Page 40 of The Sinner and the Priest: Part 1

Maria is dead, but Mercy is alive.

Fifteen

Mercy

Nothing surprises me anymore. I’ve crossed oceans, lost count of how many languages I can curse in. I’ve taken out men built like tanks without so much as a drop of blood spilled. So, I should’ve seen it coming.

But the priest … the priest caught me off guard, and I’m still standing outside his room, wondering why.

It wasn’t the way he tried to snap my wrist. I’ve survived worse. I know how to read bruises and what they mean. It wasn’t even the storm I glimpsed in those deep brown eyes, or the kind of haunting pain that goes with it.

No, it was his choice.

He chose old, broken rosary beads instead of his only link to the Vatican.

Standing in the hallway, staring at his phone in my hand, I have to wonder why. I know the password. Surely, he understands that I can unlock it.

Why choose the broken beads? Why act like putting them back himself was torture? Why did that matter more than salvation?

It was almost as if he believed that if he didn’t touch them, they never left his pocket. I never took them.

Directly opposite me, Jasmine opens the door, and she’s still covered in grime and blood. She pauses on the threshold as if caught stealing from Sister Martha’s cookie jar. At first, I think she notices me surreptitiously slipping Cisco’s phone into my yoga pants’ side pocket, pretending to adjust my cilices through the fabric, but then I see what’s in her hands—more of my belongings. Clothes, shoes, and perfume. More of my precious sex toys.

She threw something long and pink over my head earlier, and it landed in Cisco’s room. My palm hits my face, and I let out a strangled groan. How many of my toys are in there right now?

Jasmine drops my things. Bottles clink and roll off the clothes.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” I put up my hands. “What do you think you’re doing, Jasmine?”

She scowls. “I refuse to share a room with a … you.”

With a slut, I’m sure she wanted to say.

Movement at the staircase stops me from responding the way I want.

Tawny and the three young girls are damn near invisible in the gloom, barely making a sound as they crest the staircase, tattered suitcases in tow.

Jasmine slams the door. Well, she tries to. The mountain of my clothes gets in the way. She lets out an animalistic shriek and kicks the blockage clear until the door closes.

I rub at the throb in my temples and ask Tawny, “Why aren’t you settling them in downstairs with the magpies?”

“They don’t want to sleep down there. Too quiet.” She winces. “I said they could sleep up here.”

“Okay,” I sigh. “It’s fine.”

“Their names are Lucia, Eliska, and Mathilde,” Tawny says.

The girls flinch when I suddenly face them.

“Easy, girls,” I say. “You’re safe now. Nobody’s gonna hurt you here.”

The boyish one—Lucia—is a little bird with her arms wrapped so tight around her middle. Mathilde is the willowy, French one with the fox eyes, who doesn’t even blink. She watches me with a silent calculation that reminds me of Thea on a bad day: sizing up the angles, always ready for an exit.

It’s the littlest one that gets me. Eliska can’t be more than nine, probably less if we hacked off her stringy hair and she wasn’t packed in oversized sweats. She stares at the floors, at the walls, at anything but my face.

I kneel to their level, and wince as the cilices burn my flesh.

“Listen to me.” I try for my softest voice, which is still about as gentle as a cheese grater. “You don’t have to be scared. Not of me. Not of anyone here.”