I should have believed her.
I should have trusted the way my chest locked up when she went near anything dangerous. The way my hands moved before my brain when someone touched her. The way my pulse stuttered every time she said she was going to fix what my family broke.
Instead, I listened to a corpse.
Giovanni’s voice has lived in my head for years — a priest of his own rotten gospel: loyalty, control, necessary violence. He taught me not to trust anyone but him. Made me doubt Zina. Made me doubt myself.
And tonight, he made me doubt her.
I let his ghost put a hand on my throat.
She walked away from the courtyard with her heart in pieces because I couldn’t sever the last thread tying me to the man who ruined all of us. Because fear of becoming him weighed more than the truth in her eyes.
Now she’s gone.
Fog tightens around the church, dressing the stone in a burial shroud. The stained glass — the same windows that watched me rot from bruised boy to trembling priest — stare down with dead eyes.
I used to think they saw everything.
Now I know better.
They didn’t see Giovanni dragging men into the tunnels beneath this place and bleeding secrets out of them. They didn’t see the ledger hidden behind the false walls. They didn’t see me and Romeo arguing in whispers at the altar about which of us would burn first.
They didn’t see Pia torn from this street while I was still inside on my knees, begging a silent God to prove she wasn’t poison.
I inhale, slow and sharp, and lift my hand.
My fingers find the thin band of white at my throat.
The collar is damp with fog and sweat. It’s small. Pathetic, really, how much power we let a scrap of fabric pretend it holds. Cloth stiffened into command. A strip of surrender. A leash I fastened myself to so I could believe I wasn’t Giovanni’s son.
The symbol of every vow I made.
And every truth I traded.
My thumb presses against the edge where it bites into black cotton.
The last time I took it off was to shower.
The first time I put it on, Giovanni stood at the back of the church, arms folded, eyes burning with ownership. “My son,” he said, loud enough to poison the air. “My bishop.”
I mistook possession for love.
Now it feels like a brand.
Property of a dead king.Kneeling to a God who never answered.
My throat tightens.
I look up.
The sky is a slab of gray. No sun. No mercy. Just another ceiling we’re trapped under. No thunder. No divine outrage for the crimes committed in His name.
“Forgive me,” I whisper.
The word scrapes raw on its way out.
Habit makes me throw it upward — fling it at the empty sky and hope something living catches it.
