Of Heathens & Havoc: The Confessions of Mercy Soules (Kings of Thorncrown University #1)

one

The Merciful

“Forgive me Father, for I have sinned,” I say, smoothing my skirt under me so it doesn’t wrinkle on the heavy wooden seat. “It’s been… Six years since my last confession.”

A stab of pain goes through my heart as I wait for thunder and judgment, for him to tell me I’m going to hell. But of course they don’t do that. I glance at the screen, suddenly wishing I hadn’t emailed ahead and asked for a confessional instead of meeting in his office. But talking to a screen seemed easier than talking to a man, especially about the kind of things I’m about to say. I haven’t told a living soul any of this, which is why it’s both easier and harder to tell a stranger.

“Whenever you’re ready,” he says when I don’t continue on my own.

I’m startled by the deep, commanding richness of his voice, the trace of an Italian accent. It does something funny to my body, and not just because I know instantly he’s not from here.

That’s not surprising. This is the only Catholic church in the area, situated at the edge of the tiny campus of Thorncrown University. There probably aren’t many seminary schools for Catholics in Arkansas. I’m sure they have to get priests from out of state all the time.

I relax a little after the initial surprise of his smoky voice. It’s easier for me to trust that I’m safe with some who’s somewhat removed from Faulkner, a bit of a foreigner.

I take a deep breath of the incense-scented air and catch a faint trace of sandalwood and leather, as if the booth has heard rougher tales than mine, more masculine sins. I decide to just spill it all, do my penance, and get the absolution I’ve been afraid to ask for all these years. It’s part of the fresh start I promised myself when I left the safety of my aunt’s and came to Thorncrown. Part of being a godlier girl.

I should have confessed a long time ago, and I know it’s silly not to. But I couldn’t bring myself to tell of the priests at our church in Little Rock, a man I’d see at mass every Sunday. This is a stranger, and who will never see my face, never know who confessed to such scandalous sins.

“I go to mass,” I say, suddenly not wanting him to judge me, even if he doesn’t know me. “Not as much as I should but… I’m a good person. I try to be, anyway. I don’t drink or go to parties, I don’t swear or take the Lord’s name in vain. But this… This thing happened to me six years ago. It might sound silly, like it’s no big deal, but it changed my life. A lot of lives…”

The ache of loss fills my chest, and I wrap my fingers around the cross that hangs from a delicate gold chain around my neck. I close my eyes, letting the familiar jumble of images tumble through my mind—five hands with friendship bracelets on our wrists. My brother’s eyes full of hatred. My father’s voice condemning me. A closed casket. A rubber band holding a dirty piece of paper to a brick, shattered glass littering the living room floor like shards of broken teeth.

“I was at my best friend’s house,” I start again. “We were her room with another girl from our grade, listening to some new band she’d found and looking at pictures of them online. I’d walked there with my big brother, who was best friends with her brother. We lived just a couple miles away, so we’d ride our bikes over the tracks to each other’s houses or meet in the middle.”

I take a shaky breath, the pain building instead of lessening now that I’m talking. I told myself it was worth reliving if I could be absolved of the sin, but now I’m not sure I can go back, not because of what happened, but because of what I lost.

“They had this neighbor,” I whisper, my throat tight. I almost say his name before I remember that I’m the only who left Faulkner after the trial. They stayed. I don’t know how long this priest has served here, or if Angel still attends. Even if he doesn’t, they’d know his family.

“We’d been friends for years,” I go on. “We grew up together. My best friend, my brother, his friend, and the neighbor. We had little nicknames, the Quint and… Others.”

I stop before blurting out the Angel’s parents teasingly gave us—Cinco de Mercy. I don’t want anything to link this confession to me later. I’ll say these words just once, purge myself of the sin, the secret I’ve kept hidden so long. I’ll do my penance, and he’ll absolve me, and it will be washed away. No will ever know such depraved desires were hidden in the heart of a good girl who wears clogs and floor-length skirts.

I hear the priest shift on his side of the screen, and I’m suddenly guilty for taking so long. I push ahead. “Things had gotten a little different in the past few years, as we’d grown up some. We still hung out, but when we went to the park, they’d shoot hoops, and we’d go to the swings so we could talk about boys… Stuff like that. So this day, we went to hang out, but my friend decided she didn’t want the boys there because they’d tease her about crushing on this band. They started messing with us, banging on the wall and yelling for us to turn down the music, which just made us giggle and turn it up louder. And because they were fourteen and high on that thing boys get, they took it as a challenge and decided to make us turn it down.”

“They were high?” the priest asks.

“Not high, ” I say. “I mean, not like drugs. But you must know what I mean, Father. You must have been a boy before you became a priest.”

“I was,” he says, and I can hear a hint of amusement in his voice, a voice that does funny things to my belly. I can feel that stirring, the bad that I’m not supposed to have. The I’m here to expel. Once I’ve confessed this sinful thing in my nature, it will go away. I just need to trust that the father will show me how to rid myself of this burden. Let go and let God, as Mom used to say. Praying hasn’t made it go away, but surely confession will.

“Then you know what I mean, right?” I ask. “That thing that happens when they realize their power and strength, but they don’t know what to do with it yet. That’s what my dad said happened. That they didn’t know how to direct it, all that new masculine energy. That instead of using it to lead, they used it to destroy and… Dominate.”

“To dominate,” the priest repeats, his voice dropping an octave. And Lord help me, I close my eyes as I feel a flush creeping up my neck. I want to cry. What have I d to deserve this curse?

I clear my throat to ease the tightness that’s aching there. I just have to get through this, and he’ll make it go away, the relentless sin of my flesh.

“Right,” I say, my voice coming out crisp. “So, they were high on that, and we were high on the attention of the older boys, and still too young to know that male attention came with consequences. They were our friends .”

I pause and wipe my palms down the front of my loose-knit cardigan.

“They tried to barge in, and we were giggling and holding the door shut. It was a game, this innocent thing, but it was like we could tell there was this invisible line between us, the that had been emerging for a few years. At some point, the scales had to tip. Some part of us must have felt that energy they had, even if we couldn’t name it, because I remember how hard my heart was beating. That even though we were laughing and shrieking and being dramatic, that some part of me sensed the danger in them. The power.”

I squeeze my cross, my heart shivering in my chest at the memory as my thumb skims over the letters etched into the back of it.

SHAME.

“I wanted them to get in,” I whisper. “Even as I was yelling with my friends for them to go away and leave us al, it was the last thing we wanted. The boys must have felt our energy too, because they knew it. They knew we wanted them to win, to fight until they overpowered us and got to us.”

I stop talking, my face burning with shame as sentences from the past dart through my mind—my brother’s defense, the juvenile attorney, scraps from the argument I overheard the night my parents thought I was sleeping, before Mom took me away.

A harmless game.

Just horsing around.

Boys being boys.

“Because that proved that you had power over them too,” the priest says quietly when I don’t continue.

I shiver at how astute that comment is, how blunt.

Was that why?

“Maybe,” I say. “Or maybe it was just the excitement, this tension that had been building for a few years. Whatever it was, they were older and stronger than us, and eventually, they got the door open and came storming in. We ran, and there was this… This feeling, Father. Terrifying and… And thrilling. My brother caught my friend and pinned her on her bed, and I knew she let him because she thought he was cute. The neighbor had our other friend, and her brother was trying to catch me. I had a little crush on him, but I was embarrassed about it, and terrified he’d catch me. I think some part of me knew that if he did, everything would change in the Quint.”

I close my eyes, pressing my knees together and leaning my head back on the smooth wall of the confessional.

“Did he catch you?” asks the priest, his voice low and intense, not helping make sense of the confusing feelings I’ve struggled with for the past six years.

“Yes,” I whisper.

We sit in silence for a long minute. I can hear him breathing, can hear a slight rustle of his robes as he moves. I’m tempted to peak through the partition, to try to make out his face, his profile or age, so I’ll be able to pick him out from the other professors at Thorncrown when classes start. I don’t even know if I’ll have any of his classes, though. And if I do… I don’t want to know.

“Did you want him to?” he asks at last.

“Yes,” I admit. Saying it aloud makes a bubble of wild laughter want to rise up and spill out my mouth, but I hold it back. I’ve never said that before, and the burden lifts slightly, enough for me to go on. “We fell down, and he was tickling me—they were all tickling us, we were fighting them and shrieking with… I don’t know what it was. Triumph or delight or fear. All of it. We were being rowdy, as my parents would say. The air turned electric, like some part of us knew anything was possible, that we were doing something daring and dangerous but not quite crossing the line.”

I stop and take a shaky breath. “And then he did. He had me pinned on the floor, and he—he…”

My throat tightens and my fingers tremble around the cross. “Suddenly I could feel that he was… you know… Hard. ”

I have to force the word out, the old shame burned down deep into my bs. “Our eyes met, and something passed between us, and it was like, he knew that I knew, and he didn’t like that. That’s when it changed, even if the others were still playing for another minute. I tried to get away, but he held me tighter, and there was this cruelty in his eyes now. He pulled down the front of his sweatpants, and then he was—he rubbed it against my stomach. I wasn’t laughing anymore. I’d never even seen , but I knew what it was. I don’t know how, Father. Maybe when I was too little to remember, I saw my brother. But it wasn’t that. It was what he was doing, how it felt…”

“How you felt.”

I nod, even though he can’t see me.

“Yes,” I whisper. “I was scared. The fun had been sucked from the room like a vacuum. My friend shrieked, and I looked up, and they were watching. Her and my brother. She screamed she was going to tell her mom, and her brother just laughed and said, ‘No, you won’t.’ And then the others were watching, too. The neighbor pulled the other girl up from the floor, and they just stood there… Maybe they made a comment like he’d g too far, but they didn’t make him stop. The movement he was doing made my shirt ride up, and he was against my bare skin. He was rubbing against my belly faster, and there was this wild look in his eyes, like… Something feral.”

I shudder, pressing my knees together. Take this sin away…

The priest doesn’t tell me to go on, doesn’t pry. He just lets me get my rapid breathing under control, giving me the time I need until I’m ready.

“And then my brother, the brother I’d idolized since I was adopted when I was three, who’d liked to play a game called ‘orphanage’ even though I’d been adopted out of foster care… He must have read a book or seen some movie, because he’d line me up with all the stuffed animals my parents got for me, and then he’d pick me. Even after he bought me a teddy bear with his own allowance my, he still wanted me. He always picked me, Father. Every single time. I don’t know how to describe how that made me feel.”

“It must have felt good.”

“Yes, but more than that,” I say. “It made me feel special. Wanted. Reassured. After the first couple times, I knew he’d pick me, but I still loved to play. I loved waiting with my teddy bears for him to look at me, to smile and say, ‘This ’s perfect.’ To be chosen. I guess even at that age, I somehow knew my birth parents hadn’t wanted me. I’d already lived there for a year, with my new family, before they adopted me. But it was— him —who made me feel like… Like I was there on purpose. He never changed his mind, not even if he was mad at me. Sometimes he’d refuse to play the game, but he never played and then rejected me when he was mad. He made me believe he’d never abandon me.”

I’m crying now, and I have to stop and wipe my eyes and collect myself.

“When you’re ready,” the Father says gently.

“Right,” I say with a little laugh. “This isn’t about that. It’s about what he said. He said…”

My breath hitches.

I repeat Saint’s words in a whisper. “ Check out her little tits .”

I can hear the father shifting in the booth on the other side of the screen. Suddenly, I’m frozen with mortification. What if he knows?

I haven’t been to Thorncrown in four years, since I left Faulkner, and this priest must be new. I would remember that voice, sinfully dark and rich, a voice that belongs to a devil tempting me to hell, not a priest delivering me from it.

I haven’t said my brother’s name, but we used to attend mass here, and he stayed in Faulkner when I left. What if he’s confessed to this very father, told him this very scene? Has this father with a voice like sin itself heard these words before?

“He pulled up my shirt,” I whisper. “All the way. And the little bralette thing I wore under it. And he was leaning over me, that thing against my stomach, rubbing it harder and harder. No was laughing. My friend was still yelling at him, but the others were just watching, and he was staring down at… at… Where we were together. His eyes were churning with some kind of madness. I’ll never forget it. And then he…” I choke out the last word. “Finished.”

I grip the cross until it breaks the skin, relief flooding out of my skin with the blood. My face is on fire, my breath unsteady, my hands shaking. But I did it. I got it out.

Unclenching my fingers from the necklace, I lick the blood off my scarred palm before I sandwich my hands in the flowy fabric between my knees. “I still remember how it felt.”

“You said that before,” the priest murmurs. “How did it feel?”

“It felt good,” I whisper, my voice barely audible. “How is that possible, Father? That it—all—felt—good. I was defiled. I’m unclean. But even knowing that, even after everything that followed, when I think about it, I have… Impure thoughts.”

His words are hesitant, faltering. “What kind of thoughts? Lustful s?”

“Yes,” I admit, the shame so deep it shivers in my blood. “He woke something inside me, and I want it to go away. I want you to tell me how to make them stop. Because I’ve had them for six years, Father. I just want to be clean again. I want to not feel like I’m dying when I go to bed, and the thoughts come back, and I imagine he did more than that, that he put it inside me, right there on the floor with every watching. Sometimes I even picture my brother or his friend holding me down, or… Or doing more.”

I wait for him to condemn me to hell where I belong for a sin this devastating. For the things I’ve thought for so long, things no pure girl would ever imagine.

“Do you ever act on these fantasies?” he asks.

“What do you mean, act on them?”

“Were you promiscuous in high school?”

“No,” I say quickly. There are rules about student conduct at a place like this, a Catholic college. Maybe he’s trying to ferret out the liars, the dangers. Maybe he seeks out girls who look innocent but hide the form of temptation and sin under their clothes.

Maybe he found .

“I never did anything,” I say firmly, not only because I don’t want to be turned over to the bishop and expelled, but because it’s the truth. “I never even kissed a boy. That’s why I don’t understand why these thoughts won’t go away, why I’m being tormented by them. Mom said they’d go away if I ignored them, but they didn’t. How do I stop having sinful thoughts?”

“We’re all made of sin,” the Father says. “You and I are no different from every other student and faculty and clergy member here. Getting rid of sin entirely isn’t the answer. It’s impossible. Accepting that you’re made this way, that you are perfect in God’s eyes, and He forgives and accepts you as you are, might be a better place to start.”

“But I don’t accept it,” I say, swiping angrily at a tear. “What kind of person has that happen to them, and… And likes it? The thoughts mess me up more than what happened. I know what he did wasn’t my fault. Aunt Lucy made sure I knew that. I had therapists and youth councilors at church. I even know that I didn’t really want him to go further, but I can’t stop the way it makes me feel when I think about it.”

“Many people your age struggle with sins of the flesh,” he says. “It’s a college, lamb.”

I don’t know what makes the shudder roll through my entire body and my thighs clench involuntarily—the sound of his tongue forming those words like a caress made of smoke and velvet, or the nickname he dropped so casually, as if all his flock are lambs to him.

I try to focus on the words he’s still speaking. “We may have stricter rules of conduct than a public university, but we have no illusions about human nature.”

“But what do I do?” I ask.

“First, I want you to have patience with yourself,” he says. “I’d like to see you again, if you feel comfortable coming back in. We can meet in my office next time—”

“No,” I say quickly. “I mean, if that’s okay, Father. I’d rather talk to you here, like this.”

“If you’d let me finish, I was going to say, or here if you’d rather,” he says, sounding slightly amused, which only humiliates me further.

“What about this week?” I ask. “A million Hail Mary’s?”

“Some of us have a tendency toward self-flagellation when what we truly need is to forgive ourselves as God would forgive us.”

I resist the urge to groan.

“Yes, Father,” I say instead. Going easy on myself is not of my strong points, especially after what happened two years later. I didn’t pay the same way the others did, but I paid. When does my punishment end?

When is it enough to wash away the blood on my hands?

A dark smile ghosts across my face, and I skim my thumb across the scars on my palm.

I’m here for her.

She’s the reason I came back to Faulkner, with all its danger and sorrow, the moment I turned eighteen and my aunt couldn’t stop me. If this priest only knew how badly I miss her, he’d take pity on me. Or maybe he wouldn’t tell me to forgive myself at all, because he’d know that’s impossible.

But I can’t force him to punish me for what I did and didn’t do, so I simply agree. I can’t make him take away the wickedness of my soul. All I can do is repent, work toward absolution, and pray that Eternity isn’t in heaven cursing my name like the three boys I sent to juvie.