Page 34

A few miles later, I pulled into a small town I’d passed through once before. It was the kind of place tourists drove through without stopping. It had narrow streets and closed shutters. Scooters were leaning against walls. Old men gathered outside a café, bent over a chessboard as though nothing beyond the next move concerned them.

I parked behind a row of shops and switched off the engine. “Stay here.”

Her fingers clenched around the seat belt.

“No.”

The panic in that single word stopped me. My gaze moved to her hands before returning to her face.

“Adriana.”

“I’m not sitting alone in a car.”

My first instinct was to argue. The town was quiet, but quiet did not mean safe. Bringing her with me risked exposure. Leaving her behind would allow me to move faster and attract less attention. Then I looked through the windscreen and assessed the street again. Whatever danger waited outside, it was nothing beside what being left alone inside a car meant to her now. I nodded once.

“Then keep your head down and stay close to me.”

It was painful for her to get out of the car. She gripped the door and remained still until the color returned to her face. I walked around to her side but didn’t touch her. Instead, I stood close enough to catch her if her legs failed.

We crossed the street slowly to a small unisex clothing shop wedged between a bakery and a tobacconist. A bell chimed above the door as we entered.

The woman behind the counter looked up from a magazine. Her gaze travelled over my cassock, Adriana’s hood, the sunglasses covering part of her bruised face, and the scarf pulled high around her jaw. Her eyes lingered too long.

“My sister had a fall,” I said smoothly. “She needs something comfortable for the journey home.”

Adriana glanced at me. My sister. The lie came easily. Too easily, perhaps, for a priest.

The shopkeeper’s expression softened with sympathy.

“Of course. Poor thing.”

Adriana lowered her face before it could betray her. I watched her shoulders stiffen. She did not want pity. She did not want to become a sad little story a stranger might carry home and repeat over supper. Her father had been murdered. The Coccico family wanted her dead. And she was standing in a tiny shop outside Rome while a priest pretended to be her brother and selected women’s clothing with the calm competence of a man who had done far stranger things.

I chose plain clothes. Dark jeans. A loose black blouse. Several more in varying, deliberately unremarkable shades. A grey coat. A soft scarf wide enough to cover the bruising around her throat. Sunglasses with frames large enough to hide much of her face. Flat, sensible shoes that did not look as though they had come from a convent donation box. I chose quickly, with no unnecessary wandering.

Then I found clothes for myself. Nothing remarkable that would reveal my profession or make anyone remember me. I stepped behind the changing curtain and removed the cassock. The fabric slid from my shoulders with more weight than it should have possessed. For ten years, the cassock had not merely covered my body. It had concealed a history. It had separated Father Demitri Marco from the man who came before him. I folded it carefully. Then I put on black trousers, a white shirt, and a charcoal sweater.

When I stepped from behind the curtain, Adriana looked at me. Her breath caught. The movement hurt her—I saw it in the immediate tightening around her eyes— but she didn’t look away.

The priest had vanished. There was no cassock. No collar. No visible sign of the Church except whatever remained in my eyes, and even that had begun to feel less like holiness as my jaw settled into a harder line. Without the robes, I must have looked younger. Harder. Closer to the man I had spent ten years trying not to resemble.

The shopkeeper noticed as well. Color rose faintly into her cheeks when she rang up the clothes. I ignored it. I paid in cash from a folded roll of notes no village priest had any business carrying. Adriana noticed that too.

Neither of us spoke until we returned to the car and I placed the bags containing my cassock on the back seat. The movement felt final. As though I had not merely changed clothes but stepped out of one life and into another.

“We have a long drive ahead of us,” I said. “We should eat something.”

My gaze shifted across the narrow cobblestoned street to a small café tucked beneath a faded green awning. Two iron tables stood outside. Beside the door, a cracked terracotta pot overflowed with red geraniums.

We crossed the street side by side without speaking.

Late-afternoon light spilled gold across the cobblestones, catching in the windows of parked cars and along the polished curve of a Vespa leaning near the kerb.

A church bell rang somewhere in the distance. Slow. Mournful. Each note spread over the rooftops like a warning.

The café was nearly empty. An elderly man sat inside beside the window with a newspaper folded in front of him. A couple occupied one of the outside tables, their heads bent close together over two glasses of wine. A waitress with tired eyes and a black apron came outside to greet us.

Before I sat, I swept my gaze over the café. Adriana sat opposite me and attempted to hide her nerves, failing miserably.