Chapter 14 Neve
Neve
By the time I reached my street, my lungs were burning. My legs ached. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking. I didn’t stop to breathe or think or look around. I just got to my front door, shoved the key in the lock, and pushed my way inside.
I locked the door. I bolted it and slid the chain across. Then I checked the door twice to make sure I hadn’t missed anything.
Only then did I look at myself. There was blood on my wrists. On my shirt. Under my nails. It was everywhere, and it wasn’t my own.
My throat tightened. My chest felt too small for the air I was trying to pull in. I stripped off my clothes even before I got to the bathroom, putting them straight into the washer, and I stepped into the shower before the water even heated.
The cold hit me like a slap. I stayed under the spray anyway, letting it hammer down on my shoulders, my face, my scalp until the water finally warmed and the blood started streaking down my legs in thin pink lines.
I pressed my hands against the tiles and breathed. In. Out. Steady. Controlled.
It took a minute for my mind to settle enough that the memories started pushing through and I began to remember.
The convent. The gardens. The overwhelming quiet.
I used to walk the garden paths for hours.
Sometimes to avoid the other nuns. Sometimes because I didn’t know what else to do with myself.
I had been the youngest resident of the convent and the only child they had ever taken in.
I had no family left. I was traumatized.
Some would have even argued that I was beyond saving.
And I had been mute. They had tried to coax conversation out of me.
All of them. Kind words. Soft tones. Gentle questions.
None of it had worked. I didn’t speak for months.
I didn’t laugh, and I didn’t eaten unless Sister Ana had literally forced me to.
And what was worse, I didn’t slept unless exhaustion knocked me out.
I had wandered the grounds like a shadow. A small, silent ghost no one quite knew what to do with.
Except Giuseppe.
He had been the first person who didn’t treat me like I was made of glass. He never asked me why I didn’t talk. He didn’t push or hover. He just kept showing up, standing there in the background, waiting for the moment I would finally break so he could catch my fall.
He would rake leaves in the courtyard while I sat on the bench pretending not to watch him. He would whistle while trimming vines, stopping only to hand me a pair of gloves without a word. He would point to a shovel or a watering can and nod, like he appreciated the help if I could give it to him.
And eventually… I did.
He was in his fifties, with salt-and-pepper hair and a face that looked like it had weathered every storm life could throw at it. But he always smiled as though nothing could shake him.
He was patient. Steady. A quiet anchor in a place and life I didn’t understand.
One afternoon, months after I’d arrived, he spoke to me like he already knew I would answer.
“Your plants won’t grow unless you talk to them.”
I remembered blinking at him, confused and irritated and curious all at once.
He had just knelt in the dirt, patted the ground beside him, and waited.
When I didn’t move, he shrugged. “They don’t care what you say. Just that you give them your voice.”
It was the first time anyone hadn’t made my silence a problem.
I sat down. Picked up the watering can. And whispered something small and broken to a row of basil plants.
He pretended not to hear me. But the next day, he asked, “You coming?” And I followed him into the garden without thinking twice.
Giuseppe saw past the blank look. Past the trauma and the walls I’d built around myself. He didn’t try to fix me. He just gave me space and routine and the kind of quiet company that made breathing feel possible again.
He taught me how to plant seeds. How to prune. How to tend soil. How to build something instead of running from everything.
And then, when I finally trusted him enough to speak, when I finally told him I never wanted to be helpless again, he taught me something else.
Self-defense. Basic at first. Controlled. Then more.
How to break a grip. Where to strike. How to use my size, not fight against it. How to make a weapon out of anything. How to survive.
Under the spray of the shower, I could still hear his voice:
“Keep your stance low.”
“Use their momentum to your advantage, Neve.”
“Don’t freeze. Move.”
My breathing steadied.
I washed the last of the blood from my hands, scraped it from under the rim of my nails, from the tender spot on my cheek where the man had hit me. The water turned pink, then clear. My skin burned from scrubbing, but I didn’t stop until it was all gone.
When I finally shut off the water, the silence followed me out of the bathroom like a shadow I couldn’t shake. It clung to my skin and settled in my bones.
I dried off and pulled on clean clothes. Sweats, soft and worn-in, because comfort was the only thing I could control right now. I sat on the edge of my bed, damp hair dripping cold trails down my spine.
I should have been shaking. Crying. Collapsing under the weight of what happened. I should have felt something more, but I didn’t.
I had killed a man today. Slit his throat in cold blood. Watched the light leave his eyes. And I was sitting here… steady. Breathing. Not falling apart. What kind of human did that make me?
Giuseppe would have shrugged and called it survival. You lived.
But my mind kept circling the same truth like a wound I couldn’t stop touching: I had ended a life. A man who might have been someone’s son, someone’s brother, or father. Someone loved. Someone known.
And I had left him bleeding in an alley.
He was going to destroy you, Neve.
I knew. God, I knew. It had been kill or be killed, and he had picked the role long before I did. I did what I had to do.
Still… there was a part of me, buried deep and fragile, that whispered a quieter truth. The one Giuseppe had tried to stitch into me as he trained me to protect myself:
You don’t wait for mercy. You protect yourself to stay alive. No matter the cost.
And that night, the cost was blood. A complete stranger’s. And now I had to live with what that made me.