Chapter 45

Chapter 45

NARRATOR

The phone vibrated insistently on the worn wooden table in the kitchen of the Sicilian mansion, a buzzing that cut through the silence like a saw. Lucía looked at it warily, her heart beating in an irregular rhythm. It was an unknown number, with an international prefix she did not recognize. She hesitated, her fingers hovering over the screen.
At this point, almost everything from the outside world filled her with visceral fear, a knot in her stomach that would not loosen. She had gone days without sleeping, avoiding the sensational headlines that filtered even into local Italian newspapers, ignoring messages of sympathy she did not need, because other people’s pity only fueled her pain.
But something about the insistence, the pattern of repeated calls, compelled her to slide her finger across the screen, holding the phone close while Sofía slept peacefully in her arms.
“Hello?” she said, her voice tired, hoarse from suppressed crying.
There were a few seconds of silence on the other end, just a broken, heavy breath, as if the caller were struggling to find courage. Then a voice she knew too intimately, etched into her soul like a wound that would never heal.
“Lucía… it’s me.”
Her world stopped abruptly, time freezing in that instant. She did not need to hear it twice; her body recognized him before her mind did, a shiver running down her spine, a sharp stab in her chest stealing her breath.
“Mateo,” she whispered, barely able to speak, her voice breaking on the name she had tried to erase from her lips.
Neither spoke for several eternal seconds. The silence between them was more painful than any reproach, a void heavy with memories: stolen nights, promises whispered under the rain, the warmth of his skin against hers in a world that condemned them.
He drew a deep breath on the other end of the line, the sound amplified like an echo of his torment.
“I had to call you,” he finally said, his voice trembling, laden with exhaustion that crossed the ocean. “I needed to hear you… to know you’re all right, that the girls are safe. I can’t bear this silence anymore.”
“All right?” she replied, holding back the tears already streaming down her cheeks, her voice rising in a crescendo of bitterness. “After watching you deny me in front of the whole world, in that church full of cameras? After hearing that my daughters—our daughters—don’t exist, that they’re an invention? Is that what you call ‘all right,’ Mateo?”
Mateo closed his eyes in his austere parish room, the wooden crucifix on the wall seeming to judge him. He ran a hand over his gaunt face, desperate to find words that would not sound like betrayal.
“It was the bishop,” he tried to explain, his voice rough with guilt. “He ordered me to do it, Lucía. He asked me to do it for the good of the diocese, for the faith of thousands. I couldn’t refuse… I did it to protect them, to protect you. If I confirmed it, the press would tear you apart, Damián would find you—”
“Protect me?” Her voice broke into a bitter, hysterical laugh. “By denying your daughters as if they were a sin to erase? Me, as if we had never existed? We didn’t need your cowardly protection, Mateo. We needed your courage. The courage of a man, not of a priest hiding behind vows and bishops.”
The priest fell silent, his hands trembling around the phone, gripping it so tightly his knuckles turned white.
“Forgive me,” he said at last, his voice broken, a stifled sob escaping. “You have no idea how much it hurt to say it. Every word from that pulpit was a stab to my own heart. But if I denied it publicly, if I resigned, everything would collapse… they would cast me out of the Church. I wouldn’t be able to help you, to protect you from the shadows.”
“Help us?” she cut in, anger mixing with deep pain. “With your anonymous transfers and your distant prayers? We didn’t need your cold help—we needed you, Mateo. As a father, as a man. But you chose your vocation, you chose your cassock over us. You always will: God first, and us… a mistake to hide.”
He wanted to answer, to shout that it wasn’t so simple, that ever since he left Sicily he had done nothing but survive in a hell of guilt. But he couldn’t; all that came out was a choked sigh.
“Lucía, don’t hate me… please. I can’t bear the thought that you hate me.”
She squeezed her eyes shut, a tear falling onto her lips, salty like the Sicilian sea roaring outside.
“I don’t hate you, Mateo. Hate would be easy. But I can’t keep loving a ghost who denies what we were, what we created. You’re a specter in my life, nothing more.”
Another silence followed, long and painful, an abyss separating continents and hearts.
“Take care of them,” Lucía finally said, her voice firm, hardened by resolve. “From afar, from wherever you want, with your prayers or your money. But don’t call me again. I never want to hear from you again. You chose your path, Mateo, and I choose mine. Forget us. Forever.”
And she hung up, the sharp click echoing like a final slammed door. She set the phone down with trembling hands, her body convulsing in silent sobs as she held her sleeping daughter close.

Mateo remained with the phone pressed to his ear, listening to the dead tone like an endless echo. His eyes filled with hot tears, rolling down his cheeks uncontrollably.
“My God, what have I done?” he murmured, falling to his knees before the crucifix in his austere room, the cold floor seeping into his bones.
He prayed, but the words stuck in his throat. He no longer knew whether he was asking for forgiveness or punishment; his soul felt shattered into a thousand irreparable pieces.
He rose unsteadily, needing air. He pulled on an old hooded sweatshirt, a cap pulled low over his eyes, and slipped out through the parish’s side door, sneaking away like a thief in the night.
Journalists were still stationed at the main entrance. He slipped down a side street, the cold slicing his skin like blades, and began walking aimlessly through the city streets. He walked, then ran, his lungs burning.
“Lucía… my daughters… forgive me,” he repeated over and over, the words a broken mantra in his mind.
When he returned to the parish hours later, his body trembled from exhaustion and cold. The night guard greeted him in surprise, but Mateo did not answer, climbing the stairs with heavy steps.
He entered his room without turning on the lights, darkness enveloping him. He only wanted to lie down, to let exhaustion overcome him. But as he stepped forward, the first thing he saw in the faint moonlight was something that had not been there before: a brown cardboard box on his bedside table.
He stopped cold, his pulse pounding in his temples like a hammer.
The box had no return address, only his name written in clumsy, uneven handwriting in black ink: “Father Mateo Serrano.”
He opened it with trembling fingers. Inside there was a single photograph.
It was Lucía.
She was somewhere in Sicily, holding the twins in her arms, smiling. It was a recent photo, taken from afar, zoomed in. A surveillance photo.
His heart lurched violently, the air leaving his lungs.
He held the photo in his shaking fingers, and then he saw the folded paper beneath it. He unfolded it carefully, his pulse roaring in his ears. The note contained only one sentence, written in red ink, irregular capital letters:
“YOU ARE GOING TO LOSE EVERYTHING. THIS IS ONLY THE BEGINNING.”
The floor seemed to shift beneath his feet, a wave of vertigo making him stagger. His heart hammered against his chest, pure fear flooding him like an icy wave.
He knew perfectly well who had done it.
Damián.
The ghost who had been pursuing them for months—the obsessive ex-lover, the man who had sworn revenge from the shadows—had returned. And this time, the game was more personal, more lethal: he was attacking not only his faith, but what he loved most in secret.
Mateo sank into the chair, the photo in one hand and the note in the other, tears spilling again as he looked at the crucifix hanging on the wall, mute and impassive.
For the first time in a long while, he felt true fear, a visceral terror that froze his blood—not for himself, but for them.
He knew that hell is not always beneath the earth, in eternal flames.
Sometimes it arrives wrapped in a stolen photograph, in a whispered threat.
And it had just knocked on his door, with the fist of a very real demon.