I thought about whether I should have asked Teo to teach me how to defend myself. Maybe that could have made some difference somewhere along the line. Not that there’d been any time, and I didn’t think he would have been down with the idea, somehow.
“Any news on my parents?” I asked, stalling on going into the room again. I didn’t like the idea of being locked in there.
“We’ll let you know as soon as there’s word,” he said, and then added more gently, “That man of yours seems good in a tight situation, if his Boss trusts him so much. He’ll get the job done.”
It didn’t occur to me until after the safe door room closed on me, that I hadn’t corrected Conor’s description of Teo as “my man.”
It had sounded right to my ears, even in such terrible circumstances.
I paced the room once before I started to feel the walls closing in. I wasn’t claustrophobic, not really, but there just seemed to be noairin the basement rooms. I threw myself at the door and pounded on the steel furiously. When that proved fruitless, I begin stabbing my finger at the keypad next to the door. That resulted only in repeated warning buzzes.
“It won’t work,” Róisín said calmly. “You need to know the specific code, and you don’t know it.”
“Do you?” I demanded, rounding on her.
She looked at me for a moment, then shook her head. “It really is for the best that you and I are in here. We can’t do what the others can. We have our own methods of help, of course.”
“And what’s that?”
“We can pray for them,” she said simply, and took a seat in the corner of the room.
I turned around before she could see me rolling my eyes, and looked around again, really looked. The area wasn’t small, but there were no windows and the ceiling was low enough to touch if I stood on my toes. But in true Donovan tradition, it was well appointed with comfortable furniture, a television set and monitors, even a wet bar. There was a bathroom through one door that I could see, and through another door when I checked, there was a bedroom with a king-sized bed.
Róisín was clicking a rosary through her fingers, her lips moving in silent prayer and her eyes closed.
“Why are you at Hillview?” I asked. It sounded rude, but I didn’t have it in me to apologize. I was genuinely wondering.
She gave a one-shouldered shrug. “I told the sisters that Tara was gravely ill and needed my help.”
“Ill?”
“That’s what I told them.”
I thought her words over. “You mean you lied?”
A flush stained her cheeks. “Are you questioning my commitment to my order, brother?”
A harsh retort came immediately to my lips, but I paused. “Of course I don’t question your commitment. Sister,” I added. “But does this mean you’ve left the cloister for good?”
“The Poor Clares are not so harsh as you seem to think.” She resettled in the chair, adding, “Yes, I admit that I lied, and I’ll ask for penance when I get back—throw myself on their mercy and hope that they and God will forgive me. But Tara needed moral support. I wasn’t going to let her face things alone.”
I looked down at my hands. Here I was castigating a fellow traveler for no reason, dismissing her prayers as pointless, suspecting her of—what? Being part of the plot to kill me?
Sin begets sin, Father Raphael had often intoned at me. By allowing myself to become so close to Teo, had I opened a doorway to evil in my heart?
But then I frowned, remembering the discussion I’d had with Father Mike just an hour ago. I had come away from that meeting with, if not a whole new view, certainly thepossibilityof a new perspective.
* * *
“I gave into temptation,”I’d told Father Mike, my face burning, my eyes stinging with tears. We’d discussed the youth program, and then he’d asked if there was anything else I wanted to say, and it all came rushing out. “I allowed my body to betray my soul.”
“Is that really what happened?” he asked softly.
“I…” I shrugged, helplessly.
“Let me ask you, Aidan: what is it that you want to say to me? You know I can’t take your confession, not anymore.”
“No, that’s not what I want. I just want…”
