“Two minutes, I promise, Luce. Just hang tight, okay?” I gave her one last kiss on the forehead. Our eyes met, gazes watered down with fear.
“No, Tressa, please.” She looked down at Ms. Watson. Before Lucy could look back and beg me to stay again, I slipped out of the sacristy and into the main chamber of the church hot on Cruz’s heels. My eyes scanned the pews, searching for anyone else who may need help. It looked clear, the only victims already accounted for in the room I’d just left.
Sliding along the cold stone wall, I measured my breathing with my footsteps, keeping to the shadows as the sound of soft grunts grew louder in my ears.
Bastien’s warm, deeply inflected voice uttered something before all was silent again. Cruz turned back to me and nodded. “I hear them.”
We came to the corner, only steps away from the set of doors that would open into the front vestibule of the church. My eyes caught on the iron cross that hung on a tiny hook next to the door. “I know I don’t deserve it, but please pray for the man I am about to save.”
Barbed wire cinched tighter around my heart, crushing my courage one millimeter at a time, deflating my resolve.
I could run the other way.
Escape out the back door, dial 9-1-1 as I ran down the sidewalk, and never look back.
And then I heard it.
The soft snick of a bullet sliding into a chamber.
Fire tore through every vein as I fisted the heavy cross on the wall and yanked, the old hook coming free of the stone easily but before I could power with all the force I had through the double doors to save Bastien, Cruz caught my wrist and curled his fingers around the cold iron, sliding the cross from my grip easily and charging into the vestibule. A man in black, beanie pulled low over his head, gripped Bastien’s neck with one hand, a gleaming revolver in the other. The barrel aimed right at Bastien’s temple.
I choked as fear froze me but without pausing, Cruz smashed the cold iron cross into the attacker’s head, unwilling to stop, primal adrenaline released with every pummel. The attacker fell to the ground, gun clutched in one hand, and still, Cruz attacked. Bastien swept the gun from the man’s limp fingers and made quick work of tying the assailant’s hands as tightly as he could muster with his belt. Once Bastien was sure he was secured, his eyes met mine.
“I’ve got him,” Bastien murmured, hand slipping over mine to ease the cross from my hands.
“I know who that is.” I choked, eyes wide and hands trembling. The angle of his jaw, the cool icy eyes, it was the person I’d seen Lucy talking to that night. I was almost sure of it.
Cruz groaned, releasing the cross from his grip then, tension draining from his body.
“There.” Bastien rose, hands clutching gently at his nephew’s shoulders.
Cruz finally uttered, eyes glazed with shock. “Is he dead?”
“Oh, Cruz.” I descended on his shaking form, arms wrapping around his shoulders as tears leaked from his eyes. Shock blanketed me as blood darkened the worn carpet at my feet. Cruz dropped to his knees, hands holding his head as fresh tears pushed down his cheeks. I sat frozen.
Bastien pressed his palms to my neck then, thumbs sliding down my jaw and throat, willing me to look up at him.
“Sweet dove, please come back. I need you.”
His forehead brushed mine, tears beading at his eyelids as he placed soft kisses along my lips.
Sirens vibrated in my eardrums, closer and closer with every passing beat.
“Can you take care of Luce for me? And check on Ms. Watson? I have to stay here with Cruz, but can you check on them for me, my dove?”
His words solidified in my consciousness.
I nodded, hollow but present. “Yes.”
“Good.” His smile, pained but relieved, lit my desperate soul. “Thank you, Tressa.”
* * *
I picked my way around the wreckage. Shrapnel in the form of hundreds of tiny objects littering the churchyard. Objects meant to destroy, ravage, maim the flesh of God’s most obedient flock. Gunpowder and shrapnel had settled on the last rows of pews, only those with heavier trajectories flying farther up the nave.
Ronnie John picked up a wrench and a jagged shard of steel sitting under the final Station of the Cross, Jesus’s death, hanging just outside the sacristy door. The very objects responsible for battering Lucy and Ms. Watson almost fatally.
When I’d found Ronnie John huddled in a bathtub upstairs, his frail teen boy arms shook with fear as he covered his head and cried.
I cried with him when we walked down the stairs and he told me how he’d come in early before Mass to set up the catechism room and help Father Bastien distribute this week’s leaflets to the missiles in each pew. He described feeling the first boom shake the foundations under his feet. By the time he’d exited the tiny catechism room and snuck up the back stairs, a dark figure was pulling another weighted backpack into the main hall of the church. With the bomber’s back turned, Ronnie John had crab-crawled across the front pews and ducked inside the sacristy, his only focus finding Father Bastien to warn him.
What I hadn’t realized, and what Ronnie John had confessed as we walked back to the chaos, was that Bastien had apparently, and very recently, had a security system installed. A discreet button hidden in a corner of the sacristy rang the security company and local emergency services. Ronnie John had helped him install it before Bastien explained to him and the rest of the kids in catechism class how it worked, urging that if they ever felt threatened, they were to use this without hesitation. He’d also explained to them the importance of keeping it a secret, especially from church officials who wouldn’t approve of its installation without their knowledge.
Bastien’s dogged determination to help the helpless had always impressed me, but the idea that he’d installed an alarm without even the cardinal’s knowledge was something else entirely. I couldn’t help but wonder if something he’d found in the attic upstairs had driven him to seek out enhanced security for St. Mike’s.
My rebel saint, the man with the plan to save us all.
Ronnie John cleared his throat as he swung open the door of the sacristy to reveal a now-bustling crime scene.
Armed officers, detectives, and medics swarmed.
I wrapped my arms around my body, sliding my palms up and down the long sleeves of my shirt before crossing the threshold of the door and letting it close softly behind me.
Cruz caught my eye and nodded as he was being questioned by detectives. I’d already explained to them the sequence of events from my point-of-view, but Cruz was the only one that’d seen him as he entered the church. I wondered if he’d tell them the part about me, freshly showered and still in sleep clothes with Bastien’s marks on my body? What would I say if they asked? What could I say? I didn’t think there was a likely explanation other than the truth. Anything else seemed laughable in comparison.
Anxiety threaded my muscles, making it hard to walk, hard to think, my only focus the fear of what might happen if we were caught.
One night.
One indiscretion.
Two lives changed forever.
I walked the length of the church wall, fingertips drawing on the smooth stone to steady me as I descended each of the Stations of the Cross, a dark representation of Jesus’s last moments before death. The calm look on his hollow face haunted me then, and it did even more so now.
Nearing the light spilling out of the double doors at the entrance of St. Mike’s, I saw Lucy’s softly lit face shining through the pane of a single window, one medic attaching an IV to her arm, the other performing a triage scan of her major moving parts. I’d make sure I was in that ambulance with her by the time it was set to take off for the hospital. No way would I let her navigate that experience alone when she was already suffering from so much.
I pushed through the doors, the smell of gunpowder finally fading, probably with the gusts of wind that carried in and out of the church each time someone new came in and out of th
e crime scene.
St. Michael’s.
A crime scene.
I was still in shock. It would take me days to unpeel these layers, especially when they were so intimately wrapped around a man who held the most sacred of soft spots in my soul.
I paused at the second set of doors, my view clearer than it’d ever been.
Bastien’s form was hunched over what looked to be an innocent bystander who had been knocked off his feet by one of the blasts.
Bastien held the old man’s frail hand as a medic poked and prodded all the other parts of his body for wounds.
Dried fingerprints of blood caked Bastien’s hands, his gaze intent on the soul suffering before him.
Father Bastien tending his flock.
Just as he’d been called to do.
Pushing through the final set of doors, my focus crisp and clear after far too long, I walked on confident steps to the person who needed me most. Validation coursed through me in the form of a wave of satisfaction so profound, all I could do was glance back for one last stolen moment.
I watched him, kneeling and helping the wounded man at his feet, so very God-like from the inside out. The last thought to cross my mind was something he’d probably parroted to me at some point over our torrid last few months.
The best in life is only bought at the price of great pain.
Maybe this was our penance.
Our greatest pleasure had brought the greatest pain to those we loved most.
Heart shattering every step, I turned back, walking away from a life set aflame, resolution finally riding me harder than the longest of my many dark nights. I thought of all the people I’d lost in my life, the affection—the love—the smiles that I could never again take for granted. And as I shivered in the night-time chill, it dawned on me that tonight was an end to something profound.
Tonight was our expiration date.
Lucy held a hand out to me as I approached the ambulance, our eyes locking when I climbed through the back doors, listening to them close before we turned out of the churchyard, a hard left over the curb, and then the next right, headed in the direction of the rest of our lives.
NINETEEN
Tressa—six months later
Lucy and I lived for three months in a one-bedroom apartment, her in the bedroom and me on the couch, before I got a call on a colder than normal Sunday morning that Mom had suffered cardiac arrest in the middle of her dinner one night, cigarette burned into a shell of ash in her hand. My heart broke when I went back, cleaned up the life she’d spent all of her days working so hard for. The small blessing was that she’d left everything to me, meaning Lucy and I could move in to Mom’s tiny little house, the burden of rent suddenly off our shoulders.
And Lucy grew.
At seven months, the doctor began to talk about taking the baby early. He also asked her if there was a chance she could be farther along than she thought.
She was adamant, though.
Her story unwavering.
Casey.
The boy with the backpacks.
That was still how I thought of him.
The sad, broken boy with the backpacks he’d stuffed chock-full of metal debris and pipe bombs and set off in St. Mike’s on another colder than normal Sunday morning. Investigators had also confirmed he’d been picked up for loitering down the street and just out of view of the church. The likelihood that Bastien had seen him that night when I’d run tearing out into the rain was high, and horrifying. But in the end I didn’t think Casey was vicious, only sick. Very, very sick.
I’d begun to resent the cold Sunday mornings, expecting only shitty tidings for the rest of the day.
Unfortunately, Philadelphia was afflicted with about 100 freezing-cold mornings a year, which made the odds almost never in my favor.
I dug a little deeper each morning, one foot in front of the other as I took the bus downtown to one of the jobs I’d applied for that morning months ago, before everything else had happened.
That’d been the one stellar silver lining in the catastrophe of my life.
I’d landed just about the greatest job I could have imagined, coordinating the corporate giving department of a major local bank with hundreds of branches situated around the area. I was expected to research charities and different locations around the globe that the bank could organize donations and giving events for. It was the best part of my day, every day.
I took my work home most days because I loved it. My life seemed to sharpen into focus in a way it never had before, my purpose to help those around me in any way I could. Corporate giving maybe wasn’t something I wanted to do for the rest of my life, but it was certainly something I loved in the moment.
Plus, it offered a great distraction from all things St. Mike’s.
I hadn’t let myself think about that time much. One of the detectives left Lucy with a card for a family counselor if we needed to “work through anything.” I’d had to hold back a wry chuckle then, and I still did now.
Who the hell had time to work through anything? We were barely feeding ourselves.
But thankfully, there’d been no fatalities in the tragedy at St. Michael’s that day.
Ms. Watson had suffered an abdominal wound and lost a lot of blood, but after a transfusion, she teased that she felt as young as the eighteen-year-old whose blood coursed through her old veins.
Even the older gentleman who’d been shaken off his feet whom Bastien had been tending to the last I saw him had recovered, according to Ms. Watson, and was now attending Mass twice a week alongside her. Cruz had gone back to the city the following morning—only psychological scars left to work through. We’d kept in touch a little over the months, but every time his name popped up on my phone, an ache bloomed in my chest, his connection to the only man that’d made me feel bigger than myself too much to think about.
The only long-lasting fallout in all of this was Bastien and me.
It didn’t matter how many hours I worked a day, how much overtime I burned through each week. Every night when I collapsed into the tiny twin bed I grew up in, he haunted me.
Father Bastien Castaneda.
The holy man who touched my heart and then disappeared from my life like he’d been an apparition.
I’d spent three days at Lucy’s side in the hospital after the explosions as they monitored her and the baby for any issues. While we were there, they also sent in a caseworker to assist in finding affordable housing for Lucy to go home to. They knew she was living with me next to the church right now, but they also knew that was a temporary solution.
By the time Lucy and I went back to the tiny house next to St. Michael’s to clear out our few things, Father Bastien was gone. A new priest had been installed in his place, one who came with a younger seminarian sidekick who looked down on both of us with disapproval in his eyes as we gathered our things before hustling back to the bus stop to head across town to meet the landlord to get the keys for our new one-bedroom.
Now we had a little more breathing room living in Mom’s house, the roof over our head paid for in full, only insurance and living expenses to pay every month. Lucy started working at a coffee shop a few blocks away, and it wasn’t long before we were actually managing to save up a little money and buy some things to spruce up the place.
We threw away the old couch and replaced it with something brand-new and bright from Ikea.
The first new couch for both of us.
I’d be lying if I said we both didn’t tear up a little bit.
It wasn’t that it cost much at all—in fact, we’d lucked out and found it on sale—but both of us had grown up surrounded by such darkness.
That new couch felt like a breath of fresh air.
We even picked up a few things for the nursery, a tiny room off of Luce’s that was just big enough for a crib and changing table. It didn’t have a window, but it looked pretty cute after we put a soft shade of yellow paint on the walls and freshened up the old whit
e trim and door.
But even on the nights I collapsed into bed, exhausted and painted with every color under the rainbow, still, the memory of his hands discovering the contours of my body clung to the edges of my thoughts.
Some nights, I woke breathing in the aroma of incense and leather, convinced he was in the room with me. I hated that I was still so desperate for a glimpse of him, but it’d been this way for months.
I spun myself into a frenzy, resenting him and lusting after him, chasing his memory and then running from it. Coming to terms with letting him go, though that’d been my plan all along, even if the tragedy at St. Mike’s hadn’t happened.
Still, I’d become so desperate to escape the memories of our time in this place that I’d begun fantasizing about leaving. More than a few times I’d Googled organizations that accepted volunteers in faraway places—worlds with struggling economies or recovering from war or famine. Determined to aim high, for a few weeks I even floated the idea of working at a school for girls in Africa. Surely, they needed teachers at those schools Oprah was opening. I wasn’t exactly a teacher by trade, but I’d be the best damn teaching assistant they’d ever seen.
I only had to get myself there.
But taking money out of the precious emergency fund Luce and I had worked to build felt like the most selfish move I could make, and what was I complaining about anyway? I had a great job. The truth was, I was under-qualified, but something in the one-on-one interview had convinced them I was the right girl. And I wanted to make them proud, which did not include leaving exactly four months after being hired because I was just missing something.
And it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out it wasn’t even what I was missing, but what I was craving.
An escape from the heartbreak.
His heartbreak.
His leaving.
A faint voice whispered in the quiet moments that chasing Bastien was weak, disrespectful of the calling he’d chosen. But the longer time wore on, the wider the crack in my heart grew, cleaving me open and leaving me raw and exposed. That was the thing about heartbreak—left untended, it bloomed like a black dahlia, crushing out the sunlight with all its darkness.
REBEL PRIEST Page 14