Chapter 4
Neve
The convent was nothing like home.
Home had noise. My mother’s voice, and the clatter of pans as she cooked and baked her famous scones. My father arguing in the next room, his soldiers laughing at something funny he’d said.
Here, everything was too quiet. The hallways felt hollow and empty. The walls echoed as my footsteps traversed the narrow halls. Even the air felt different, like I’d stepped into someone else’s life and couldn’t step back out.
I didn’t talk often. I didn’t trust my voice enough to try.
Sister Ana kept asking gentle questions like where I was from, if I was hungry, if I needed anything.
I shook my head every time. The man who’d brought me here had spoken to her like they weren’t strangers to one another.
If she was his friend, I shouldn’t trust her, either.
Because he was definitely no friend of mine.
They gave me a small room with a narrow bed and a wooden dresser. Someone left folded clothes on the blanket; a simple nightgown, a pair of socks, a sweater. I sat on the edge of the bed and didn’t touch any of it.
I barely ate. My stomach twisted every time I tried. I sipped water because Sister Ana watched until I took a drink.
The other sisters gave me space. They didn’t try to talk to me beyond offering food or showing me where things were kept. I listened to them rustle through their routines. Their voices were soft, calm, steady, nothing like the noise still ringing in my head.
The convent followed a strict schedule. There were bells at dawn, ominous and moody.
Prayers. Chores. Meals. More prayers. Lights went out early and everyone was expected to go to sleep.
Every night I lay awake and stared at the ceiling until my eyes burned.
When sleep finally dragged me under, I jolted awake gasping—heart hammering, certain there was someone standing over me with a gun.
Some nightmares didn’t care how far you ran. They found you anyway.
The worst dreams were the ones that weren’t dreams.
My mother’s hands on my shoulders. Her voice tight and rushed.
“Hide, Neve. Now. Don’t come out. No matter what.”
She shoved me into the closet before I could ask why.
I heard shouting. Then her scream and a gunshot so loud it made my ears ring.
I stayed in the dark for the longest time before I finally cracked the door open.
I thought she’d be standing there, waiting for me with her arms open, and everything would be fine.
Instead, I found her on the floor, eyes wide and glassy, staring at nothing at all.
My knees buckled, dropping me beside her as I grabbed her shoulders, shaking her, begging her to respond.
But her body stayed limp, her gaze fixed, and the truth hit me with a cold, merciless finality—she was gone, and she was never coming back.
I looked down at my hands, trembling, slick with bright red that didn’t feel real until it was smeared across my skin.
Panic surged. I scrubbed my palms against my nightgown, desperate to wipe it away, desperate to pretend this wasn’t happening, but the blood only spread, blooming across the fabric like a stain I’d never outrun.
I moved back to the closet like a ghost, numb and floating somewhere just outside my own skin. My feet knew where to go even if my mind didn’t.
The back wall gave way beneath my hands, just like Mother and Father had taught me. I slipped into the hidden passage, the door sealing quietly behind me.
The house had a second skeleton running through it—narrow corridors buried between the walls, built for escape, for hiding, for surviving.
My parents had shown them to me as soon as I was old enough to understand, their voices serious in a way that had made the whole thing feel like a game I didn’t understand.
If you ever need somewhere safe, they’d said. Go to the pantry.
I drifted through the dark belly of the house, brushing past cold plaster and exposed beams until the passage opened behind the false wall.
The pantry.
The hidden door stood to my right, exactly where it had always been.
To my left, shelves rose from floor to ceiling, stacked with enough food to supply a small army. Cans. Boxes. Flour. Rice.
And tucked among it all were the things my mother kept just for me.
My favorite sweets.
My hand moved before my brain caught up with it. I pulled a candy bar from the shelf and slid down the wall until I was sitting on the cold floor.
The wrapper crinkled loudly in the silence.
I stared at it in my hand like it belonged to someone else.
I didn’t know why I did it.
Maybe I wanted a single moment of normalcy in a night that had swallowed everything familiar.
Maybe I just needed something small and solid to cling to while the rest of the world bled apart around me.
Then the man with the gun found me.
His eyes were stuck in my head now. Cold. Grey. Unblinking. I saw them every time I closed my own.
He hesitated. I didn’t know why. But he did. He didn’t kill me like he did everyone else.
Now I was here. Alone. Trying to understand where my life ended and this new one began.
During the day, Sister Ana showed me small things: where the laundry was washed, how to help peel vegetables for dinner, how to sweep the courtyard. She explained the rules without pushing me. She talked to me like I was still human, even though I didn’t feel like it.
She told me I was safe here. I nodded, but I didn’t believe her.
I watched everything—the doors, the windows, the shadows in the hall. I tracked where the keys were hung. I memorized which locks made noise and which didn’t.
I wouldn’t be caught off guard again. I wouldn’t hide in a pantry and hope someone decided to let me live. I might only have been seven, but I knew one thing with absolute certainty: I wouldn’t die helpless next time.
I learned the rhythm of the convent faster than anyone expected.
At first, I stayed in my room most of the day. Sister Ana let me; she brought food and left it on the dresser without asking questions. I ate only enough to keep the room from spinning when I stood.
The nightmares got worse before they got better. Most mornings, I woke up shaking, gripping the blanket so hard my fingers ached. Some nights I woke with my mouth open in a silent scream, but no sound came out of me anymore. It was like my voice shut off the night everything else did.
Sister Ana pretended she didn’t hear me. It was the kindest thing she could do.
Eventually she told me I needed to join the others for chores. It wasn’t a request; I thought she just wanted to get me out of my room. So I followed her.
I peeled potatoes in the kitchen with two older nuns who talked softly about the weather. I swept the hallway with a broom that was taller than I was. I folded laundry next to Sister Ana, who worked twice as fast as I did but never commented on my slowness.
Some of the sisters smiled at me. I didn’t know how to smile back anymore, so I looked down and pretended to focus on the work.
The convent had rules about where we could go. Certain doors stayed locked. Certain areas were off-limits. Most of the girls who came here already understood why, but I was new and I was the youngest, so I watched the locked doors more than anything else.
Not because I wanted to break the rules. Because I needed to know what stood between me and danger.
I mapped the hallways in my head. I memorized which floorboards squeaked. I planned how fast I could hide if someone burst through the front doors the way the men did in my house.
It was stupid. No one was coming. The sisters kept telling me that. But I didn’t believe in safety anymore.
Sister Ana tried sometimes. She sat with me while I shelled peas or hung clothes on the line. She told me things about the convent—how long she’d been here, how many girls they’d raised, how the world outside wasn’t cruel, but humans were.
I listened, but I didn’t trust her. Why would I trust someone who knew a man who could put a gun to a child’s head without flinching?
I kept replaying that moment. His knee on my chest. The weight of the gun against my head.
His eyes. Grey and empty.
They haunted me more than the gunshots or the bodies on the floor. More than the memory of stepping over my mother’s arm when I finally left the closet. More than the way her eyes stayed open when I touched her cheek, hoping she’d blink.
I saw those grey eyes every time I closed mine.
He had no reason to spare me. And no reason to care whether I lived or died. I didn’t understand why he’d stopped. And the not knowing sat inside me like another bruise.
One night, Sister Ana brought a blanket to my room—thicker, warmer, softer than the one I already had.
“You’ll be cold when winter comes,” she informed me.
I nodded but didn’t take it from her hands. She placed it at the foot of my bed and left without pushing.
When the door shut, I pulled the blanket toward me. I didn’t cry. I didn’t break. I just made a quiet promise to myself that I wouldn’t depend on anyone ever again.