Page 43 of The Sinner and the Priest: Part Two

It’s just a man in armor. “The warrior?”

“Mars.” He smiles fondly. “The God of War.”

“And the woman?”

“Venus.” A feral grin. “Lust.”

“Ah-huh.” I try not to sound too unimpressed, but I’m curious where this is headed.

He moves to the middle panel and casts his torch over a battle, illuminating the grotesque violence and gore. Pride fills his eyes. “He gets better looking with age, doesn’t he?”

I snort at the warrior from the first panel painted here, battling up a hill of corpses. “Right. Is there a point to this?”

He flattens his lips and exhales hard through his nose as if I’m trying his patience. “The point is that, unlike most other cultures, the Romans didn’t fear war—they worshipped it.”

“Maybe that’s why their religion failed, buddy.”

His hand whips out lightning fast and grabs me by the scruff, twisting the robe and lifting me to his eye level. My toes scrape the floor. My muscles relax, playing dead.

It’s self-preservation. Maybe Leila got it wrong about him not being able to hurt others. He moved so fast, so powerfully, with only one hand. The torchlight didn’t even gutter at the speed. Slowly, as if to prove his strength, he brings me closer so we’re eye to eye. His once-brown eyes are now wholly black—like how Cisco’s look when his curse rides him.

“They failed because they stopped believing,” Asmodeus snarls in my face, forked tongue flashing. “They stopped fighting for it. All they had to do was pray to me, and I would have helped them!”

“Okay!” I force my voice not to tremble. “I get it.”

Fleeting anguish crosses his face, and then he drops me with a disgusted twist of his upper lip. He swings the torch to the wall, highlighting a section where Mars leads his soldiers up a mountain of dead foes, his flaming sword held high.

“They never tell the story properly,” Asmodeus mopes, the picture of misery again. He slips a hand into his pocket. “First, I was Fury. That’s what they called me when men looked at the blood on their hands and needed somewhere else to put the blame.” He pauses, jaw tense, breath sawing in and out of flared nostrils with conviction. “But I was the shove before the spear. The heat in the skull. The moment obedience cracked.”

He moves the torchlight to the final panel, the banquet with twelve gods at a table overlooking two lovers caught in a net—Mars and Venus.

“Later,” he continues, “when they grew more frightened of what happened in the bedrooms than on battlefields, I became Lust.” He growls, low and bitter in his throat. “Funny that. Men can watch a city burn and call it history, but let a bride tremble in fear on her wedding night, and suddenly I am the scandal of the age.”

My eyes narrow. “I’m assuming you’re talking about this woman, Sarah—the one whose father used Raphael’s staff to trap you in the stone.”

The CCTV footage of the dive bar he massacred revealed he was hunting down Sarah’s descendants to kill them in revenge.

He puffs out his chest, indignant. “Did I go too far? She will tell you that. So will her miserable husbands. So will every fool who mistakes obsession for love because I breathed on the fire and found it beautiful.”

I don’t even know what that means. “Pretty sure they can’t say anything. They’re dead.”

“I didn’t invent desire!” He gapes at me. “I merely refused to apologize for it.”

Goosebumps break out over my skin as his words strike a chord. My fingers twitch toward my thighs, to the cilice wounds I’ve not thought about all day.

“This is why you call me one of your own,” I whisper. “Because my lust goes too far.”

“Sweet, innocent child,” he croons at me. “Lust is the kindergarten version. Desire is bigger than flesh. I am the patron saint of everything people crave badly enough to lie about.”

“I suppose that makes sense.”

“Take Venus, for example.” He gestures at the lovers and then the battle. “She wanted Mars so badly that she risked being caught for adultery. Back then, it was a crime punishable by death.”

I note dryly, “I’d bet it wasn’t a crime at all if she’d been born male.”

He gives me a brief, sad smile, then returns to studying the fresco. “Venus was forced to return to a loveless marriage, so Mars had two choices—let the woman he loved and who loved him in return suffer for it . . . or . . . stop lying to himself and realize some things are worth fighting for.”

“But they won.” I point at the battle depicting his victory, then at the banquet and the net. “They kept fighting for it, and they were punished anyway.”