Chapter 79

NARRATOR

The girls were discharged that morning. The doctor said they were stable, that they only needed warmth, constant feeding, and rest. I watched them wrapped in thermal blankets, asleep in Lucía’s arms, and felt something tearing me apart.

Pride. Fear. And a guilt so deep it weighed on every bone in my body.

Me, a priest, looking at my daughters. Mine. Flesh and blood. Small, fragile, absolutely innocent.

When we left the hospital, the Calgary air was cutting, brutal. Sebastián and Santiago were waiting outside, but I gestured for them to give us a moment alone. I needed to speak with Lucía before everything changed.

She noticed immediately.

“What’s wrong, Mateo?”

I took a deep breath, feeling the icy air burn my lungs.

“We’re going to Italy.”

She looked at me, confused, with Isabella asleep against her chest.

“Italy? Why so far away?”

“Because they’ll be safe there. I have a house in Sicily. No one will be able to find them there.”

“A house? You?” she asked, frowning with distrust. “What are you hiding from me, Mateo?”

I lowered my gaze to the cracks in the frozen pavement. I couldn’t keep avoiding that conversation. I had hidden my past my entire life, but silence no longer protected me from anything.

“There are things I never told you,” I said hoarsely. “Not because I didn’t trust you… but because I didn’t want you to see me for who I really was.”

She waited in silence, her eyes fixed on me.

“My real name is Mateo De Luca,” I continued, each word feeling like a confession torn from my chest. “I was born in Sicily, the son of Carlo De Luca, a powerful… and ruthless man. My father was the boss of one of the most feared families. Everything he had, he built with blood and ashes.”

Lucía stared at me without blinking, processing every word.

“From the time I was a child, he prepared me to inherit his empire. At fifteen he already forced me to witness executions. He wanted me to learn to command, to kill, to feel no remorse. My mother, Elena, was the only one who saw what it was doing to me inside. When I turned seventeen, she helped me escape in the middle of the night.”

I swallowed the knot in my throat.

“I arrived in Mexico with a false name, no money, no verifiable past. I left the De Lucas behind and became Mateo Serrano. I entered the seminary because I needed to cleanse the blood that stained my soul. I wanted to believe I could be someone completely different.”

Lucía remained silent, holding the twins as if afraid they might be taken from her again.

“I never went back,” I went on. “Until a few months ago, when my mother died. I went to Sicily to say goodbye and… she left me everything she had. The properties, the family house, her entire inheritance. I didn’t deserve it, but I accepted it out of respect for her memory. My brothers, Sebastián and Santiago, kept the empire. They now run what my father left behind.”

She covered her mouth, incredulous.

“So… your brothers…”

“Yes,” I nodded. “They’re the bosses now. But you can trust them completely. When it comes to you and the girls, there will be no danger. I swear it.”

“And you?” she asked, her voice breaking. “Will you stay with us?”

“For a while. I asked the bishop for a leave. Two weeks. I have that time to decide whether I return to my vocation… or walk away from the Church forever.”

“You don’t have to give up everything for me, Mateo,” she said in a thin voice. “I can raise the girls alone if necessary.”

I shook my head firmly.

“Not now. Not while Damián is still breathing. When they are completely safe, I’ll make my final decision.”

She lowered her gaze. She said nothing more, but I saw silent tears rolling down her cheeks.

Sebastián and Santiago took us to the private airport. I thought we would fly commercial, but they always had another way of doing things.

The plane was waiting for us: white, imposing, with the De Luca family crest discreetly painted on the tail.

“Were you always this discreet?” I said to Sebastián with irony.

He smiled faintly.

“Mom would have liked seeing you like this, taking care of your family. Protecting them.”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t.

We boarded the plane. Lucía was nervous; the girls slept deeply. During the transatlantic flight, I couldn’t close my eyes for a single second. The infinite black sky, the constant engine noise, the distorted reflection of my face in the window… everything brought me back to the same torturing question I was avoiding: Who do I serve now? God or my blood?

We crossed the Atlantic in absolute silence. At dawn, we saw the Italian coast emerging from the mist. The smell of the sea seeped through the air vents and struck my memory with brutal force. It was the same smell of my childhood: salt, damp earth, dried blood, and ancestral fear.

We arrived in Catania late at night. The private airport was deserted. Two armored vehicles waited for us on the runway. During the drive to the mansion, Lucía stared out the window, hypnotized by the distant lights of the town and the dark hills stretching endlessly toward the Mediterranean.

When the wrought-iron gates opened with a metallic creak, the air changed completely.

The De Luca mansion was exactly as I remembered it: enormous, silent, threatening, with ancient stone columns covered in wild ivy and windows lit like eyes that saw everything.

A line of servants waited at the foot of the marble stairs. The butler, Giovanni, stepped forward in his eternal impeccable black suit.

“Welcome home, young Mateo,” he said, bowing his head respectfully. “The house has been prepared for your family, by direct order of Signor Sebastián.”

“Thank you, Giovanni. But I am no longer that Mateo. I am now Father Mateo Serrano.”

Lucía smiled faintly, exhausted but amused by the tension.

“I like Mateo De Luca.”

I glanced at her.

“I don’t,” I said dryly.

Giovanni made a ceremonial bow and led us inside. The white marble gleamed under crystal lamps; the family portraits still hung in their exact places. I felt like a ghost condemned to walk forever through the corridors of his own cursed childhood.

Lucía stopped in front of a large portrait of a woman with dark hair and a gentle but sad smile.

“Your mother?”

“Yes,” I said, a brutal knot tightening in my throat. “She was the only good thing left in this house of blood.”

We climbed the marble stairs to the second floor. Giovanni opened the door to the master bedroom. Everything was perfectly intact: the enormous carved wooden bed, the red velvet curtains, the ancient silver cross above the headboard. The same place where my mother prayed every night for my soul… and where I said my last goodbye before fleeing forever.

The servants withdrew discreetly. Lucía placed the sleeping girls in the adjoining room, specially prepared as a nursery.

“Rest,” she said, touching my arm. “I’ll take care of them tonight.”

I nodded, drained.

“Thank you for everything, Lucía.”

When she left, the room sank into sepulchral silence. Only the sound of the Mediterranean wind slipping through the old cracks and the ghostly echo of my own footsteps on the marble. I knelt before the silver cross, feeling the cold floor pierce my knees.

“Heavenly Father,” I murmured in a broken voice, “I don’t know what You want from me. I have dedicated my entire life to You, and now I don’t understand whether this is a divine test or an eternal punishment. If loving her was a sin, I no longer know how to redeem myself, or even if I want to.”

I clenched my fists until my knuckles turned white.

“Give me a sign. Something. Anything. Speak to me.”

Nothing. Only the relentless silence, as always.

I looked at the cross—cold, unmoving, indifferent—and for the first time in many years I felt that God had turned His back on me. Perhaps not as divine punishment, but by leaving me to decide completely on my own.

I closed my eyes, sighed deeply, and stood up on numb legs.

I entered the adjoining room and saw Lucía asleep with the twins in her arms. I watched her steady breathing, her human and absolute fragility. And I knew with devastating certainty that even if I lost eternal heaven, I could not lose them.

The next morning, when I opened my eyes with the Sicilian sun streaming through the curtains, the cross was still there—silent, gleaming, implacable. And I understood that God’s answer was precisely that silence.

Because now the next step belonged solely to me.