They freeze. Mira closes the guidebook with a soft thump that is, in the sudden chapel silence, approximately as subtle as a foghorn. Alex stops breathing — or attempts to — before a ceiling drip finds the exact back of his neck and he makes a noise that is technically not a yelp. For a long moment there is only rain hammering the stones and the candle flame doing its best. Then something shifts in the far corner: a shape unfolds, unhurried and entirely unbothered, and steps into the light. She is perhaps seventy, rubber boots, slate-grey coat, mop held horizontally across her body like a toll barrier. She studies them the way a park warden studies geese that have wandered onto a bowling green. A single finger rises. It silences the storm, the thunder, the entire Adriatic. She speaks — one word, in Montenegrin — and gestures: toward the door, or further into the dark beyond the altar.