
‘Go?’ I rise before I remember to hesitate. ‘Back to Ren— to him? The patient’s room?’ I ask breathlessly, before I can stop myself.
A flicker in his eyes, pity, maybe. ‘Yes. That’s where we’re going.’
My heart leaps like a bird freed from a tangled wire.
Relief. The word arrives and brings its friends – elation, steadiness, the dizzy lift of a bird forgetting it ever learned to fear the sky.
It’s so wrong to feel this way. So wrong and yet…
I smooth my habit, buy myself a second with the small ritual, but my feet are already pushing against my will, hurrying out the door.
The other guard steps aside to let me pass.
My steps whisper on the polished floor and I try to pray as we go. Nothing fancy or even dramatic. Just the short, stubborn kind.
Help me. Help me. Help me.
At the turn near the nurses’ station, I slow. ‘May I use your phone?’ I ask, hating the crack in my voice. I have no idea what the convent number is but surely someone will know?
The guards freeze, then exchange fearsome looks with the nurses. ‘Not without the boss’s permission.’
‘Okay. Then tell me, has… has anyone called? Asked after me?’
A beat. The smallest shake of her head. ‘We don’t know. Maybe Dr Conti might know.’
We don’t know.
It is worse than no. It is the same blank left in my head, the same unmarked door at the end of every dream. A hollowness God is not filling.
I bite the inside of my cheek until the taste of iron gives me something that feels like certainty.
We reach the familiar door flanked by more guards.
One of my escorts knocks once, then again in a pattern I’ve learned. A click, a whisper of mechanics, and they open.
His room is lighter now with curtains drawn for morning. He looks just as I left him… maybe even better. Sharp eyed with no signs of the sedation he insisted on. A storm organised into a map.
When his eyes find me, the ache and weight of it is a physical thing.
As is the savage determination in his face when he holds out his hand, imperious, palm up, implacable. ‘Come here, angel.’
My feet move again, independent of my thought or will.
My hand shakes when I raise it. Shakes harder when he drops the rosary into my open palm and closes his fist over it, binding us once more.
And sweet heaven, why does my heart sing, then settle as if it’s found peace? ‘Are you… Is everything okay?’ I ask, more to quiet the rush of alien feeling than for affirmation of what my eyes tell me.
‘Yes and no.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning, the obstacles are only going to get bigger, angel.’ He pulls me closer, peers deep into my eyes.
And within those silver depths I spot something vital. Something I need to keep reminding myself no matter what comes.
The dash of bitterness and rancour I saw that first day. The solar flare of savage intent that whispers that in the grand totality of my memory loss, all I have is Renzo Salvatore’s sliced version to keep me dangling on his hook. That I would be so much better off being on my guard.
A press of his fingers refocuses me. In time to hear him add, ‘I hope you’re ready for them.’