Chapter 4
CAYCE
The door stays open. That’s the only rule that matters.
She sits across the screen, veil shadowing her face like a perfect mask for the darkness I can feel calling for her. I keep my hands where she can see them. Palms on the wood. Boring. Safe. I let the silence stretch until it turns into something beautiful.
“Okay?” I ask finally.
“Yes.” Her voice doesn’t wobble. Mine almost does.
It’s astonishing how much of a man you can be when you’re not trying to be a weapon.
“Would you like to tell me what you want?” I ask. “Or do you want me to lead?”
“I want…” She swallows, decides. “I think I want to write the rule and have you follow it.”
“Done.” I mean it. The yes I give her sits heavy and right in my mouth. I’ll defile this little angel but I’ll let her walk her own path to hell.
She leans closer. The veil brushes the screen and my body remembers a square window with no light and I choose this room instead. I choose her.
“Tell me what you want, Kitty” I prompt, because I’m about to die for something real to happen. “Do you want me to pull up that habit and eat that pretty pussy?”
There’s a sharp intake of breath, and beyond the mesh her mouth curves. Gotcha.
“Kneel.” Her voice is a whisper.
I do. It’s easy. It’s everything.
“Hands stay there,” she adds softly. “You don’t touch me unless I ask.”
“Yes.”
She exhales like I took the weight off her ribs. “If I say Sanctuary—”
“We stop,” I finish. “We talk. You walk away.”
“And you don’t make a scene.”
“I don’t make a scene,” I repeat, because she needs to hear it twice.
The next minutes are a study in patience. Her fingertips ghost the screen. Mine don’t move. She explores what it feels like to be the one who approaches. The one who decides. The one who says now.
It’s a prayer I understand.
And then she presses her mouth to the mesh. There’s no real contact, just warmth and shared breath and the knowledge that if we took the screen away, it would be kissing—slow, deliberate, owned.
A kiss.
The intimacy of it is stunning. Unexpected.
“Okay?” she whispers.
“Perfect,” I say, and I mean it.
She laughs once, wrecked. “Don’t call me perfect.”
“Real. You feel real.”
We hold there until both our breathing changes and the nave goes wider and smaller at the same time. I keep my hands braced where she told me to. I don’t push. I don’t take. I pause, and the seconds ticking by turn into a flame so powerful it threatens to consume me entirely.
When she eases back, I don’t chase.
“I’m going to ask for one thing,” she says.
“Ask.”
“When we’re done here, you don’t follow me. You don’t hover. You don’t make my night smaller because you’re being careful and wanting to make sure I’m safe.”
I take that in like an instruction with teeth. “I won’t follow,” I say. “But I’ll make sure no one else does.”
She studies me, weighing whether that’s a loophole. “How?”
Tiernan is nearby. He’s always nearby, watching my back.
“I’ll text a friend to keep eyes on the street. Not on you. Just on the cars.”
“Fine.” A beat. “Thank you.”
“Thank you,” I correct, and she smiles like I passed something that can’t be a test. We don’t have long enough together for tests.
I watch through the screen as she stands and steps out, for a moment creating an irrational panic in my bones.
She can’t leave. Not yet.
I haven’t gotten to tarnish the saint or knock the halo off her head.
But she’s not leaving. The door creaks open, and instead, she steps into my side of the confessional with a serious expression on her sweet face that sends the last remnants of blood in my body straight to my aching cock.
I shuffle on my knees to face her, looking up into her face. My hands begin to rise of their own accord and I pause, asking silent permission. With a barely-there inclination of her head, she gives it, and I close my hands over her hips beneath that monstrosity of a habit.
I can smell her…nerves and something deliciously sweet and floral and indisputable feminine musk.
I think my comment about eating her pussy must have aroused her.
My face is level with her abdomen, and I pull her in, nuzzling into the voluminous folds of the habit.
Her breath hitches a little and her fingers curl into my hair.
“Get up,” she whispers.
I move, returning to sit on the bench, and we close the last inches the way we started—on her terms, one breath at a time.
Sanctuary lives between our mouths like a switch only she gets to touch.
Keeping one arm locked around her waist, I move one hand to her jaw, stroking it, putting her mouth where I need it.
“I’m going to kiss you, Kitty,” I tell her, low, because warnings are another way to ask. I wait a beat long enough for the word to stop this. It doesn’t.
I go in careful—the barest of grazes, a draft more than a press—so she has one last clean breath to say sanctuary. She doesn’t. The moment our mouths meet, the quiet hits like impact anyway. Heat, then a tremor, then the give of her lips parting on a sound I feel more than hear.
She tastes like wintergreen and candle smoke, like someone who brushed her teeth too hard trying to be good and still came. Her fingers catch in my lapel. The veil’s edge skims my knuckles; the rosary taps once against my wrist like a hallelujah.
I keep the kiss measured, contained, the kind of control you have to muscle for—because I know the shape of taking, and this isn’t that. This is her yes cupped in my hands like a butterfly, and it’s better than anything I ever stole.
Because regardless of what she tells herself, and how she’s trying to act, Caterina is truly all innocence and light. I should walk away, but the damage to my soul was done too long ago.
I’ll take her, even for the night, and make sure that this angel always remembers the night she fell for a devil.
“You can touch me now,” she whispers when I let her come up for air. “I want you to touch me.”
Thank God.
I don’t waste another moment. One hand gently wraps around the back of her neck, anchoring her to me. The other, I skim down her body to the bottom of the habit and beneath, to finally get my hands on her skin.
In a matter of moments, every nerve ending in my body is on fire with the connection between us.
Caterina pushes herself into my grasp further, deepening the kiss while she struggles to figure out what to do with her hands and her body.
Pure innocence that I am too happy to corrupt. Reluctantly releasing her thigh after squeezing gently, I cover one of her hands with mine and guide her to my chest.
“You can touch me now, too.” I tell her. “But be warned, kitty…I’m not going to take it easy on you.”
She nods once, settles over my lap like she’s stepping onto thin ice and daring it to hold. The habit pooled around us makes a dark little tent; the screen on our left throws latticework over our faces. I can’t see the color in her eyes, only the widening when I breathe on her mouth.
“Kiss me,” she orders, quiet as a blasphemy.
I do, slow. She meets me like she’s memorizing a prayer she wants to mean something, mouth soft at first, then braver. She tests; I follow. She tastes like mint and nerves and something I shouldn’t put a name to because it’ll wreck me.
She trembles—decision, not fear—and breathes faster against my mouth. My sweet innocent kitten tries a deeper kiss, hesitates, and then tries again. The rhythm’s careful, counted, not sloppy. Not practiced. It throws me. She’s giving me saint and good girl like a weapon I asked for.
“You wanted a saint,” she murmurs, like she heard me thinking. “You’re getting a saint. Be good to your girl.”
Saint. Good girl. The words slide under my ribs and find the part of me that obeys orders because it learned the cost of ignoring them. Instead of the nausea that I expect with the memories every other time, the angel in my arms is bringing peace to the maelstrom of emotion.
When I skim my thumb higher along the inside of her thigh, she makes a sound that she tries to swallow and fails. Her hand flies to my chest, palm flat, feeling the thud that won’t calm down.
“Too much?” I ask.
She shakes her head, a tight little motion that still jostles the veil. “More. But slow.”
“Slow,” I echo, and I keep it measured, giving her time to decide again and again. Her body tilts into my palm, learning me, and I start to wonder if I read her wrong earlier. Maybe she’s not acting. Maybe she’s never had anyone ask. Maybe she’s making this up as she goes for both of us.
“Tell me,” I say against her jaw. “Tell me how you want me. Tell me what you want.”
“You lead,” she breathes, contradicting herself and meaning it. “But only because I said so.”
“Yes, Caterina.”
Her name shakes her. She leans closer; the open door lets October in and I don’t feel it. All I feel is her heat through the mess of fabric and the slow, careful way she rocks, testing what matches the pulse I set under my skin.
“Good girl,” I murmur when she finds it, because praise is a lever and I’m not above using it.
She breaks a little on a laugh that isn’t a laugh. “Again.”
“Good girl.” I keep my mouth on hers while I say it so she can take the words straight from my tongue.
I shift back on the bench and bring her with me, closing the last inches the way we started—on her terms, one breath at a time.
Sanctuary sits between our mouths like a live wire only she can cut.
I keep one arm cinched at her waist, an anchor not a trap, and put my other hand at her jaw, thumb riding the soft corner of her mouth until she tilts for me.
“I’m going to kiss you again, Kitty,” I warn, low in her ear. I leave a beat where the word could land and end this.
It doesn’t.