“Control freaks back up their obsessions,” I say. “If we’re not in here…”
“Then we were either above this pay grade,” he says, “or off the edge of even her comfort zone.”
I turn a few more pages. The dates jump forward years, then trail off. The last entry is just a list of supplies. Gas, cash, fake IDs, and a single word in the margin:leave. “No handwritten evil monologue,” I huff sarcastically. “I’m almost disappointed.”
I close the notebook. Everything about this place is depressing—the low ceiling, the damp, the way my ribs ache when I breathe too deeply. “Anything else worth digging for?” I ask.
Sterling sweeps the flashlight around one more time, lingering on the cot, the shelves, a set of hooks on the wall where coats used to hang. “If there is, we’re not going to see it by staring at mold,” he says. “Cam will go over this with a microscope. We did what we came to do.”
“Then let’s go breathe something that doesn’t smell like dead hymns.” The climb back up is worse. My legs have cooled, and the ache in my side is a steady pulse. Sterling takes the steps just ahead of me, flashlight beam bouncing off the walls.
We push back through the side door into the main body of the chapel. The sunlight hits me first. The grey winter sky filters through the brokenwindows, dust dancing in the beams, with nowhere else to be. For a second, we just stand there. “It’s uglier up here,” I say. “In a pretty way.”
Sterling steps beside me, tucking the dead phone into his pocket, the notebook under his arm. “Sunlight shows the damage,” he says. “Basements just smell like it.”
“Poetic.” A soft smile appears without permission. “I’ll add it to your résumé under ‘hitman.’” Sterling’s gaze tracks up the length of the chapel: broken windows, scarred altar, the sagging roof. There’s something tight in his face that wasn’t there before. “This place is a mess,” I add, trying for light. “Ten out of ten, would condemn.”
“Yeah,” he says softly. “That’s kind of the point.”
I turn to look at him. “You dragged me to a condemned church for the aesthetic?”
Sterling shifts the notebook to one hand, freeing the other. His fingers brush mine, then curl loose at his side, like he’s not sure if he’s allowed to reach. “Everything I remember about this place is secondhand,” he says. “Her stories. Her rules. Her version.”
“Welcome to my childhood.”
Sterling tips his head back, studying the cracked ceiling. “I spent years trying not to think about it, because every time I did, it felt like she was still in my head. Still telling me what this meant.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m tired of letting her own every room she walked through.” His eyes come back to me, sharp and intent. “Basements. Houses. Hospitals. This.”
I feel my pulse kick up. “So what, Sterling? You want to exorcise it?”
“Something like that,” Sterling chuckles, low and deep. “We came here to dig up her secrets. We did that.” He nods at the notebook. “But I…” He breaks off, jaw flexing, like the words don’t come easily. “I also just want one fucking place that wasn’t defined by what she did. One room that’s ours because we said so, not because they wrote it in a file.”
The air between us stops, feeling thick and heavy. “You picked a church for that,” I say, because if I don’t keep talking, I might forget how.
He shrugs one shoulder. “Look at it,” he says. “It’s already broken. Nobody’s praying here. Nobody’s watching. No cameras. No files. Just stone and dust and two idiots who don’t know when to quit.”
“Romantic,” I deadpan.
“Terrifying,” he counters. “Romantic would be flowers, dinner, and pretending we’re not built out of knife wounds.”
Sterling steps closer. Not crowding. Just enough that I can feel the heat off him in the cold air, the colored light from the broken glass paints his jaw in red and blue. “What are you asking me for, exactly?” I ask.
Sterling holds my gaze as if he can see deep into my soul. “A new memory,” he says simply. “Here. With you. Something that doesn’t belong to her, Evelyn, or the program. Just us.”
For a moment, all I can hear is my heartbeat and the wind whistling through cracked panes. “Sterling…” I start. I don’t even know what the end of that sentence is.
“If you say no, we walk out right now,” he breathes. “We go back to the safe house, hand Cam his new toys, and pretend this was just another errand. I won’t push.”
Sterling means it, I can see it in the tight set of his shoulders, in the way his hand stays loose at his side instead of grabbing me. I look around the chapel—at the vandalized altar, the shattered saint, bleeding colored light onto cracked tile, the pews where someone once knelt and asked for things they probably would never get. This was her place; it doesn’t have to stay hers. “Okay,” I say, voice low but determined. My voice comesout steady. “One new memory.” Something in his expression eases, like a muscle unclenching. He takes the notebook and the phone back to the front pew and sets them down carefully, as if putting the past in time-out. When he comes back, his hands are finally empty. “Just tell me one thing,” I say as he stops in front of me.
“Anything.”
“You’re not about to ask me to pray, right?”
His mouth curves into a tight, evil smile. “Oh, you’ll pray, Thorn,” he says, voice low and velvet. “But it’ll be on your knees…praying to me.”
