Page 70 of Veil of Ashes

He looks at me, frowning.

“She disappears,” I clarify. “I finish this. Alone.”

Ettore’s eyes narrow. “You won’t survive it.”

“I don’t have to.”

I hear Sylvara’s breath catch across the room.

She doesn’t turn.

But she heard it.

All of it.

The chapel holds nothing holy. Just choices carved into bone.

And this one’s already made.

Ettore crouches over the stone altar now, hunched like the weight of what he’s doing has finally landed. One by one, he pulls out the tools of resurrection—ink-stained forms, stamped seals, the small plastic pouch holding our new lives in miniature. IDs. Exit documents. A new set of fingerprints.

For her.

I step away, deeper into the chapel’s shadows, down a corridor that’s lost most of its roof. Moonlight filters in through what used to be stained glass. Red and blue shards crunch beneath my boots, their holy stories fractured under the tread of too many sins.

The desert presses in on all sides, dry and vast and watching.

And I remember.

I was sixteen when they killed Benedetto.

The only person I ever loved without conditions. Without masks. He’d laughed like nothing could touch him, moved like he had time to burn, always said he’d die young with a cigarette in his mouth and a woman on his lap.

He died alone. Blood on asphalt. No gun in his hand.

Set up by someone I was working with. Someone I was too scared to cross.

I hid for three days afterward. Lived on vending machine crackers and adrenaline. Slept in drainage tunnels. My ribs were cracked from a fight that didn’t matter. The city felt too loud, and my name tasted like ash every time someone said it.

When I knocked on the back door of Ettore’s parish, I wasn’t looking for God.

Just somewhere to fall.

Father Ettore opened it with a gun in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He didn’t flinch when he saw me.

“Come in,” he said. “Wipe your shoes.”

He fed me. Let me sleep on the stone floor. Never asked what happened. Never asked what I’d done.

Only said, “If you stay, you’ll owe me.”

I stayed.

For four years.

He taught me how to disappear. How to strike only when it meant something. How to endure. Not forgive.

I’d been his blade once.

---