Chapter 38
Thirty-Eight
Cisco
“Bless me, Father…”
The nun’s sins are small, quiet things. I reach into my pocket for my rosary, and my fingers close on silk. My breath hitches. I fumble, find the rosary there too, but it’s tangled with Mercy’s panties.
The nun is still speaking. I try to listen, but all I hear is my pulse pounding in my ears. I am sitting in the sacred dark, a vessel for God’s forgiveness, and I am clutching a woman’s slicked underwear.
I try to pray, to count out the Pater Noster for the nun’s penance, but I can’t feel the beads. Instead, my thumb slides over the lace, counting the stitches, the seams…
My cock throbs, and heat licks up my spine. I know I torture myself with this in my hand, but I can’t let go. I go on like this for an insurmountable number of penitents. I lose track of time, mumble through my part, but am lost in the dark, thinking, feeling, and praying for things I can’t have.
Is there a way I can have it, though?
Is this familiarity with Jasmine something else? Is there another explanation for the sword reacting to her? Why did my devil come out at the pool hall?
I barely register the current penitent’s next line. Something about a sweet tooth and a stolen bun before dinner. But then she pauses. Waits.
I clear my throat. My voice still wavers when I speak. “Have you made an Act of Contrition, Sorella?”
She answers yes, and my blessing is a blur.
“In nomine Christi, I forgive your sins.”
I speak the absolution and, without thinking, use the hand I always use to make the Sign of the Cross—the one holding my rosary.
Mercy’s scent doubles from the way the air moves in the confined space, and I bite back a groan.
More. I can’t help it. I press her panties to my face, suck in a deep breath, and squeeze my eyes shut.
It’s better than whiskey. Pure liquid gold, warm in my lungs.
God, I have a new addiction.
The nun is speaking. I freeze. Did she see?
“Ten Hail Marys,” I quickly tell her. “You may go.”
She thanks me and leaves. The door thuds closed. I close the lattice screen, flick off the light, and then don’t move. I just sit there in the dark, eyes closed, cock so hard I might die from it.
I have faced down insurmountable odds, tragedy, misery, and knowing I will spend an eternity in Hell. Yet nothing feels worse than the idea of facing tomorrow without the sun.
Another shuffle outside reveals a waiting penitent. I slip the panties back into my pocket this time, clenching my fist to avoid digging them out again. With a deep, steadying breath, I turn on the light and open the lattice screen.
The door on the other side creaks open, and I glimpse a flash of coppery hair through the lattice before it goes dark. My lungs seize.
She came.
“Well, I’m here,” she sighs, resigned. “Happy?”
I can’t answer.
“For fuck’s sake,” she curses. “Fine, I’ll say the spiel. Whatever.” Another heaving sigh. “Bend me, Father, for I have sinned—”
“Scusa?” The strangled word bursts out of me.
“Sorry?”
“Did you say, ‘Bend me, Father?’”
“I said, Bless me, Father.” She scoffs. “And they say I’m the one with a dirty mind.”
Fabric rustles. Through the faint diamond shapes in the wooden screen, I see that Mercy’s hair is even redder in the confessional light. White fabric flashes. I angle my head to see more. There. Smooth, bare legs and the navy flap of a coat. She sits back, mostly out of my view.
Except for those legs. More specifically, the closest one that she’s bent and propped up on the door.
Stop looking.
I sit back so fast I accidentally hit the back of my head against the wood panel and wince. The silence stretches.
My lips part. Close. I don’t know what to say.
“Fuck it,” she mutters. “I don’t even know why I’m here.”
“Because you lost the wager.”
Silence. Then a deep, throaty laugh that makes my insides melt. She sighs, stretches her second leg up to join the first, and her coat slips a little more.
“So.” She plucks at something. Fabric scratches. “What now?”
“Now you confess.”
She snorts. “How much time do you have?”
“Whatever you need.”
Take all the time in the world.
More plucking and scratching sounds. “I suppose that’s why I waited until last.”
Heat clenches low in my belly. “There is no one else in line?”
“Nope.” She pops the p. “I’m the lucky last.”
Cristo. I close my eyes to compose myself, but imagine her lips making that sound. The pop of the p. Glossy, wet…
I should lock the church door and—
“You alright in there, Padre?”
“It’s Father,” I correct gruffly.
“Why?”
“Padre is for monks. You know this.”
“It’s also for priests.”
Wretched brat. She drives me crazy, but I want to help her. I need to stop thinking of myself. Need to remember why I wanted her so desperately in the first place. Even if there is no us, I am her priest. At least for one more night.
“You can talk about the past,” I suggest. “You don’t have to mention anything recent. I am here to listen.”
“And judge.”
“Not that. Not anymore.”
Rain pitter-patters on the church’s roof.
No sound comes from the nave, or anywhere else nearby. It’s late. I should be packing, sleeping, and preparing for a long journey and a mission with a stranger who feels familiar. I should be planning what to tell the Cardinal.
And yet, I would sit here until the world stopped turning so long as she needs me.
I will miss this the most, I think. Sitting here in the dark, I can simply exist beside her. I will miss how the hunger is still there, but also how it’s not. It doesn’t strangle me like it did moments before she arrived. But I know Mercy is not feeling the same way.
She plucks at something higher up and hidden beneath her coat, and I’m reminded of the same motion she did at the archives. She still wears the cilices.
“What’s the point?” Her voice is raspier than usual.
“To confession?”
“To confess sins that happened so long ago.”
Oh.
“Well…” I smooth the cassock over my legs, thinking on it. “Sometimes we carry sins because their weight is the only thing keeping us grounded. We let them sit in our gut like stones. But…”
I rest my head on the panel separating us.
“But?”
“But often we have sunk so deep that it’s too dark to see the surface, where another hand is responsible for casting the stone.” I tug my Roman collar, my words hitting a little too close to home. “Do you remember when I told you what exorcists learn at the seminary?”
“About evil not surviving a name?”
“Sì.”
She is so silent that I strain my hearing to hear her breath. When I catch it, stilted and shallow, my heart bleeds. I place my fingers on the lattice, tips poking through so she can see.
“I am leaving tomorrow, Mercy, but I will wait for as long as you need me.”
Her breath grows sharper, faster, as if she is trying to control her emotions. I don’t want to cause her suffering. I just want her to heal.
I let go of the screen, and my fingers bump down until there’s nothing left. I’m about to reach for the door to end this when she speaks.
“Do you know,” she whispers, “that I feel cursed, too?”
“How so?”
“It’s stupid,” she mutters.
“Nothing spoken in here is stupid.” I tap on the wood. “It is the beauty of this box.”
“Beauty,” she spits. “That’s the curse.” Gasps. “God, it sounds so ridiculous to say it out loud.” An incredulous, pained laugh. “No one with my looks has the right to feel hard done by them, right?”
I stay silent. Give her the room to breathe.
“People have surgery to look like me,” she says.
“But I was born like this, and I’m just supposed to feel grateful?
” Her voice pitches high. “Do you know what beauty gives you? Do you know what it gives a child?” She heaves in a breath.
“Nothing. It gives nothing. Only takes. It takes and takes and takes … until one day, the only way to stop it is to take it first.” Another, sucked in breath.
A shuddering gasp. “I started taking it from myself first, thinking there would be nothing left for them. And then when I came here, I learned to take it from them. I took it from that priest. I took it from everyone until I was the only one left with the power to say mercy.”
My heart is breaking. Screaming. I want to find all of ‘them’ and swallow them whole.
She picks at the lattice, and I let her. I would let her pick apart my skin before her own.
“Only one person ever made me feel like … he didn’t see the beauty.” The lattice splinters. “But he still heard.” Wood peels. “He heard what my mother wanted him to hear.” Pieces fall. “He believed them and then he—”
She gasps. Her hand disappears from the lattice.
The silence is deafening.
“Mercy?”
“That’s my confession. My sin.”
“Beauty?”
“Why not?” she sneers.
I clench my jaw. “Because it is not something that comes from within. It is a label given by others.”
“Yes, and it’s the cause of so much ruin.”
I ruin things. I ruin lives.
That’s what she told me in the changeroom. After I kissed her, she tried to tell me it was her fault, that I wasn’t thinking clearly because of something she made me do.
“You don’t ruin lives,” I say.
“Pretty sure it’s in my job description.”
“Mercy.”
“Padre.”
God save me, I want to choke her.
“No one makes me do anything, remember?”
“Then why are you leaving?” A pause. “Why are you leaving with her?”
My head drops into my hands. “Because she’s—”
“The one.” She scoffs. “Got it.”
“No, because—” I lift my head. Force my muscles to relax. “At the pool, when you saw me … change. Do you remember?”
I peer through the lattice. Red light bathes her upturned face. She shakes her head as if to ward off tears I see glistening on her lashes.
“Of course I do,” she whispers.
“I should have told you what triggered it.”
“Me.”
“No. You stopped it.” I inhale. Scrub my hand through my hair. “When I first met the new Sinners, I thought they felt familiar. At the pool, the sense of familiarity was different. Stronger. The curse recognizes Jasmine.”
I think.
I still don’t know for sure. It’s hard to pin down.
She grows still. “I see.”
“So when she picked up the sword, and it sparked—”
Mercy’s palm hits the door, whip-fast, and then she is gone.