Saint of Sinners

Chapter Five: He Came Back

Celeste

I had seventeen days to get used to the quiet again.

Seventeen days of Lauds and Vespers and the smell of the garden after rain. Seventeen days of my vows sitting on my shoulders like something I had chosen deliberately and would choose again. Seventeen days of not thinking about grey eyes or the sound of a voice that treated every word like it cost something.

I was doing very well. I want to be clear about that.

So when Nico knocked on the garden door on a Tuesday morning with his hat in his hands and that carefully neutral expression, I stood up from the roses slowly and brushed the soil from my hands and told myself the thing moving through my chest was irritation.

It was not irritation.

I walked around the side of the convent to the main courtyard and stopped.

Dante was leaning against the stone wall near the gate with his arms crossed, looking healthier than a man who had been half dead seventeen days ago had any right to look. He was watching me cross the courtyard with those grey eyes that gave nothing away and everything away simultaneously, and when I stopped a careful distance from him he said nothing. Just looked at me.

I said nothing either. For a moment we just stood there in the Tuesday morning sunlight like two people in a conversation that hadn't started yet.

"You took your vows," he said finally.

"I did."

"How do you feel?"

It was such an unexpected question that I answered it honestly before I could think better of it.

"Settled," I said. "Like something that had been in the wrong place for a long time finally found where it belonged."

He looked at me steadily. "Good."

"Why are you here, Dante?"

He uncrossed his arms and reached into his jacket. What he produced was not a weapon, which given everything I knew about him I considered notable. It was a small envelope, thick and cream colored, sealed with plain wax.

"The convent roof," he said. "The eastern section. It took damage in the storm. I had someone look at it." He held out the envelope. "That should cover the repairs. And the medical supplies you used."

I looked at the envelope. Then at him.

"You drove up a mountain to pay a medical bill."

"I pay my debts."

"Dante. The convent doesn't need"

"Take it, Celeste."

The way he said my name did something it should not have done. I took the envelope.

"Thank you," I said. "On behalf of the convent."

"On behalf of the convent," he repeated, with something that was almost amusement.

I held his gaze. "Is that all?"

A pause. He looked at the convent wall, then back at me, and in that moment I saw something in his face that he usually kept very well hidden. Something uncertain. On Dante Ricci it looked so foreign that it took me a moment to recognize it.

"I don't know," he said. Honest and simple, the way he said everything.

I should have sent him away. Every sensible, faithful, clear-headed part of me knew exactly what I should have done.

"Have you eaten?" I said instead.

Something shifted in his grey eyes.

"No," he said.

"Then come inside," I said. "We have bread and the sisters make very good coffee. You can eat and then you can go back down the mountain and pay your debts somewhere else."

He looked at me for a moment with an expression I was starting to recognize as the one he wore when something surprised him. Then he pushed off the wall and followed me inside.

Nico, behind him, made a sound that might have been a cough.

I chose not to investigate.

* * *

He sat at the long kitchen table and Sister Margherita, who was seventy-four and had no fear of anything on this earth or the next, put coffee in front of him and studied him with bright, curious eyes.

"You're the one who was shot," she said conversationally.

"Yes," Dante said.

"Celeste did a good job."

"She did."

"She does everything well." Sister Margherita refilled his coffee without being asked. "Pity she's taken her vows. She would have made some man very confused."

"Sister Margherita," I said.

"I'm seventy-four," she said serenely. "I say what I observe."

Dante looked at me over his coffee cup. I looked at the wall.

Sister Margherita smiled to herself and went back to her bread.