Chapter 31
Thirty-One
Cisco
It feels like an eternity since the Reverent Mother left, but it’s only seconds, and then the pool hall empties and fills with silence.
Then it’s just Mercy, me, and the gentle lapping of water against our skin.
“Come on.” She lets go of my hand and climbs out of the pool with the ease of an acrobat.
I can’t move. I’m still locked in position, hand round my cock, back against the pool wall, feet planted, torn black fabric floating around my shoulders.
“Cisco,” she hisses from the deck. “Let’s go.”
With a groan, I pry my fingers from my cock, wincing more from the ache there than the one in my body.
Mercy helps me climb onto the deck. Once I’m free of the water, fumbling to my feet, it feels like I swallowed a sack of stone.
Gravity pulls me down, and I stumble. Mercy quickly stabilizes me with an ease belying her femininity.
Again, I marvel at her strength. Her fortitude.
Her sheer, stunning confidence and composure while she is virtually naked.
I accept her arm around my waist and lean on her shoulders for support.
Why am I so lethargic? Surely, she didn’t injure me that badly.
I held my own. This must be a side effect of the curse being activated and then stifled so quickly afterward.
Usually, I have a chance to satisfy my hunger, and when I do, drowsiness follows. Perhaps my body is confused.
She helps me stagger across the deck, obstinate in her pace toward the changeroom. I punch the swinging door open for us to enter, and it echoes like thunder.
The storm.
The pool, the water, the memory afterward feels like another version of me, as if I were dreaming about myself. It’s all echoes now except for the need still clawing at my insides, and the unforgivable thought that I let my sister go.
Dio mio, I let my baby sister go, my little angel, and something in me had sighed with relief, something that still lives inside me now said, “There, you see? The world is lighter now. No one weighing you down.”
But my curse is not some devil, despite what I call it. That is just my way of distancing myself from the truth. It’s me. It’s the dark part of me, the bitter blood of my family line. If it were a separate, demonic entity, then Mercy’s Beatific Vision would see the truth on my face.
Whatever the case, I refuse to let it continue. It must end with me.
Mercy should know—no, I need her to know—that I am not the priest right now in this room. I am not a man of God. I am the thing under her skin, the monster she lets out when she’s desperate for pain.
“There’s a first aid kit in here,” she mumbles as we shuffle inside the changeroom.
I glimpse a pile of clothes beneath a low wooden bench against the wall. Cubicles further back are likely shower stalls or toilets. Hooks on the wall hold swimsuits and water sports supplies.
When I’m resting against the vanity cabinet, the hunger surges against its cage. I suck in a sharp breath as the feeling floods my limbs, contracting every muscle in my body.
“You good?” Mercy asks.
“I’m fine,” I grunt.
What must she think of me standing here, gripping the vanity with white knuckles. My cock is still hard, tenting my wet trousers where the fabric doesn’t cling to it. My clerical shirt hangs in tatters. My dignity is broken.
I am the very image of something that crawled out of Hell, but if I face the mirror, I’m afraid the devil will notice. I raise my fists to my collar, one on either side of my neck, and focus on the stiff white cotton strip somehow still threaded through the shirt’s channel.
The rustling not far away tells me Mercy is either searching for a first-aid kit or changing out of her wet clothes. That pile on the floor must belong to her.
Dear God, I hope she’s undressing. It’s a ridiculous want, considering, but I feel it all the same. I need it. My fists tighten around my collar, fingers digging into my neck.
Something sharp, long, and thin presses into my throat above the knuckles of my left hand. I lift my lashes and lock eyes with blue.
Still wet. A bead of water travels down her temple from a curl of stuck hair, down her jaw, and neck. I swallow hard as it disappears in her cleavage.
“You’d goddamn better be fine,” she growls. “Otherwise, you’re dead.”
She’s still in her swimsuit.
“Eyes up here, Padre.” Mercy uses her body to press me against the cabinet, probably as a threat, or punishment …
cutting my view of her breasts. But now I feel them against my chest. Soft.
Full. My gaze dips to the hollow of her throat.
A little more to the side. There. Right over that smattering of freckles. That’s where my mouth will land first.
“Start talking.” She applies pressure to the blade, and I feel the sting. “What the fuck was that out there with your eyes?”
I twist the white cotton in my fists. I should be doing exactly what she wants, but all I can think about is winding this collar around her wrists so I can hold her still and fuck her from behind.
Every urge I’ve caged along with the devil is scratching to get out of me, and I’m sick of holding them back.
God forgive me. I can’t. I won’t. I want her ruined, mouth open, tongue out, hair sticky with sweat. I need her with an unholy force. It’s an ugly, desperate biting at her throat, hands bruising her hips, kind of need. I want to mark her so badly it hurts.
Fuck her.
Take her.
Why not?
Why hold it back?
The devil came out anyway. And she put it back. Not God.
Every time I fought these desires, every time I denied myself, it’s been a joke. A sick, hollow performance. What has it earned me but misery and starvation? I look at her now, water beading on her curves, that damp, wild mane falling over her furious eyes.
It’s never been more obvious that I’ve been so wrong.
They lied to me.
They told me they would help me find forgiveness.
“You are a creature of appetites, Francisco,” Cardinal Valerio said a decade ago, his eyes tracking the fresh wounds on my knuckles from the man I had just broken in prison. “Take the vow. Starve the man, and you will cage the beast.”
“It won’t work,” I told them.
“We have seen men like you before. It will work.”
They lied to me, and I believed them.
My entire life, nothing has come close to what Mercy did for me under the water, what she’s still doing for me now. She saw me. And the beast did not recoil from her touch; it leveled out.
Valerio told me the hunger would swallow me whole if I let myself taste desire again. He was wrong. Right now, the hunger is the only thing that feels real.
And Dio mio, do I hunger. It’s not even human anymore, is it? I breathe her in, and I’m gone, just gone, every thread of self-control snapping like rotten twine.
All those long nights in the monastery, kneeling on freezing marble, fasting until I saw stars. Tongues wagged about how I, their perfect penitent, their weapon in a collar, could purify the beast if I just suffered enough. If I just prayed hard enough.
The devil never leaves, though.
They lied.
They fucking lied.
“Start talking, Padre.”
My muscles lock tight. Say Padre again, I dare you.
The brat knows full well that term is reserved for monks, for men with cleaner hands than mine. Don is worse, given my family history. Father still belongs to the job, but somehow, said here at the abbey, on Mercy’s lips, it finally feels like it belongs to me.
So, it’s Father. Hell, I’d take Cisco right now.
But do I rage at her?
Do I let it out?
No.
I fucking hold it in and stuff it down where my devil eats it up whole. I let it simmer. But when I don’t answer, she grows agitated. The knife nicks my skin, and a warm trickle slides down my throat.
Through it all, I hold Mercy’s gaze with my own, watching her grow agitated at my silence.
God, I could take her right now. Bend her over the cold counter, fist in her hair, watching her ass shake as I drive into her with the kind of hard, ugly fucking men like me are meant to give women like her.
She’s no victim. She’d turn on me, claw at me, bite me.
She’d call me Padre with her mouth full of my cock and laugh while she did it.
And I would bless her for it. I would confess to her, not to God.
I would tell her every filthy thing I want to do—lick her from cunt to ass, bite those perfect nipples, fuck her so good she can’t walk straight to Mass on Sunday, let the whole abbey know Mercy finally found a man who matches her hunger.
“Talk!” she barks in my face, knuckles whitening on the blade.
My lips part, then close.
“Tell me I did the right thing by keeping your secret,” she demands. “Or tell me to kill you now before it’s too late.”
“Mercy…”
“Tell me it’s my fucking fault for dressing like a slut and—” She bites off her words and releases a breathy growl of frustration that makes me want her more. “I don’t care what you tell me, just say something, dammit.”
That last sentence. The tone. I feel her pain leak into me and burrow deep. With her, I’ve always felt it as if it’s my own.
She thinks my lapse in control out there was her fault because of what she wore. She doesn’t know what creeps beneath my skin, only what she sees on the surface—a priest, aroused and in pieces.
“You think you have ruined me?” I bare my throat, push into the blade, and bleed some more. “You think I am a man worth saving? You’re wrong.”
“What are you then?” she asks, almost hesitantly. “What are you if not a man?”