Chapter 4
Ithought it would be harder to make a priest get a boner, but in one night, I already had him panting. This was too easy. It was nearly boring.
I’d definitely hit more than one nerve tonight.
He was unraveling at my touch.
Annoyingly, his reactions made it easy to seduce him, but I shook off that thought. It was just because he was easy on the eyes, and I craved a man’s submission. This holy man was all too willing to submit to me.
I’d imagined a control freak, needing dominance and addiction to making women feel small. Oh, wait, priests didn’t get their dick wet anymore, they only get erect for their ‘sky daddy.’
“I am your god now, Prayer Boy. Just wait, you will be begging for the devil when I am through with you.”
The parish house felt wrong the moment I crossed the threshold.
Not necessarily abandoned, even given how modestly the man actually lived. It was more like it was sitting here waiting to be peeled away to reveal the false prophet hiding inside its holy walls all this time.
The air was warmer than the evening outside, even after the rain had finally let up.
The air around me was heavy with the scent of old incense and the weird leather smell of furniture.
Father Franklin may look like a posh pretty boy, but his living space was sad.
His sofa was black leather, bare, with zero blankets or pillows.
The walls were white, with no other color, and felt suffocating.
I closed the door behind me without a sound, sliding my hair clip back in my hair. It was the last thing I had that belonged to my mother.
A gorgeous silver barrette that said: “覚悟…Resolve.”
From the very first breath I drew, I knew my fate as a Yakuza daughter. I was nothing more than a transaction to be made, but my mother loved me. Her love and protection were what caused her death.
My fingers lingered on the wood as if the house might shudder awake if I let go too fast or broke away.
He was still at the church.
That was what I told myself.
That was the lie I needed.
This little hovel wasn’t far from the quaint block of wood I just escaped from. And the flustered man inside was closer yet.
My footsteps were careful, placed where the floorboards dipped least as I made my way upstairs. I’d already mapped the house in my head from searching the floor plans on old Zillow pages.
I didn’t leave anything to chance.
I should have waited to begin this challenge, but I couldn’t stand seeing the smile on his stupid face. I didn’t have time to hang around in one place for too long.
I am never safe.
I tracked the church a few hours before actually going in. I had been precise in finding the exits, watching the strange priest pace and curse at the walls. He seemed troubled when he was alone, but composed around others.
Was this one of his many masks?
I knew the church now. I knew when the lights would go out, which windows stayed dark against the moonlight, and which ones glowed faintly with the candles’ illumination.
Father Franklin lived alone here. Of course he did.
Men like him always did.
Coward.
His study smelled of paper and oil. Books lined the shelves in obedient little rows, everything from scripture, philosophy, histories of men who pretended their thoughts belonged to God, and fictional books.
I wondered if he read for fun or to mock. I ran my fingers along the spines, imagining which ones he touched the most and which ones he avoided or had placed for show.
The desk drawers yielded nothing but neatness.
It was full of receipts from takeout, diners, clothes, church shit, and more.
There was nothing illicit, like prostitution paraphernalia or strip club information.
He had handwritten notes in another drawer, weird scrawls made from what I assumed was his old-fashioned quill pen.
It wasn’t art.
It was…unnerving.
Dark red swirls covered page after page, and some had indented lines in the paper as if he wrote them with a hard hand. Intrigue and satisfaction led me to realize that the gishin image was not as perfect as he tried to portray it.
I imagined him fighting demons of his past, nightmares in the shape of my body, lying near lifeless on the street. The other notebooks showed neat scripture, grocery notes, and little empowerment statements written as neatly as possible—the handwriting of a man terrified of disorder.
I smiled.
“Liar,” I whispered, barely more than a soft breath. “I see your truth, ōkami.”
I was turning away from the drawings and their lies, already rehearsing how I’d leave without a trace, but then the tinkle of keys shattered the silence from downstairs.
Metal scraped metal.
Creeeeek.
My heart slammed so hard it felt like a betrayal of its own. I could see down the stairs from where I was, right to the door.
The door opened, and I saw the blond of his hair before I bolted from my spot and ducked into a different room. He’d likely go upstairs first to his study, to drop off his Bible and put his coat on the rack right by the door, wouldn’t he?
Footsteps followed my beating heart as I closed myself into a small closet in the bathroom, tucking myself under the white shelf holding towels. The steps sounded heavy, uneven, and impatient.
It wasn’t the calm, measured pace he wore like a mask in public places, or even the rushed pace of that same cadence when he realized I fled from his sanctuary. These steps were hurried, almost stumbling, like he’d outrun a beast and it had followed him home anyway.
That is because you are the beast.
You cannot ‘out’ yourself.
You cannot outrun me.
I watched him pace his hallway, throwing items into the study, not placing them neatly, just pulling them off and chucking them into the dark corners.
He loosened his collar, tugging at the fabric as if it choked him.
His golden hair was damp with sweat, and his jaw clenched so tightly it looked painful.
The void of his gray eyes was dark, nearly black. He didn’t look normal, nor did he appear tired or peaceful. There was something else on this beast’s face.
Hunger.
He didn’t see me.
I stayed hidden in the closet, watching only through the slats.
I thought once his tantrum was over, he would retreat to his bedroom, but he didn’t. Instead, his heavy breaths grew closer, and I could feel the electric heat vibrating off of him. He kicked the door, slamming it hard enough to make the walls shudder.
The shower roared to life within seconds.
I crouched there, frozen, my pulse roaring louder than the water as the steam filled the room.
Leave. Now. This was not the plan. What if he catches you?
My feet didn’t move.
Steam crept through the slats of the wooden closet, thin at first, then curling thicker, like breath escaping a mouth that didn’t want to be silent as it enveloped me.
I swallowed hard. A priest was stripping layers of heavy black fabric from his body, the holy robes dropping to the floor like discarded thoughts.
I tried to look away. I was enraptured by the beauty of the tattoos shining back at me, and the most noticeable of all on his naked flesh was an Oni covering the entire span of his back, nearly over his cheeks.
The Oni in my culture was more folklore than anything, a monstrous demon set as a manifestation of punishment. Their existence was to see the sins wiped clean and the sinners exorcised.
Why would Jedidiah Franklin have the creature that would collect his soul for his crimes carved into his flesh?
Was this his way of remembering?
Or atoning?
I couldn’t help but stare at the man in front of me, walking into the steam of the shower. He looked so different than his photos now, so different than even the kid hidden in a baggy hoodie all those years ago. This was…
I turned my gaze away from his image and instead focused on the small full-length mirror across from me, beside a sink. My reflection stared back at me, my dark eyes too bright, with my lips parted like I’d been caught mid-confession.
Don’t you fucking look again, Sayuri. Leave and get out of here while he’s distracted.
I did look again.
His silhouette moved behind the fogged glass, his broad shoulders hunched, with his head tipped back into the spray. The water streamed relentlessly over him, as if he were trying to wash the ink off his skin.
His breathing carried through my small hiding space, rough and broken.
“This is wrong,” he muttered. “This is—”
A sharp inhale cut the sentence off.
I traced his body with my fingertip on the wooden gaps, trying and failing to ground myself as the heat curled low in my stomach. The house creaked softly somewhere, as if responding to him, too.
Bam!
I jolted when something struck the tile—his hand. He groaned and held onto the hard material as if he needed support.
“God,” he whispered, and it wasn’t prayer.
My thoughts crowded me, intrusive and sharp as I tried to focus on the design on his back. The Oni rippled under his skin.
You wanted this.
You wanted proof he was only a man.
You wanted to see him crack.
The sound of skin against skin slipped through the water’s roar, and I swallowed hard, my thighs pressing together as if my body had decided this moment was my own punishment.
“No,” he said again, weaker this time. “Stop thinking about her.”
My breath hitched, and now I really felt I was intruding. Jedidiah had a woman, and he was clearly thinking of her while he touched himself. I was just a creepy Peeping Tom trapped in his closet.
Her.
I couldn’t help but wonder who she was.
What woman took a priest for herself?
Was that not blasphemy?
The mirror fogged slightly, blurring my reflection until I looked unreal, like a ghost haunting this very real, living man.
The sounds continued inside the shower, and I found my own hand sliding down my coat, my fingers curling into the fabric of my dress at my waist. The instant release of some of the pressure felt grounding and dangerous.
Then he said it.
“Taste my sins.”
My words.
“Oh fuck, Mortifera. I will taste every damning drop you give me. I promise I’ll be your good fucking boy if you let me. Please let me come.”
His plea echoed off the tile like a benediction in itself. Hearing that strained, reverent, worshipping tone sent a shock through me so sharp I physically gasped.
My fingers slipped into my heat, and I ground my body against my palm with the pace he set with his hand.
What the fuck was wrong with me?
His body turned, and I saw his hand rise through the steam, his fingers trembling as they brushed his mouth softly. He pressed them there, his eyes closed, his head tilted like he was trying to memorize the feeling so he could recreate it.
“I can still—” His voice broke.“Taste you.”
Horror and more arousal twisted together in my chest, inseparable and damning.
The worst part wasn’t the heat pooling low in my body, or my fingers shamefully following the tempered speed of moans filling the space.
It was who it was for.
I caught my reflection again in the mirror—my skin flushed, my breath shallow, my eyes dark with something I despised and hadn’t felt in so long because it always led to pain and darkness. I ripped my fingers free of my sex, a wave of nausea rolling through me.
A white man, of all fucking things.
My ex-husband’s face flashed unbidden in my mind, his pale skin flushed with his careless need to drink, his knuckles splitting against my cheek, painted in red, and his friends laughing behind him like a chorus of ghosts awaiting their turn to ruin me.
It was white hands pinning me down, white mouths telling me to be grateful, and white voices deciding what I was worth.
I swallowed hard, my throat burning.
You don’t want this.
He was a beast, and you were the slayer.
Kemono and karyūdo.
Sex was business. You would seduce the ōkami and eliminate him.
You were his Oni.
The disgust hit sharply and immediately, curling in my stomach even as my body betrayed me with further heat mingling in the nausea. It felt like treason against myself, against every night I’d survived by learning how not to feel.
My fingernail slid along my wrist as if I could punish the want out of myself. Tiny droplets welled on my skin, spilling and dropping into the grooves of the floor. This was my way of washing away my sinful thoughts.
Father Franklin groaned softly, frustration and wrecked pleasure echoing off the walls.
“Let me come, please. Tell me I can come. I need to come for you.”
Something inside me twisted even tighter.
I hated that I responded to his words, hated that a man who looked like them, all clean, controlled, and self fucking righteous, could make my pulse race. It burned me from the inside knowing that his voice, strained and shaking, stirred something I’d sworn I’d buried with my husband’s body.
“Yes,” I whispered, hating the way I just responded most of all.
“I can be good for you, you make me break, you teasing temptress. This isn’t me,” he whispered.
I almost laughed.
‘It is,’ I thought viciously.
And that was what made it unbearable.
The word white echoed in my head like a slur I hurled at myself. White collar. White skin. White savior fantasies wrapped in scripture and restraint. Men who believed they were gentle because they hadn’t hit yet.
And still…when he said my words again, when his voice broke around them again, my body answered before my mind could intervene.
“Taste my sins.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, my shame flooding hot and thick inside my underwear as he grunted and his moans reached their peak.
I wanted to scrub myself raw from the sound.
For wanting any man at all.
For wanting him…
The horror wasn’t just that he was unraveling. It wasn’t that he was imagining my teasing and getting off to it.
No.
It was that some sick, traitorous part of me was addicted to being the reason he had broken his pretty facade and begged to sin.
And the real horror?
I couldn’t wait to do it again.