"Forgive me father, for I have sinned."

Elena's eyes remained set on the small rosary in her hands. Focusing on the familiar feel of the wooden beads against her fingers, trying to find comfort in the silence that filled the small attic where she had been an inmate for the past three months, and which was empty but for an iron bed and a chair and table where she could write.

On her knees, facing the window, Elena spoke again the words that only herself and these four walls could bear witness to.

No priest had been by to listen to her confession since her arrival to the convent.

No one at all would see her – which was understandable.

She supposed that, all things considered, she should feel lucky that the nuns tolerated her presence, that they would bother to slide a meagre portion of bread beneath her door day after day, instead of driving her from the convent. In the wilderness, alone, given the state she was in, she would last maybe a week – probably less.

Sometimes, she caught bits and pieces of their gossips as the women walked past her room. It didn't happen often. Virtually no one had any business upstairs, where there was no other lodger, only Elena –

What she would do for a companion, for a voice other than her own filling the room.

Those same words she heard spoken, over and again – she hardly knew what else to say.

"Forgive me father, for I have sinned."

It was no use going any further than that. God alone could hear her now, and God needed no word from her to know who she had sinned against.

"It has been three months now, since I first heard His voice. It holds the same terrors now as it did then. Every night, still, I hear it. I know it is the voice of the devil, but I cannot chase it – I cannot."

Mad screams wrenched her from sleep, night after night, however hard she fought against it. Though Elena struggled and prayed for her savior's strength, though she resisted, still it came for her, black as midnight, the voice of temptation, entering her dreams like a knife enters the flesh, so her weaknesses would lie bleeding and exposed.

My sweet Elena, It said.

There's no use in this brave resistance. You think those fences in your mind can keep me from you? You think the walls of a convent can keep me from you?

It laughed.

I wouldn't stop at an army of angels, I wouldn't stop if you were locked in a tower beyond the gates of heaven.

She knew this to be true.

"You're cursed," her father had said when he'd seen her, sobbing that first night, with fear and shock, when she first experienced the dreams – when she first heard His voice.

And cursed was the best word for what she felt that she could think of.

Curses were forever, weren't they – with luck, they might end with death.

"When I am dead," she thought, "they'll seal this room for fear I'll haunt it."

Suddenly, there was the sound of footsteps up the flight of stairs that led to her attic room.

Elena gasped and tightened her hold on the rosary.

"Don't torment yourself," she said to scold the very hopes that were rising in her chest. "They're not here for you. They'll keep just keep walking down the corridor as they always do."

She knew they were not here to give her the daily share of bread and water, because those had been delivered earlier, before dawn. They preferred to give the food while she was asleep, as if they feared to hear from her a mere Thank you.

Because she was haunted by a demon, they treated Elena herself as a demon.

But the footsteps stopped at the level of her door. The young woman's breath was trapped in her mouth, like a thin thread of ice. Her own heartbeat, deafening, at her temples. Her grip so tight on the rosary she could feel the beads biting into her flesh.

"Are you decent, Elena?"

Elena recognized the voice of Sister Maria, the woman who usually communicated with her, on the rare occasions when it did happen. The other women here did not speak English. It was this same woman who had met with her when her parents had brought her here, three months ago, and promised a large sum in exchange for board and shelter for their daughter.

That same voice that had been pregnant with judgment, and with the very fire burning in her eyes, as she said, "You are the girl, then, who claims the devil is trying to seduce you?"

Elena had been unable to answer, dazed by the sheer power of the woman's disgust – how hate blazed in every fiber of that holy-dressed body, hate for the devil, no doubt, legitimate hate, but Elena had crumbled still under its weight.

Now, three months later, the girl swallowed, struggling to find her voice for her moment. It had been a long time since she had spoken to anyone but herself. "Yes."

"There is a holy man to see you. We have warned him of your condition. He will try to help."

"What? But how –"

"Will you see him, Elena?" The voice sharp through the door. "He has come a long way."

Elena pressed her hands to her forehead, for courage, for strength.

How would anyone have heard of her, how would they have come all the way here, through the infinite stretches of wilderness that surrounded the convent? Her parents themselves would have told no one of what had happened to her. Probably, by now, everyone in her native village, in England, thought Elena was dead. And anyway, there was no one there who would have cared enough about her to cross the channel to France before traveling all the way down to Italy, where Elena was presently confined.

Curiosity was raging strong within her. If it had not gotten the better of her, then it would have been the sheer desire to speak to someone, to see another soul in this room who might look on her with mercy.

"Yes," she said, "yes, I will see him."

A short wait followed her pledge of consent.

Soon afterwards, the door to her attic room was opened, and a young man, dressed in a black religious habit, stepped in.

His youth actually surprised Elena more than she let on. Throughout her life, all the religious men she had known had been wrinkled and grey, which had somehow lent a more authoritative dimension to their Bible-based warnings.

But the man now standing in front of her hardly looked older than seventeen. With chestnut-colored curls and strikingly handsome features, the young man looked, she thought, more like an angel than a priest.

Elena felt her courage cower under the stare of his direct green gaze and lowered her eyes to her hands, still tightly clutching the rosary.

"Rise, Elena." He said.

His voice was the gentlest, heavenliest sound she had ever heard.

Before she could muster the strength for a reply, he extended a kind, large-palmed hand, which she could only look on in startle.

"I won't have you kneeling in front of me."

Though Sister Maria had introduced him as Signor Salvatore, he spoke perfect English, without even the mildest trace of an accent.

Elena shivered at the touch of his hand. Not only because it was her first human contact in three months, or the first time, in fact, that a young man touched her – but because his hand was very cold.

"Who are you?" She asked.

Not because she doubted him.

Somehow, the truth of his extraordinary kindness had immediately defeated any of the cautious barriers she might have raised against him.

"I came here a friend."

"But –"

"Elena," he said, once he had helped her rise to his level.

Her head was spinning, maybe from faintness – she had been living on bread and water for three months – but part of her felt the cause lay deeper.

Three months ago, her parents had ridden away with her in the middle of the night to the wildest regions of Europe, looking for a place holy enough that might balance with the terrible curse she seemed to bear. Then, as she glimpsed bits and pieces of the landscape through the window of the horse-drawn carriage, Elena had known her whole life was changing forever –

Now, with her hand wrapped in the strikingly cold touch of that young man, she felt her world had started spinning once again, and she could not tell where it would stop or in what state it would leave her.

"I realize how sudden and strange this must seem to you." The young man said. "And though you have no reason to trust me yet – I'm asking you to."

His eyes conveyed the urgency of his demand.

"Tonight, the nuns have arranged for a man to come here and take you away. He has paid them a lot of money in exchange for having complete guardianship over you. I've managed to convince them that I was that man, and that I'd arrived early. The man they were waiting, they knew only as Signor Salvatore, and I've shown them papers that identified me as such."

"You mean you deceived Sister Maria –"

"Please." He interrupted, perhaps missing out on the fact that, through her shock, Elena was more admirative than frightened. "We have little time. The man who wants to take you, the other Salvatore, is the man you've been hearing, Elena."

Then, the young woman did feel afraid.

The sensation speared through her ribcage and into her chest, attacking all that was deepest inside her.

The mere evocation of her tormentor – the thought alone of the voice that haunted her most private thoughts – was like an invasion by an alien, freezing cold wave of water, one that not only soaked but burned.

Elena spoke through clenched teeth. "How could you possibly know –"

"You must trust that I do," he said. "You must trust that the voice you have been hearing is not the devil's – but that it doesn't belong to any human being, either. Especially, Elena, you must trust that if you don't come with me, right now, this creature will find you. And he will lead you to damnation."

Elena was still for a moment, rather out of brute shock than actual hesitation.

The young man clutched her hand in his, and through that touch, she could feel the urgency of their situation.

"Are you with me, Elena? Will you trust me to keep you safe from the beast?"

There was an old man in Elena's native village who begged for alms, and who always thanked her for the little she had to give him with a, Bless you, bless you child, and may God save you from the Tiger.

Elena had never known exactly what he meant by that word – the Tiger – except that it wasn't the fantastic black-streaked animal you read about in children's books.

But since the Voice had started speaking to her, she had felt sometimes, inexplicably, that that's what she was hearing.

The Tiger.

Whatever the old man meant by it.

"Yes," she said. "Yes."

Sweet lord, how cold his hands felt upon hers, but he soon gave her a smile kind enough to make her forget it.

"Then follow me."

They left the convent in what felt like a minute's time – how it all whirled by Elena's dazed mind, like fogged images you see in a dream.

"So quickly?" Sister Maria inquired after them as Signor Salvatore – she learned his name was Stefan – led her away. "Will you not breakfast with us, sir? Are you quite sure she's in a condition for such a journey?"

"I'm sure she's in the fittest condition which your benevolence and charity have allowed."

There was a sharpness to his tone which was new to Elena's ears. The mellow, honey-voice that had coaxed her into blind trust, in the attic room, felt all the more dream-like.

Somehow, Elena felt sure a man as religious as the habit Stefan wore suggested would not speak to a Sister with such inner coldness, even wrapped as it was in the most courteous dress.

"Thank you, but no. We'll have breakfast when we stop at the nearest town."

"But that's hours away –"

"Thank you, Sister."

The ice in his voice indicated he could guess well enough that Elena had gone without breakfast, in fact, without proper food, throughout her entire stay.

Still, there was that deep-grounded kindness that was more than a layer – that seemed, somehow, to mirror the man's soul.

"I'm afraid we must be on our way."

Elena caught the natural reticence on Sister Maria's face.

Had a sudden guilt stricken her, when it became clear that she was actually selling her away, or did Elena's miseries all seem plainer when she was a face and body, and not merely a voice in an attic room, a ghost of a girl haunting this convent with her dreadful dreams?

"Goodbye, Elena."

"Goodbye, Sister."

Outside, the air tasted of warmth and wilderness, but she caught only a glimpse of the woods ahead, barely had time to look past her shoulder and take one last image of the convent with her, erect and frightening with the awesomeness of God, before Stefan led her into the horse-drawn carriage that was waiting for them outside.

"It's all right," Stefan said once they were alone. "You're safe now."

Yet Elena had never felt farther away from home, or more helpless in the hands of fate, than now.