She doesn’t need to.I can see the tension in her shoulders, the brief clench of her fists at her sides, the steady pace that masks a heart tearing itself apart under her ribs.
“What are you doing, Pia?” I ask quietly.
She stops.
For a long moment, she doesn’t turn. She just stands there in the dim corridor, suspended between the priest’s office behind us and the rectory ahead—shadows gathering like witnesses.
Finally, she looks over her shoulder.
“Exactly what you accused me of,” she says. “Lying. Walking where I shouldn’t. Testing how far I can push you before you break.”
Heat ignites beneath my skin—anger, want, pure fucking frustration.
“You think this is a game?” I grind out.
Her gaze flicks down to my collar, slow and deliberate, before lifting back to my face. “I think you’re the only one pretending it’s not.”
I step closer, closing the remaining distance until her back brushes the wall—not trapped, not pinned, not yet. Just contained. Watched. Seen.
“You want me to watch you?” I ask. “Fine. Here you go.”
My gaze drags over her—slow, deliberate—the quickening pulse in her throat, the rise and fall of her chest, the tension in her jaw, the fear curled under all that defiance. She swallows, and the tiny movement vibrates through the air between us.
“This is a bad idea,” she whispers.
“Then why did you ask for it?” I shoot back, voice low, unforgiving.
Her lips part. No sound comes out. For a second, the bravado slips and something else breaks through—something that looks terrifyingly like a plea.
Not for forgiveness.Not for mercy.
For a witness.
She doesn’t want to be invisible.She doesn’t want to run alone.
“I told you,” she whispers. “I’m not here for God.”
Her eyes lock onto mine, unblinking.
“And I’m not here to save you.”
The words should feel like a bullet.Instead, they feel like the truth—raw, unfiltered, unavoidable.
She isn’t here to redeem me.She’s here to drag me to the edge of the same darkness that made me.
My darkness.Giovanni’s darkness.The kind that leaves scars on bones, not skin.
And I’m walking toward it anyway.
I inhale, slow and raggedly.
“Then why are you here?” I ask.
She hesitates.
For the first time, she doesn’t have an answer ready.
And in that silence—heavy, charged, dangerous—I feel it creeping in, cold and deliberate:
