Chapter 47
“Go and get some fresh air. I’m here, I’ll watch her,” Asvika said as I reluctantly walked out of the VIP ward and towards the exit.
A sign caught my eye. It was the cross outside a door that read ‘CHAPEL’. The Hospital Chapel.
It was smaller than I expected. Just a room with a cross on the wall, a few wooden benches, and one single light that hummed like a trapped fly.
The space smelt of antiseptic and old prayer books. The whole place felt too polite for what I needed to do here.
I didn’t want prayers.
I didn’t want to bow or whisper soft things.
I wanted to tear angels out of the sky and drag them down to her bed.
But there was nowhere else for the noise that I was now.
Not in corridors, not in the operating theatre, not in the sterile roar of the ward.
So, I came here because even monsters needed a room to break.
I closed the door behind me, the latch clicked. The sound was small and perfect. No footsteps. No uniforms. No business. Just me and the air that tasted faintly of bleach and incense.
My hands were stained. Her blood won’t wash off. It was on my skin like a branding and every time I moved, I felt it, sticky and undeniable. As if the world was trying to tell me who I was now.
I knelt before a bench because I couldn’t stand. My knees snapped under me like they forgot how to be bone. The wood dug into my palms when I laced my fingers over each other.
I didn’t fold my hands in a prayer anyone recognised. I just grabbed hard, as if holding on would keep something together.
“God…”
I didn’t know how to pray. I never had.
I was raised on deals, on signatures and terraced threats, not on the soft machinery of faith. But the room was quiet and that quiet pulled a sound out of me that I didn’t like. A laugh, hollow and failing.
“God,” I said it like I was testing a name I’d been keeping at the back of my mouth.
The sound bounced off the cross and came back small. “If you’re up there, if you’re listening, this is the first thing I ask for and the last.”
I wanted to bargain. Wrap the city in my hands and trade it for her life. But bargains meant trust and trust meant the possibility of being betrayed again. So, I started somewhere simpler.
“Save her.” My voice was raw. “For me.” Then because silence made monsters, I added, “I’ll do anything. You want blood? Take mine. Take my life, take my years. Take my name if you must. Just—keep her.”
The words hung. They felt ridiculous and honest in the way that ruined men.
I laughed again, and it broke into a sob that shocked me because I didn’t know I had any left. I thought I left my tear glands in my teenage years. My body was all sweaty and tired. I wanted to smash the cross. I wanted to throw my hands at the ceiling and rip answers out of the plaster.
Instead, I folded in on myself, tears falling from my eyes and the chapel held me like it was built to swallow men like me whole.
A prayer I didn’t know slid out of me. Not a beg so much as a fumble. “If she wakes up, I’ll be better. I’ll be less. I’ll—” I stopped because I couldn’t promise that.
I was made of wrong choices. I was made of violence. I could promise destruction. I could promise devotion. I could promise ruin.
"Take my empire," I said. "Take the blood-slicked throne I built and tear it down to the dirt. Take the Moretti name and every ounce of power I’ve bled for until I am nothing but a ghost in my own city. I’ll give you my history and my future. But don't take her."
Silence answered. The kind that had no patience and teeth. For a second I was a child again, lungs full of nothing but the demand: fix it.
Then the anger came, slow as poison. If God couldn’t keep her, then God will answer for it. The prayer turned into something that sounded like a threat.
“I will break everything in the world if you do this to me,” I told the empty room. “You let her die, and I will make sure no man who stands by your name ever breathes easy again. I will find them, and I will make them count their seconds.”
There was hypocrisy in my mouth, and I could taste it, but the heat behind the words was real.
It was the old promise I made when everything was stripped away. I would not be gentle with the world that took her.
I whispered her name like a rite. “Versace.” It tasted like iron and rain. It was my confession and my curse.
I thought of the first time I saw her. How small she looked, that feisty woman pretending to be my one-night stand.
I thought of every stupid moment I told myself to keep distance, every vow I broke because love was a bad liar.
Regret wasn’t new to me. The shape of it was. This was older. Deeper.
I didn’t say ‘forgive me, lord’, because that would be cheap, and I couldn’t afford cheap. Instead, I said it like I was making a ledger. “If she makes it, I’ll make it right. If she doesn’t—” I didn’t finish.
The blank was full of things I would do if the world took her from me.
I left the bargains and the promises and fell into something worse. Raw pleading.
I told God I was not afraid of the work I’ll have to do. I told him I’ll walk through every ruin if she woke up. I told him I'd be a better man if he gave me that chance.
I promised violence and tenderness in the same breath because that was all I knew how to give.
Finally, because prayers need a closing, I pressed my forehead to the wood and exhaled.
I whispered again. “Let me keep her.”
There was a sound at the door. Footsteps that didn’t belong to my men. For half a second, my hand went to the gun that wasn't there. Habit. Reflex. Then I saw the white collar and dropped it.
“Dominic Moretti?” The voice was older. Kind. Worn like a coat.
The priest stepped inside slowly, hand already raised as if he was used to opening doors into other people’s grief.
Black shirt, white collar, a face you’d trust to sit with the dying.
He looked at me, then at the bench. He didn’t ask me to leave. He sat down on the end closest to me, not too close, not a polite distance either. Only close enough that he could hear my ragged breaths.
“You look tired, son,” he said, plain, not stupid about what I was or what I needed.
“Yeah.” The answer was a sound in my throat. I didn’t want words. I didn’t want sermons. I wanted results.
He was quiet for a beat, then, “May I?” He nodded at my folded hands.
I didn’t move. He didn’t touch them. He folded his hands, and the motion was small and ancient.
“I don’t have answers to give,” he said. “Only a prayer. And the company for it, if you want.”
Company.
The word was like a hand on my shoulder, gentle and unwanted. But the chapel was tiny and the thing inside me that had been screaming for hours wanted only to keep from snapping.
“I don’t pray,” I said. It was a fact and an armour.
He smiled without humour. “Then I’ll pray for you.” He bowed his head, slow, respectful. He was careful not to close his eyes in a way that would demand I follow.
He started quiet. Not a show but a thread.
“Lord, watch over this woman, this child of yours, who’s been brought in tonight.
Keep her breath. Keep the hands that hold her.
Make the surgeons steady and merciful. If it’s your will, mend her.
If it’s not, make a path for those who love her to carry what’s left. ”
He didn’t beg. No theatrics. He said it like he was naming what could be named and leaving the rest to things we couldn’t touch.
The words did something stupid to me. They scraped open a place I’d welded shut years ago.
I wanted to flinch, to laugh, to tear the bench in half, but I couldn't.
My throat constricted. A sound caught there, and I couldn’t bite it down.
“Father,” I said, and the word tasted foreign. “Pray for her to stay alive.”
He nodded without surprise. “I will. But the prayer is not a promise, Dominic. It’s a plea, and sometimes, son, God hears it.”
He placed a hand on mine, not soft, not weak, just present, a simple human pressure. I didn’t pull away. My fingers twisted like a man holding an edge.
“You’re angry,” the priest said. “I won’t tell you to be otherwise. Rage is honest. Promise me one thing though, don’t make your anger the only language you have left.”
“Then what?” I choked out. “Speak softly while she dies?”
“No.” He looked up at me. He was not naive.
“Hold her hand when you need to. Use your rage to clear the path, not to burn the bridge. Don’t spend what you’ll need to keep her.”
I hated that he was right. I hated that in that single sentence he drew a map of the thing I’d been refusing to see.
Violence was a tool, not a cure.
He prayed again, quietly. This time he touched my head, just above my brow, a gesture that made something in me fold smaller.
The touch was not religious for me, it was human. It was someone else saying, ‘I am here with you in this empty place’.
“God,” he said, “if you keep her, let him be changed. If you don’t, don’t let him walk away broken.”
I wanted to argue that I was already broken.
I wanted to tell him that breaking was the thing I did well.
But the words got stuck because when he looked at me, there was no pity.
Only the blunt, patient gaze of a man who had seen a thousand men pray like monsters and still believed there was a soul left inside.
He ended with a single line I didn't expect. “Amen.”
The priest stood. He didn’t ask if I wanted to go to her or to stay. He simply said, “I’ll light a candle for her in the chapel downstairs. And I’ll be down the corridor if you want to talk, cry or do whatever it is you need.”
“Good,” I said. My voice cracked on the word. The chapel suddenly felt too small for all my breathing.
I stayed until the light above me grew thin and the hallways outside changed into the steady, clean noise of the hospital.
I stood up, palms bleeding faintly from where they dug into the bench.
The chapel door closed softly behind me. The corridor hit me with its fluorescent glare. The world was back.
Deals to make, enemies to burn, a hospital ward that held everything I couldn’t fix with bullets. But the priest’s voice, that quiet plea and the pressure of his hand, stayed with me like a promise I made to myself.
I went back to the ward because that was where she was. Because nothing in me could sit still until her eyes opened. Because in the chapel I did what I hadn’t thought I ever would. I asked. I bargained. I begged. And for now, that must be enough.
If God keeps her, I will be returned. If God doesn’t—then the world will have to answer for it. Either way, I won’t rest. I will burn and burn. I will be worse or better. I will be what she needs.
But for now, I sat and waited. I held her hand. I watched the monitors. I rode the stupid, awful hope that the priest said Amen to.
Ask and it shall be granted unto you, Dear Lord. For I have not only asked but begged for the safe recovery of Versace, may you answer my plea.
In Jesus name—Amen.