Be My Sacrifice (Brotherhood of the Sacrament #2)

1. The Sinner

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,

I love you directly without problems or pride:

I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,

except in this form in which I am not nor are you,

so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,

so close that your eyes close with my dreams.”

One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII

Light flashed brightly and intensely behind my eyes in that brief moment. While the pain soared through my body, unbearable and threatening to shatter me forever. To rip me apart, limb from limb with poisonous claws, and unmake everything that I ever was, and longed to be.

When the sound of my mother and brother’s sorrowful voices called to me, begging me to return to them, the sound haunting and painful, filled with longing and devastation. Promising me an eternity of peace and love. Love that I craved with every fiber of my being. Love that I had been denied, and which had been cruelly stolen from me by thieves with blood on their hands. Love that I wished to be reunited with more than anything else. To be embraced tightly in its warmth and know that I was finally home, safe, and where I belonged.

It was in that moment that I heard his voice the loudest and clearest. The tone shattering pieces of me with his sorrow. The overwhelming need in that smooth whiskey-soaked tone, shredding what was left of me, until almost nothing remained.

His pleading demanded that I not leave him here on this plane of existence while I went where he could not travel. He called to me, my lover, my soulmate, my knight, and implored that I stay with him in the darkness forever.

Always by his side, my soul forever intertwined with his, with unbreakable threads, the fragmented pieces of his heart filling all the sharp cracks in mine. We were always meant to be one, forever, until the world stops turning on its axis, and the sun in her majesty stops rising; we will always be one.

As much as I wanted to return to my family’s side and end my suffering, I could not refuse him. I could not leave him, so I lay waiting in this malignant darkness to return to him—to be reunited with my love once more—my Sammy, my lover, my soulmate. Mine.