Page 92 of The Sinner and the Priest: Part 1

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.