The Vows We Break - Serena Akeroyd Page 0,14

to cry now? And yeah, she has big fat blobs of tears in her eyes... I know it isn’t good.

Huh.

I’m dying.

So why don’t I feel like I am? Why does this feel like the first day of the rest of my life?

Diana: Did you see this?

The buzz of my phone has me staring down at the screen. She’s sent a few messages, all of them demanding more information. Knowing her intent is to distract me, I ignore them to ask:

Me: Did I see what?

A link appears, and when I open it, uncaring about the conversation now, I see him again.

What is it about this priest?

Savio Martin.

I bite my bottom lip, surprised how the sight of him makes something inside me squirm.

I’ve never been a sexual creature. I figure that was why, at twenty-eight, I’m still a virgin. Everyone else got down and dirty, and I just like watching. And no, not in a voyeur kind of way, just in a ‘life’ kind of way.

But Father Savio? With eyes like velvet and a face that would make a saint weep?

He makes me melt.

I scan the article—it’s an exposé about his life since he’d been freed from his captors.

Was that really ten years ago?

God, how time passes.

I’d kept an eye on his situation, his story, every now and then, but when it dried up, I couldn’t follow the trail.

I let it go.

Let him go.

And now, I realize how wrong that was.

There’s pain in his eyes.

In his soul.

It calls out to me. Demanding action.

I stand up, then flinch when my dad grabs my shoulder. “Andrea? Where are you going?”

I blink at him. “I need to leave.”

“Leave for where?” He frowns at me like I’m crazy, and then something shifts on his face like now he sees me as sick. Like maybe all the weird stuff I do is because of this ‘arachnoid cyst on the left temporal lobe.’

Anger whispers through me, but the doctor murmurs, “Ms. Jura, it’s important that you focus. We’re going to have to act very fast. Though benign, it’s actually quite aggressive. We need to—”

Surgery.

I could die under the surgeon’s knife.

Without ever seeing Savio in the flesh.

He needs me.

I need to go to him.

And that means the surgery has to work.

When someone needs me, I never let them go.

Ever.

And his soul?

It’s crying out for mine.

The wings, the path, the choices I made—all of a sudden, it all makes sense.

He’s been there, on every step of my journey, and now? I need to be there for him.

Savio

The second I touch down in Italy, it’s like I can breathe again.

It’s intense. Overwhelming.

Behind me, the impatient folk traveling to the Eternal City are jostling, trying to shove me out of the way, but I don’t stop them. I just stand on the top step of the airplane, waiting to descend toward the buses, sucking in the scent of jet fuel as I absorb where I am.

The church doesn’t know what to do with me, so they’re bringing me back to the Capital.

I’m not about to complain.

I haven’t been brought here because someone has discovered my habit of punishing sinners the way they deserve, but because the bloodstains on my cassock had become noticeable.

I understood why a small town a few hours away from Geneva would be disconcerted at the sight of blood oozing through their priest’s cassock, but self-flagellation isn’t something the church technically approves of anymore either.

Neither is killing parishioners who aren’t adequately penitent...

Doesn’t put a stop to my behavior.

It’s not like I do it every damn day of the week. Just here and there to those who truly deserve being delivered into the Devil’s embrace.

They commit the gravest sin imaginable— taking a life. So I take theirs as payment. Put their soul into Satan’s hands. And each time?

Mine feels lighter.

Not light enough to whitewash the past—I wish—but enough to keep me going, to stop me from doing something stupid.

The pain of my past is something I live with every day. Night terrors, flashbacks. They call it PTSD, but I call it an endless nightmare.

They say I’m borderline suicidal, I say I’m past the border, but only my cause keeps me going.

Only knowing that I make a difference, a true difference, keeps me away from the point of no return.

I still hope, foolish though it may seem, that God will embrace me in his open arms upon my ascent to heaven. I work in his name, to honor him, but I’m well aware that, to Ishmael and his men, they, too,