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I didn’t care who heard us because I didn’t care anymore. I was hers; she was mine. Even if I was a fool to think so, I felt it that moment. My dark room was clear, her scent was all around me, and the world was dead. I was tired of purity and perversion clutching my hand in my life.
I vowed to have no master, no keeper—no one to silence me when I swore, tell me what to eat, keep me bound to anything. No one but her.
Exorcising the past was all that mattered.
I kissed Sorina’s jaw, clutched her throat, and spilled myself inside her like a heathen. She made me feral, alive; I felt immortal, and looking back, there is nothing like the cocksure defiance of a teenage boy.
Especially one inside of a girl he is addicted to, a girl he never thought would walk out of his mind and into a reality that made sense, that felt like home.
TWENTY-FOUR
Every moment Valerie spent with the Deacon she learned something. She had still never touched a Bible—she felt too dirty for that—but she enjoyed being in the small round church every moment they weren’t eating dinner or talking in the living room. She let the Deacon read to her. Let him teach her, scrub her clean.
And she let him touch her.
Small moments.
She placed them on her tongue when she slept at night. She would push her fingers into her flesh, where his hands had been—his fingers grazed her shoulder, his arms wrapped around her when he hugged her goodnight, the light kiss he placed on her temple. She touched all of those places, licked her fingers clean. If he knew where her fingers lingered later, he would want to pray for her.
More than he already had.
The wicked do not wed the holy.
She told herself this truth every night after she left him. Fed herself the bitterness. Convinced herself he would tire of her, eventually. That’s why the nights were the hardest. During the day, she remembered his words, his promises and his confessions. She remembered his wicked smile when she would arrive for dinner, and every gift of his scent told her he wanted her.
She’d spent Thanksgiving with the Deacon, and though that made her heart warm, Nicholas did not join. She’d kept her visits with the Deacon secret at first, but after his confession that he wanted her, and wanted her to live on the hill with him, she told Nicholas she was spending time with him. It went as she had suspected. Nicholas rewarded her lies with that mocking face he often wore and his cold indifference.
Their make-believe family was paper thin, and she was ripping it to shreds with each deceit and defiance of her promise of new beginnings. She knew he thought she was circling around to the dark, but she did not believe so.
The Deacon was not Markus.
The Sunday night she saw his true face had been slow and calming. She’d attended Mass. Spent the evening eating dinner with the Deacon before going home to check on Nicholas. She found him in the cemetery with his friends. Instead of telling him where she was going, she left a note in the kitchen. A lie. She said she was going to confession. But every moment with the Deacon felt like confession. And she’d considered telling him about her sister that night, but he had other plans and steered her away from the confessional.
The Deacon said he wanted to show her something, and she marveled at the thought, dipping into dark places. She knew where his bedroom was but had never been there.
“Did you know the first elevator in the Ozark’s is in this house?” the Deacon asked, his hand resting on his stomach. He was sitting at the kitchen, fresh from a shower. Valerie studied his knuckles, the firmness of his arms in his button up shirt. He looked casual, so different after how he’d seemed in the church in this grey and white. She was in his home, a part of his private life. It felt wrong and alive. She didn’t know what to do with her hands and then reminded herself he could not see her.
“No. Where is it?” she asked, leaning against the door frame as she watched him.
The Deacon stood, not reaching for his cane. She wondered why he only used it when he left the house. Perhaps his home and church were familiar; he was like an ordinary man in that holy place.
He was hardly ordinary. He seemed special to her—glowing with an otherworldly presence that spoke God into her ear.
“I can show you.”
Valerie cleared her throat as she pushed off the wall. “Why did you not let me confess earlier?”
The Deacon smiled wide. “You’re so very different than everyone here, Valerie. I have been listening to the people of Hart Hollow for so long, and their voices are so familiar to me, so comforting. But yours, it’s special. I didn’t want you to confess again until we were alone.”
“Can we go now?” She wanted to confess, because the last time she had, he’d confessed his own feelings. She needed more. Needed more to combat her warring thoughts, her nighttime voice.
“How about we go after I show you the elevator,” the Deacon said.
“Where does it go? Is there a basement?” she asked.
“Yes. But it doesn’t go there. Missouri is known for the beautiful caves beneath us. Labyrinths. The entire world is below. I find creatures of the night to be fascinating. I have since I was young.”
“Things that see in the dark scare me,” she lied. She didn’t want him to know about the dreams—the snakes, the dark things that walked the woods, the one that looked like the thing she’d seen on the hill. She regretted the time she’d spent away from the house on the hill, full of fear over the thing in the road. She knew now that the Deacon would never let anything harm her. Knew that even the darkness inside of her, and all she’d done that night at the ranch, wouldn’t make him look at her differently. She’d been forgiven for her sins, but for years she had been someone else, never herself.
