The moment hangs suspended—dangerous, breathless—until the church groans around me like an ancient warning, a reminder from the walls themselves:
Nothing good survives here.Especially not desire.
And just as I think I might truly lose myself—
—a shadow moves at the end of the hall.
Someone else is in the church.
The Warning She Doesn’t Expect
I force myself to go back. To find her.
I breathe once. Hard.Enough to think.Enough to remember what I saw outside.
“Someone is following you,” I say.
Her reaction is immediate—visceral.
Her eyes widen, not with surprise…but recognition.
Not the look of a woman caught off guard.The look of someone who has just named their nightmare.
She swallows. It’s small, quick, but impossible to miss. That tiny movement tells me everything.
She already suspected it.
A cold blade of realization slices under my skin.
I take a step back—not away from her, but far enough to look at her clearly. Not at the temptress. Not at the liar testing my restraint. Not at the woman who keeps dragging me closer to the edge of a cliff I swore I’d never fall from.
I look at the fear.
“You heard me,” I continue, voice dropping. “A figure. Tonight. Watching from the courtyard.”
She goes still. Too still.
I add, “Not one of my brothers.”
That’s when the mask cracks.
Her breath stutters.Her shoulders pull tight.Her posture shifts—the careful poise slipping, replaced by something raw and wounded and terrifyingly real.
Fear.
Holy shit.
She’s scared.
And that—more than anything she’s lied about—makes my stomach drop. Because a woman like her? A woman who walked into my confessional with deliberate poise, who toyed with temptation like she was tasting it for leverage?
A woman like that doesn’t scare easily.
I step toward her again before I even register the movement. Instinct—violent, territorial—surges to the surface. The part of me I thought I buried with Giovanni. The part that protects what it wants.
“Tell me who you’re running from,” I say.
She shakes her head immediately. Too fast. Too absolute.
