Her eyes sweep over the mess.
She sees the violent truth.She reaches out anyway.
Her fingertips touch my face—
feather-light,soft in a way nothing in my life has ever dared to be,soft in a way far more dangerous than any blade.
I flinch.
Not from pain—nothing hurts right now.It’s the instinctive recoil from a touch that isn’t violent, demanding, or transactional.
I brace for her to pull away.
She doesn’t.
Her thumb grazes my cheek, smearing a thin line of blood. Her touch lingers—warm, steady—despite the cold tightening around us.
“You saved me,” she whispers.
The words land like a blow.Not dramatic.Not emotional.Just truth—quiet and lethal.
A priest is supposed to save souls.But I saved her by ending a life.
Something shifts inside me—pain tangled with clarity, violence brushed with something tender I don’t have a name for.
Her hand stays on my cheek.Her gaze holds mine.And the fear I’ve been bracing for… isn’t there.
Instead, I see something else — something unsteady,something vulnerable,something that terrifies her more than the blood on my hands.
She’s not afraid of me.
She’s afraid of how much she needs me.
My throat tightens.
When I finally speak, my voice is rough, scraped raw by violence and something dangerously close to confession.
“I killed for you.”
Her breath grazes my skin. Warm. Close. Too intimate for a chapel carved out of stone and old sins.
“I know.”
Two soft syllables—barely air, barely sound—but they settle in my bones like a vow I never meant to make.
With her hand on my face, with Rocco cooling behind us, with the air thick with dust and iron—
I don’t regret it.
Something dark stirs low in my chest. Something honest. Something that’s been starving under the collar and the guilt and the years of pretending I was anything other than what Giovanni made.
Her thumb drags along my jaw, another streak of blood smearing across my skin. It feels like a mark.
A claim.
And without meaning to — without permission — I lean into her touch.
The movement is slight, almost imperceptible, but inside me everything ruptures.
