“You ever wonder,” she says quietly, “what it’d be like to leave and not come back?”
“All the time,” I answer.
She glances over, brows lifting slightly. “Then why don’t you?”
“Because faith is a chain,” I say. “Even when it breaks, it remembers.”
She considers that. “You think I’m your penance, don’t you?”
“No,” I say. “You’re my reminder.”
“Of what?”
“That salvation and sin wear the same face.”
Her breath catches — just slightly. Enough for me to see that the words landed.
She looks down, tracing circles in the wet gravel with the toe of her boot. “You think that’s poetic, but it’s not. It’s tragic.”
“I never claimed it wasn’t.”
When she looks at me again, there’s something in her eyes that wasn’t there before. Something softer. Tired. Maybe even understanding.
“Saint,” she says quietly, “I don’t belong to any of you.”
“I know,” I say. “That’s what makes you dangerous.”
And I mean it — not as a threat, but as a prayer.
She exhales, a slow shiver of breath that fogs in the chill. “I’m done walking.”
I nod once, stepping back. “Inside, then.”
She moves past me, shoulder brushing mine — barely a touch, but enough to leave a spark behind.
When the door closes behind us, I look at the garden again. The mist has thickened, softening the edges of everything.
I whisper a prayer I don’t believe in anymore.
Deliver us from temptation.
And for the first time in years, I mean it.
Ember
The next day, the garden is too quiet for comfort. It’s the kind of silence that hums beneath the skin, like the world’s holding its breath.
Rook had said I could come out here only with Saint, which is its own kind of punishment. Of all of them, he’s the hardest to read—soft voice, sharp eyes, like sin dressed up in forgiveness.
I kneel beside the fountain, the stone cool beneath my palms. Water drips from the cherub’s mouth, each drop echoing against the basin. It smells like rosemary and rain, earth and metal.
Saint’s voice breaks the quiet. “You somehow always manage to look like you’re about to run.”
“I am,” I say without looking up.
He chuckles under his breath. “Then why don’t you?”
“Because I don’t know where I’d go.”
