8. Of Pulpits, Penance, and Punishments
Chapter eight
Of Pulpits, Penance, and Punishments
Cassian
The chapel is the one room in this house Alistair has never once set foot in, and I’ve never asked why, because I don’t want to know if the answer is reverence or contempt. Some questions are safer left as architecture.
I come here still dressed from the circuit, mask gone, jacket open, her scent still on my hands like something I haven’t earned the right to wash off yet.
The altar isn’t consecrated by anyone but me.
No priest blessed this room. No congregation has ever knelt here but the one that matters — which is to say, no one but me, on nights exactly like this one, when the distance between what I believe and what I want collapses down to something I can’t hold apart anymore.
I kneel anyway. Old habit. Older than doctrine, if I’m honest, which I try to be here if nowhere else.
Lorelei.
I press my palm flat against the stone of the altar, cold under my hand, and I try to pray the way I was taught. Forgive the want. Sanctify the want. Make the want into something with a purpose larger than itself.
It doesn’t work tonight. It hasn’t worked for longer than I want to admit.
Memory comes back without order: black lace dragged beneath my hands, my teeth against her neck, the shiver that moved through her when I touched her, the sounds she made when she stopped trying to contain them.
I reach into my back pocket and close my hand around her panties.
Once wasn’t enough. I need her again.
The admission should disgust me more than it does. Instead, still kneeling before an altar I built for confession, I undo my pants and free my cock.
I wrap the lace around the hardness that never fully left after I walked away from her and stop there, hand closed around myself, as though restraint might become possible simply because I have finally named what I’m doing.
It doesn’t.
I move my hand.
I surrender.
I surrender to the memory of her tightening around me when I drove deeper, to the way she took as much as she demanded, to the sound of her asking for exactly what she wanted. I surrender to the humiliating certainty that wanting her is easier than resisting her has ever been.
My hand moves faster against the lace while I chase a sensation memory can’t reproduce: Lorelei coming around me, body tightening, voice breaking against the room.
Even that isn’t what undoes me. It’s remembering her asking.
She asked without shame, without pretending she wanted less than she did.
The memory of it tears the last of my control loose. I come hard into the lace clenched around my cock, the sound I make swallowed by stone walls that have heard every other confession I refused to speak aloud.
When it passes, I rest my forehead against the edge of the altar and breathe.
What have I done?
Eventually I fold Lorelei’s panties into my back pocket, put myself away, and fasten my pants.
I stay there, the altar in front of me waiting for my confession.
But I won’t confess, because the thing I can’t give even this room is the one answer I’m no longer certain belongs entirely to me.
I didn’t go to that box tonight because the design required it.
I went because I couldn’t stay away.
At least, that’s the answer I want.
Then I remember the token in her palm. Alistair’s crest. Permission she hadn’t known she possessed until I looked at it.
Either my father knew I would go to that room, or he counted on wanting her being enough to put me there.
I don’t know which possibility is worse.
What I know is that I went anyway.
Her mask is where I put it when I left the box, folded into my jacket pocket after I picked it up from beside the workbench. I take it out now and set the black lace on the altar like an offering. Her panties stay in my back pocket.
You feel it too, I told her.
As if saying it first made what happened inevitable instead of chosen.
Alistair would call tonight useful: a vessel responding to claim, another piece settling exactly where he expected it to. Once, I could have repeated that explanation until it became indistinguishable from belief.
I can’t tonight.
I stay on my knees with one palm against the altar and catalogue every reason I should stay away from her — doctrine, strategy, family, the fact that my father appears to have anticipated enough of tonight to put his crest in her hand. Another man might count rosary beads. I count reasons.
None of them changes what I want.
Somewhere in this house, two floors up, she’s sleeping — or not sleeping, more likely — replaying the same hour I am, perhaps wondering whether what happened in that room belonged to us at all.
I think of the car instead — eleven minutes of her beside me, Lorelei asking why I refuse to call her Lo. The name your mother gave you, I told her, as though that explained anything.
It still doesn’t.
I don’t make it out of the room before the door opens behind me.
“Didn’t peg you for the praying type,” Ash says from the doorway, still in his circuit clothes, arms crossed, doing a poor job of pretending he wasn’t looking for me on purpose. “Or is that a new thing?”
“It’s not new.”
“Could’ve fooled me. Six years living in this house, I think I’ve seen you in here twice.”
I don’t answer that. I straighten my jacket instead, buy myself a second, decide how much of my voice I’m willing to let him hear.
“You look like hell,” he says, less like an insult and more like an actual observation. “Rough night at the opener?”
“Long night.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I’m aware.”
He studies me with his arms crossed and his jaw tight, deciding whether tonight is a fight he wants to have. I know that look. I’ve been on the other side of it since we were children.
“You disappeared during heat two,” he says. “A runner came looking for you because your box needed covering and nobody could find you.”
“I had somewhere to be.”
“Where.”
“Somewhere,” I say, and I let it sit there, flat, closed, the way I close every door in this house that Ash would very much like to open.
He glances past me to the altar, where the small black lace mask rests against cold stone, and his attention catches.
“That hers?” he asks, his voice quieter now.
“Whose.”
“Cassian.” His voice drops instead of sharpening. “I’m not stupid. I know what that box is used for on opener night. The runner said you’d disappeared into the private one.”
“Then you already know more than you’re asking me to confirm.”
So Alistair will know. If he doesn’t already.
“I’m asking you to be honest with me. Once. That’s all.”
I look at him — really look, the way I don’t usually let myself with anyone in this house — and for one unguarded second I consider it.
Telling him the truth. All of it. What I felt, what I did, what I can’t stop feeling even now, standing here, having already prayed and failed to be forgiven for it.
I don’t.
“Go to bed, Ash.”
His mouth tightens. He already knew what answer he was going to get. I can see that much.
“Yeah,” he says. “Okay.”
He leaves without slamming the door, which somehow lands harder than if he had.
I stand alone in the chapel afterward, the mask still resting on the altar, and I think about how close I came to telling him everything, how relieved I am that I didn’t, and how neither feeling cancels the other.
When I finally leave, I don’t go to bed either.
In the hallway, the house holds its usual breath, every closed door making the silence feel deliberate. I stand outside her room longer than any version of restraint would recommend, listening to nothing and refusing to move.
I don’t knock tonight, but I don’t leave right away either.