Doesn’t flinch.
Doesn’t ask me to spit it out faster.
He just watches me with that flat, unblinking focus that makes it feel like the entire world abandoned me in this one rectangle of air.
“Then tell me,” he says.
No comfort.No softening.Just an invitation to hang myself with my own rope.
My mouth goes dry. My tongue tastes like rust.
“I didn’t come to the church for God.”
His eyebrow twitches, barely. “I know that much.”
“I know you do.” My laugh fractures. “You’re not stupid.”
He doesn’t argue.
He just keeps looking at me like he’s stripping paint off my bones.
“But I also didn’t come for you.”
That one lands wrong in my chest, sinks where it shouldn’t.
Not at first.”
His eyes sharpen.
Not in surprise.
In concentration.
“Go on,” he says.
The rosary digs into my palm until the skin pulses.
“I came to steal something.”
There.
The first blade.
His shoulders go even stiller. “What.”
“Evidence.” I can hear my heartbeat in my ears. “Giovanni’s ledger. The proof he framed my father and had him killed.”
The sentence leaves my mouth and hangs between us like smoke.
Thick.Poisonous.Impossible to take back.
The room changes.
Not louder.
Not colder.
Heavier.
