Gideon's Sacred Prey

PROLOGUE

THE VEIL

POV: GIDEON

She counts the pins.

Six. Noemi does not say the number, but her mouth moves around it as I pull the first pin from her veil and drop it into the brass offering dish on the altar rail.

It rings like a coin.

The second does the same. Then the third.

"You're counting," I say.

"No."

"Six, novice. You counted six."

The chapel smells of beeswax and the gold size she mixed this afternoon. Under it is the faint sweetness of satsuma on her skin and the oil from the gun I left on the pew behind us.

My mother's rosary is looped twice around Noemi's crossed wrists on the prie-dieu. The knot is loose. I made it loose.

She could slip it.

She does not try.

Everything else is already done.

The roof over her bed at Saint Veronica's. The bishop's second mortgage. The envelopes in Mother Agathe's locked drawer. The new brass lock on cell nine. The hand Earl Guidry used on her wrist.

I have spent three years making the world around Noemi smaller without letting her see the walls.

Tonight I let her see them.

The fourth pin falls. The fifth.

"Do you know what I bought this week?" I ask, and I give her the list one piece at a time. "The roof over your bed. The bishop's debt. Your Mother Superior. The lock on your door. The hand of the man who sold you fruit."

Her breathing changes before the last pin comes free.

I drop it into the dish.

Six.

The veil slides from her hair. Cold air touches the back of her neck, the strip of skin I watched from the last pew for twenty-nine mornings and from a screen for far longer than that.

She makes a sound I have heard through speakers at three in the morning and never from this close.

"There she is."

I put my gloved hand on her nape. I do not need to hold her down. The rosary is loose. The door is behind me. She knows both things.

"You hum when you're scared," I tell her. "The Salve Regina. Off-key in the same place. You eat the peel of the satsuma when you think no one is looking. You sleep on your left side, facing the door."

"Stop."

"You wanted to see me come in."

Her eyes close.

Three years I let the Church keep her. Three years I paid for the roof, the doors, the woman who called it providence. Three years I watched other people teach her to be ashamed of the same darkness that made me choose her in the first place.

I lean to her ear.

"I'm done lending you out."

Her thighs press together under the thin skirt.

I see it. I see everything.

My hand settles low on her stomach and stays there.

Waiting.

"Ask," I say.

She shakes her head.

"You wrote it down. Every night for a month. You wrote it in a notebook you were supposed to burn." I put my mouth against the place below her ear. "I read every page, Noemi. I know what you want in your own words."

A tear falls from her chin onto my mother's rosary.

I have watched her pray ten thousand times. I have watched her ask a god who never answered for forgiveness she never meant.

I want one word from her that belongs to me instead.

"Say amen, novice."

For one beat, the whole chapel is silent.

Then she says it.

"Amen."