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It was only a matter of time before the Coccico cartel came looking for Adriana, and once they did, there was no telling what they would do. Men who bound a wounded woman, hunted her through a forest, and forced their way into a church to reach her would not be deterred by convent walls. They would keep coming until they finished what they had started.
After two days of hiding and recovery, we decided I would take Adriana elsewhere. There was no clear plan. Only preparation. I contacted my bishop and requested an immediate leave of absence, citing a family emergency and offering little more than that. He asked questions. I gave him no answers that could endanger her.
The only certainty I had was that Adriana needed to leave Rome. Perhaps I could take her somewhere far enough away to obtain new documents and arrange safe passage out of the country. Somewhere the Coccico would not think to look. Somewhere she could disappear before they closed their hands around her again.
I told myself I was doing it because I didn’t want the death of another innocent woman on my conscience. That was true. It was simply no longer the whole truth.
Adriana had not argued when I told her we were leaving the convent. She had only watched me with those bruised, exhausted eyes and nodded. In some strange and dangerous way, she trusted me. She believed I would do the right thing. She believed I could keep her alive. The weight of that faith settled heavily across my shoulders as I drove.
Adriana sat with one hand braced against her ribs and the other curled around the seat belt. The strap appeared to hurt whenever the car shifted, but she refused to release it.
Pain showed in every careful breath she took. In the bandages wrapped around her wrists. In the swelling around her mouth, and the way she held her head unnaturally still, as though the smallest movement might cause her even more pain. Still, she forced herself to remain upright.
Outside the windows, the countryside blurred in shades of green and grey against rain-darkened stone. I avoided the main roads, choosing the narrow lanes that wound between olive groves and abandoned farmhouses.
Twice, I turned without warning.
Once, I pulled off the road behind a crumbling wall and waited until a white van passed to ensure we weren’t being followed.
Adriana watched everything. Every road. Every vehicle. Every movement I made.
Her vigilance was born of terror, and it was sharp. She tracked my hands when I changed gears. She watched the mirrors whenever another car appeared behind us. She had not relaxed once since we left the convent.
I lifted one hand to my throat. Her gaze followed the movement. For a moment, I left my fingers against the clerical collar. I had worn it for so long that touching it had become instinctive, a reminder of the life I had chosen and the man I had buried beneath it. Then, with one swift tug, I removed it. The small strip of white came free from the black fabric, glaringly bright between my fingers. I looked at it once. Ten years reduced to a narrow piece of fabric. Then I opened the glove box and placed it inside. The compartment closed with a click that sounded too loud inside the small car.
Adriana stared at the place where the collar had been. Without it, the skin at my throat felt exposed. Bare in a way that had nothing to do with clothing. The collar had always told people what to expect. It softened the black clothes, the controlled voice, the discipline. It gave strangers a safe explanation for the distance I kept between myself and the rest of the world.
I was a priest. Nothing more. Now there was no white band to direct her eye away from the man beneath it. Her gaze moved over my hair and the side of my face. Lower, briefly, to my shoulders beneath the cassock. When I glanced towards her, she was studying my jaw, then my eyes.
She did not look away quickly enough.
“You’re staring.”
“I’m curious.” Her gaze dropped to the glove box. “Why did you take it off?”
“Because a priest draws attention when he is running.”
She swallowed, and I saw the movement hurt her.
“Until I find a way to get you out of this, call me Demitri.”
“Demitri.”
My name sounded different in her voice without the title before it. Closer. More intimate than it had any right to be.
“It’s better if we disappear into the crowd,” I told her. “No collar. Nothing that gives people a reason to remember us.”
A faint change passed through her expression. She understood the logic. A priest in a cassock would be noticed anywhere, especially one moving like a man with something to hide. The problem was that she continued watching me as though losing the collar had made me more visible rather than less.
I knew what she saw beneath my dark hair and hard profile. I had broad, muscular shoulders the cassock had never succeeded in disguising. A mouth shaped by restraint rather than gentleness. Eyes that had spent years learning to recognize violence before it arrived. The collar had allowed me to become a holy man. Without it, I wasn’t certain what—or who—I was.
I tightened my hands on the wheel. The road narrowed ahead. I slowed as we passed a stone house with blue shutters and a rusted shrine to the Virgin Mary set into the wall. A woman sweeping her doorstep glanced at the car, then peered through the windscreen at Adriana. Adriana turned her face away immediately and pulled the hood of her coat lower.
“We need different clothes,” I told her.
Her gaze dropped to the clothes she wore. The sweater and trousers from the convent were plain but too large. They looked borrowed because they were. The scarf did little to hide the swelling across her face, and while the bruising on her throat was covered, it was not concealed well enough to survive close scrutiny.
The rosary rested against the soft flesh of her throat. She had insisted on keeping it close. I had noticed the way its weight pained her whenever she swallowed or shifted, but she had not removed it. Her fingers touched it unconsciously when fear rose, as though the beads were the last fixed thing left in a world that had torn itself apart around her.
