I step closer.
Barely an inch.
Enough to tilt gravity toward me.
The air thickens. I watch him register my scent again—the involuntary inhale, the microsecond of surrender he tries to hide.
My pulse hammers, fierce and reckless.
Not fear.Not entirely manipulation.
Something else.
Something I can’t afford to feel.
“I didn’t mean to get lost,” I whisper, letting the words tremble just enough to pass as vulnerable. “Maybe you could help me… stay where I’m supposed to be.”
His eyes snap to mine.
The look he gives me is scorched earth.
Wrecked. Hungry. Unbalanced.
I’m no longer sure who’s hunting whom.
For a heartbeat, the mission falls away—
the danger, Giovanni’s secrets, the evidence, the lies.
All that exists is this:
His trembling restraint.My reckless pulse.The razor-thin tension between our breaths.
I feel it—
the shift.
Invisible. Irreversible. Undeniable.
I’ve turned the key inside him.
The one he didn’t know I was reaching for.
The one that unlocks everything he swore to bury.
Everything he can’t hide from me anymore.
The Breaking Point of a Priest
The quiet between us isn’t silent anymore.
It’s charged.
A low, humming pressure pushing against the walls, the floor, the stale fluorescent light—like the church itself can sense the line about to snap.
I move first.
Not away.
