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The church had never seemed so empty.

I stood beneath the darkened nave and listened to the silence press into every hollow space.

It gathered beneath the vaulted ceiling. Settled between the wooden pews. Clung to the confessional and the stone pillars and the small alcove where parishioners had lit candles for the dead.

Ten years of prayers had been spoken inside these walls. Some whispered. Some begged. Some thrown at God like accusations.

I had heard them all.

The pleas of mothers sitting beside sick children. The confessions of husbands who had betrayed their wives. The trembling promises of addicts certain that this time would be different. The fractured words of people who had come to me after losing someone they believed they could not live without.

I had offered comfort when I could. Silence when words would have been an insult. Forgiveness when it was mine to give. And sometimes, when the church doors were locked and no one remained to witness it, I had sat in the front pew and wondered whether any of the mercy I spoke about so easily could ever reach a man like me. The answer had changed depending on the day.

Tonight, I didn’t ask. I walked slowly down the centre aisle, my footsteps striking the stone in measured echoes.

The church had been my home for ten years. This place. These walls. This silence. It had all been mine.

I had arrived carrying little more than a borrowed name and a past no amount of prayer could bury. I had believed that if I remained here long enough, knelt often enough and made myself useful enough, the man I had been might eventually starve.

Father Demitri Marco had been born inside this church. Not in the water of baptism or beneath a bishop’s hand. He had been created through repetition. One prayer. One Mass. One funeral. One frightened stranger at a time.

Every morning, I had fastened the collar at my throat and stepped into the role the Church had given me. I had spoken gently. Walked carefully. Kept my hands visible.

People had trusted those hands. They had placed infants into them. They had clasped them while dying.

They had never known what else those hands had done.

How many triggers they had pulled. How many throats they had closed around.

I stopped beside the font. My fingers rested against the cool stone. Once, many years ago, I had stood here after midnight with blood dried beneath my nails. I had scrubbed my hands until the skin split, though the blood had already been gone.

I remembered staring into the water and thinking that perhaps a man could drown without ever lowering his face beneath the surface.

I had been drowning then. I simply had not possessed the courage to die. So I had hidden. I had taken refuge behind scripture and sacrament, telling myself I had chosen penance when I had really chosen distance. Distance from my family. From my name. From the Saint.

Distance from the possibility that one day, Raze might look at me and see the brother who had abandoned him. Or Tone might ask why I had left her to grieve without me. Or Atlas might refuse to forgive what I had done.

The Church had asked me to surrender worldly attachments. For years, I had believed that was my sacrifice. Now I understood it had also been the cowardly thing to do.

My gaze travelled toward the altar.

The white cloth had been removed. The candles stood unlit. Without flowers, incense or the murmur of a congregation, the sanctuary appeared stripped of ceremony. An empty vessel.

This building had held my life, but it was no longer alive. I had filled this place with meaning because I had needed somewhere to put everything I couldn’t carry alone. My guilt. My grief.

Forgiveness or punishment? For years, I had treated the two as though they were one and the same. I had punished myself and called it repentance. But punishment did not resurrect the dead. It did not undo the orders I had followed or the lives I had taken. Nor did it restore the decade I had stolen from my family. It merely ensured that I lost more.

I moved into the front pew and sat. The wood creaked beneath my weight.

In the quiet, memory came without mercy. My father standing in his study, watching me with disappointment at my disobedience. I saw Raze at seventeen, bloodied and furious, daring the world to strike him again. Tone as she’d been, small enough to sleep against my chest, one fist tangled in my shirt as though even then she feared I might disappear. Atlas watching everything. Understanding too much while saying too little. Alessio laughing. Alessio dying.

My hands closed over my knees. There were some wounds time did not heal. It taught the body how to move around them. How to breathe without disturbing them.

For years, I had believed those wounds were proof that I deserved what I got. Then Adriana had walked into my church covered in blood. I had looked at her and recognized something I wished I hadn’t.

Ruin. The particular kind that came from discovering the person meant to protect you had been the one who brought about your downfall.

I had hidden her because it was the right thing to do. I had opened the door. And I had chosen my past. Because for some reason, Adriana’s life had mattered more to me than the illusion that I was no longer capable of violence.