Boarding School, Somewhere in Northern Italy – Autumn Term

The bells of Saint Aurelius rang at dawn, as they always did—melancholy, measured, and vaguely threatening. By the third week of September, the corridors of the boys’ dormitory had begun to smell of ink, incense, and sweat. The windows were tall and narrow, the kind designed more for prayer than for escape. But the boys at Saint Aurelius had long learned that you could find salvation or sin depending on which shadow you followed.

Carlo Gambino walked in light.

Or at least, that was the rumor.

He was the prettiest boy in the school, and not in the clumsy, pubescent way the others were. His hair reached past his shoulders in soft dark waves, thick and rebellious, which he tied with black ribbon only when the head priest threatened to cut it himself. He had the jawline of a marble saint but the mouth of a boy who knew when not to speak. He rarely smiled, but when he did, Pietro said it could make even the Virgin blush.

He had been voted “prettiest” by popular consensus—boys and girls alike—at a chapel fundraiser, causing a mild scandal when Sister Daria’s niece asked him to bless her rosary.

Carlo only bowed his head in mock humility. “Dominus vobiscum,” he murmured in flawless Latin, pressing her hand gently. Everyone laughed. Everyone looked.

⸻

They often gathered in the scriptorium after supper, the old copy room where ink stained every wooden surface and candlelight made the world seem smaller, more secret. There was Angelo—brooding, sharp-jawed, and too quick to fight. Antoine, who sang hymns like they were love songs. Pietro, who could charm anyone into sneaking him wine. And Raffa, wiry and clever, always scribbling poems into the margins of Latin drills.

Carlo sat at the center of them, long fingers smudged with ink as he copied Psalms and geometry tables in elegant calligraphy—not for his own grades, but for theirs.

“You’re spoiling them,” Angelo muttered, leaning against the stone wall, arms crossed. He always sat closest to Carlo.

“They learn faster when they see it right,” Carlo said mildly, eyes still on the page. “And I like the quiet.”

“It’s not quiet. They’re using you.”

Carlo glanced up. “So are you.”

“I protect you,” Angelo said simply.

The others exchanged glances, but said nothing. They knew better.

⸻

Angelo had once broken a boy’s nose for calling Carlo a pretty little girl. It wasn’t the insult that had stung—Carlo had heard worse, and didn’t flinch—but the tone, the crowd that laughed, the way the priest turned his head as if he hadn’t heard. Angelo had seen red, and the sound of the boy’s nose crunching was followed by a week of silence between him and the chapel.

He hadn’t confessed since.

Carlo had sat outside the confessional the next evening, ink on his hands, holding a thin copy of The Confessions of Saint Augustine. He didn’t say anything. He just passed the book to Angelo without looking.

Angelo kept it.

⸻

In the dark of their shared dormitory, lit only by the flicker of hallway lanterns, the five of them would whisper Latin verses back and forth like prayers or poems. Sometimes they told stories about saints who’d been tempted. Sometimes they kissed.

Never out in the open. Not even in candlelight.

Pietro once said the school taught them how to suffer beautifully. Antoine called it a holy curse. Raffa claimed if Christ had had friends like theirs, the gospels would’ve ended differently.

Carlo said nothing.

But some nights, when everyone else was asleep, Angelo would hear the soft rustle of Carlo’s sheets, then the click of a pen against parchment as he copied out scripture long after curfew—verses about love that endures, fire that refines, and names only God would know.

⸻

Once, in the chapel garden, Carlo leaned against the statue of Saint Sebastian, light sifting through ivy leaves overhead.

“You know,” he said, plucking a leaf and turning it in his fingers, “if I ever die here, I hope they mistake me for a martyr.”

“You’re not going to die here,” Angelo said.