Page 62 of The Savage

The way that softening, edged by hard speculation, feels on my body, inside my body, like a weather shift, a pressure I cannot read. Heat gathering at the horizon.

I try to redirect my mind, think of the convent. Think of the sisters.

Have they missed me?

Sister Teresa will have knocked at my door after the invasion and found the room cold, the bed still tucked. Sister Alba will have frowned over the morning bread and scolded herself for humming if no one is there to hear. The bell will have rung and rung. Despite the helicopter and the soldiers, I like to think they will have searched for me. In the laundry, the chapel, the orchard where the wind combs the trees. It’s both worrying and comforting to imagine them searching.

Perhaps I’m just deluding myself but it keeps the loneliness from sharpening into a blade.

But then I think of the Madre Superiora.

Has she done anything to find me?

Has she reported the black-clad men who took me and my kidnap to the authorities, or has she told the story that costs the least – Sister Benedetta has been called elsewhere; God’s will is mysterious; pray for her discernment? It would be so easy to tuck me into a parable and wash her hands.

Renzo’s words haunt me: Convenient. Protected herself. Or someone else.

I have no proof. Only a feeling I keep trying… and failing… to drag into the light.

Are the things he says about her true? Did she keep things from me? If so, why?

Because I asked? Because I begged? Because wanting is dangerous and control is easier than comfort?

I bow lower. ‘Forgive me,’ I whisper, though I’m not sure for what. Doubting a woman who clothed me, or believing a man who undresses me with his eyes.

Flashes press at the edges of my sight the more I pray.

They’ve been doing that these five days, like pictures projected on the ceiling when I blink too slowly. A girl’s laughter I know is mine. A smell: petrol and lilies, sweet and sharp, funeral and festival at once. Knocked knuckles against a pew, the sting blossoming into a kiss I don’t remember and remember in my bones.

A gun, cold and heavy, not in my hand – near my hand – someone else’s breath ragged with fear or fury, I don’t know which. I try to catch each fragment, pin it with words, but they dissolve when I look straight at them. Like my prayers lately, memory prefers the side glance, not a full-on scrutiny.

I rise and go to the mirror with the crucifix above it.

Only a handful of days and yet the habit makes me someone I recognise and don’t at once. The veil frames a face I would not pick out of a crowd if she were wearing another woman’s clothes.

I touch the edge of the wimple at the exact place where Renzo’s fingers touched it too, and the fabric remembers better than I do. My cheeks heat. I hate the blush and love it. That’s the worst of it. This fracture between hate and love feels like the crack in fine china that will never be repaired.

I think of my oldest sisters – Maddelena and Sofiya – and the way the names gain familiarity now, ever so lightly, as if they’ve been circling, waiting for permission to land. They are married to his brothers.

The knowledge sits on my tongue like a sacrament I’m not sure I’m allowed to take just yet. If they are bound to the Salvatores, then what am I? A lost piece, a missing stone in a dangerous mosaic. Is this divine design… or a net?

‘Lord,’ I say, speaking to the glass because the glass seems less stern than heaven, ‘if You’re answering prayers, can You be clearer? I am trying to be good. I am trying to be Yours.’

A thought rises, unbidden, insolent: And yet you are his.

I flinch as if I have slapped myself. It isn’t true. It cannot be. I belong to God. I belong to the life that saved me when my mind was ash.

I belong to⁠—

You belonged to me first.

—his voice across the room, low and rough, saying those charged, possessive words, saying ‘come closer’ and the way my body obeyed before my mind had a chance to protest. The way relief and elation flared when the guards walked me back the second night and we said nothing, we just existed, breathing the same air like it was consent.

I press my palms to my eyes until stars bloom red then white. ‘No.’

I say it to the room, to my thoughts, to the girl in the mirror who blushes like she’s lit from the inside.

The days have slid into a pattern I’m afraid to admit I like: prayer, tests, Renzo’s growled demands made bearable by his softer questions, my refusals unconvincing even to me.