Saint of Sinners

Celeste Sister Agnese always said that the storms coming in from the sea carried things with them — old things, restless things, the kind that had no business being anywhere near God's house. I never took her seriously. Until tonight. The storm arrived just after Compline, rolling in from the Tyrrhenian Sea with the kind of fury that felt personal. Rain hammered the convent's stone walls. Lightning split the sky in long jagged strokes that lit up my window like God was trying to get someone's attention. The other sisters had gone to their cells hours ago. I should have done the same — I had five days left before my final vows, five days before I committed the rest of my life to this place and this calling, and Mother Bernadette had strongly suggested I spend them in quiet reflection. I was, as usual, not doing what had been strongly suggested. I sat at the window of the eastern corridor with my knees drawn up and a cup of chamomile tea I'd completely forgotten to drink, watching the storm take apart the convent garden with what I could only describe as personal enthusiasm. The roses were not going to survive this. I felt genuinely sorry about the roses. I was still thinking about the roses when I heard it. A sound beneath the storm. Wrong in the specific way sounds are wrong when they don't belong to the night they're in. Heavy. Deliberate. Coming from the direction of the eastern gate. I set down my tea. Every sensible instinct I had told me to wake Sister Agnese. Or Mother Bernadette. Or literally anyone who was not a twenty-three year old novice five days from her final vows with no experience dealing with whatever was happening at the eastern gate at midnight in the middle of a Sicilian storm. I picked up the lantern from the corridor table and walked toward the sound. I've thought about that moment many times since. That small, quiet, completely irreversible choice — walking toward the gate instead of away from it. One foot in front of the other down a rain-slicked corridor with the lantern throwing shadows against the stone walls and my heart beating at its perfectly normal rate, which probably should have told me something about myself. I pushed open the heavy side door and the storm hit me immediately — cold and furious, smelling of salt and something else underneath it. Iron. I raised the lantern. There were six of them just inside the gate. Five were standing — large, armed, dressed in dark clothing soaked through from the rain, with the particular stillness of men who had been trained to be dangerous even when they were trying not to be. They looked at me with expressions ranging from wariness to something that surprised me. Guilt. The sixth was on the ground. He was tall even lying down — long legs, broad shoulders, dark hair flattened against his forehead by the rain. One of the standing men had pressed a jacket against his side but I could see even from where I stood that it wasn't just rainwater soaking through the fabric. The man nearest to me stepped forward with both hands raised. Not threateningly. Which was interesting given the gun at his hip. "We need shelter," he said, in Sicilian dialect so thick I had to concentrate. "Just for the night. Our boss — he needs a doctor." I looked at the man on the ground. His face was turned slightly toward me, jaw set even in unconsciousness, like his body didn't know how to fully surrender control. Strong jaw. Dark brows drawn together. A mouth pressed into a hard line even now. His chest was moving. Barely. Close the gate, said the sensible part of my mind. Wake Mother Bernadette. These are not good men. You can see that from here. I looked at the blood soaking steadily through the jacket pressed to his side. Then at the five men watching me with that strange guilt on their faces — like even they understood this was not a place they should have brought their violence, and were sorry, and had nowhere else to go. I stepped back and held the door open wider. "Bring him inside," I said. "And close the gate behind you." * * * They laid him on the infirmary table and I lit every lamp in the room and looked at what I was working with. Gunshot wound to the left side. The bullet had passed through cleanly — good. He'd lost a significant amount of blood — not good. His pulse was present but thin, and his skin had taken on the specific grey-white of someone whose body was quietly making very difficult decisions. "How long ago?" I asked, already moving toward the supply cabinet. "Two hours," said the man from the gate. I kept my expression neutral. Two hours was a long time to be bleeding and still breathing. Whatever this man was, he was stubborn about staying alive. I knew where Mother Bernadette kept the real medical supplies — the sutures, the antiseptic, the things a convent in the Sicilian hills stocked because we were forty minutes from the nearest hospital and God helped those who helped themselves. I gathered what I needed with quick certain hands. "You know what you're doing?" the man asked from behind me. "My mother was an emergency room nurse," I said, setting out the suture kit. "I grew up in her hospital on school holidays. I've sutured worse than this." I paused. "Probably." A beat of silence. Then from somewhere near the door, someone made a sound that was definitely a suppressed laugh. Under the circumstances I chose to take that as a good sign. I worked quickly. The storm kept hammering the narrow windows. The five men arranged themselves around the room in the careful way of people trying to take up less space than they actually occupied, which I found oddly considerate. One of them had removed his boots at the door without being asked. I was finishing the last suture when his hand moved. It was sudden — his fingers closing around my wrist before I'd processed that he was conscious. Not violently. Just firmly. The automatic grip of a man whose instincts ran faster than his awareness. I went still. His eyes opened. Grey. A grey so pale it was nearly silver in the lamplight, and even half-conscious and wrecked from blood loss, they were the most alert eyes I had ever looked into. Like the rest of him could be falling apart and those eyes would still be cataloguing every exit in the room. They found me. Slowly at first, then with a sudden sharp focus that made my breath do something I immediately decided not to examine. I watched him take in the room — his men, the stone walls, the medical supplies, the crucifix above the door — and then come back to me. To my habit. To the small wooden cross at my throat. Something moved across his face that I didn't have a word for. "Where am I?" His voice came out low and wrecked, like gravel pulled across stone. "The Convent of Santa Margherita delle Grazie." I kept my voice even. "You're in the infirmary. You were shot. I've sutured the wound but you've lost significant blood and you need to stay completely still." He looked at me for a long moment. Something unreadable moved behind those silver eyes. "You're a nun," he said. "A novice," I corrected. "Almost a nun." Another pause. That unreadable something shifted, deepened, became something I liked even less. "Dante Ricci," he said. The way someone says a name when they're used to it changing the temperature of a room. It changed mine. I knew that name. Every person in Sicily knew that name — the way you knew the names of storms and of saints. Things powerful enough to reshape everything around them. Things you prayed either never came near you or passed quickly when they did. I had apparently run out of that particular prayer. I kept my voice steady and removed his hand from my wrist with calm, complete finality. "You're welcome to stay until the storm passes, Mr. Ricci. After that, you and your men will need to leave." He looked at me for a long moment. Then the corner of his mouth moved — not quite a smile, something more unsettling than a smile — and he said: "Of course." He said it the way men say things they have absolutely no intention of meaning. I turned back to my supplies and began cleaning up, and told myself the feeling settling into my chest was nothing more than the reasonable wariness of a sensible woman in a complicated situation. I almost believed it.