I don’t need to see his face to know what’s carved across it.
Not desire.Not conflict.Not the wild, trembling heat of last night.
Suspicion.
Sharp.Focused.Lethal.
The priest is gone.
The heir is awake.
And now I’m not mapping this church anymore.
I’m surviving it.
Santino’s Shadow, Dante’s Doubt
I force myself back into the main corridor, letting the hum of parish life swallow me. Soft voices, shuffling feet, the rustle of bulletins—normal sounds that should calm my pulse.
They don’t.
Because behind me, stretched thin and sharp as wire, I can still feel Santino’s stare.
Not the stare from the hallway last night—the one dripping with sin and hunger.This stare cuts colder.
Suspicion.Calculation.A slow, quiet undoing of everything I’ve built around him.
I keep my pace steady, steps controlled, the perfect picture of a dutiful volunteer slipping back into her routine. My smile stays soft, my posture relaxed, hands folded neatly at my waist.
But inside, every nerve tenses up.
I pass a row of parishioners lighting candles. A woman nods at me. I nod back.Easy. Calm. Harmless.
Then the air shifts.
A different awareness prickles down my spine.Not Santino’s eyes — smaller, sharper.Young, but weathered in a way no child should ever be.
Dante.
He’s leaning against a marble column like he grew out of it, arms crossed, posture deceptively lazy. Built like a boy trying too hard to be a man—and somehow already succeeding.
But it’s his eyes that freeze me mid-stride.
Not childish.Not curious.Not the gaze of someone guessing at the truth.
He already knows.
He tracks my movement the way wolves study the shift of wind—quiet, patient, ready. His chin tilts just slightly toward the hallway I came from.
The hallway with the locked vault door.The hallway where Santino caught me.
Dante’s gaze slides back to me, slow and deliberate. And in that silent exchange, he delivers a message carved clean as a blade:
I see you.I see your lies.I see the spaces you’re not supposed to be in.And if you hurt my family, I will end you.
My throat tightens—unexpected, unwelcome.
For a moment, just one, my chest aches.
