“You heard his confession?”
Our conversation had taken place in English thus far. But at his sharp reply, I murmur, “Si.”
“You speak Italian?”
“I do.” And I carry on in that same language. “He confessed to—”
“Molesting her. Use the appropriate word. ‘Touch’ means nothing in this instance. And he’ll get worse—”
“I know he will. Unless you help him.”
“How can I help him? He’s perverted. Wicked,” he snaps, his tone seething, his eyes dancing with a light that exposes the chasm in his sanity. “He needs to be stopped.”
“There are other ways.” I reach out, nuzzle the edge of his shirt aside, exposing his pec, and press my hand to his chest. The blood stains his flesh with my prints.
Staring at it, then looking up at him, I watch his eyes dilate as he rasps, “What do you want?”
My answer is simple. “You.”
He rears back, but not far enough to avoid my touch, because, in all honesty, the door is behind him and he can’t go far.
“What do you mean?”
“I want you.”
“I’m a priest.”
“Aren’t you also a man?” I counter instantly. My fingers flutter, and I press the tips into his chest. “A man with weaknesses. A man who sees weaknesses. What did they do?”
My urging, the reply I gave him, astounds him. I can feel it. The darkness in him recedes somewhat before he whispers, “They were murderers. Rapists. Evil that needed scourging because the police never caught them.”
“And all of them were beyond redemption?”
My question confuses him enough for him to whisper, “Of course. I wouldn’t take their lives otherwise. A life for a life.”
“I’m ex-Catholic—you don’t have to go all Old Testament on me for me to know what you’re talking about.”
“Ex?”
“I lost faith in the church. As much as you have.” My head tips to the side. “You’re not a priest anymore. You wear the collar, you go through the motions, but your heart? It’s not in it.”
“And how would you know that? After watching me for one service—”
His sneer doesn’t hurt my feelings. “Priests don’t kill their parishioners.” My words aren’t exactly simple, but Christ, do I need to spell it out?
“Some parishioners are beyond redemption.”
“And are you?” I query, hurting at his wooden tone.
“I’ve been beyond redemption for a long time.” His eyes are stark before he shutters them with his lashes. “Call the police if you must—”
“I have no desire to call the police. You did no wrong—”
“I took lives. Whether or not it is Old Testament, that isn’t the law of the land.”
“No, it isn’t, and thank God for that,” I say dryly. “Still, I see no need to call the police. I’m not here for that. I didn’t track you for that.”
“Then why did you?” His eyes opened again when I uttered ‘track you,’ his curiosity clear, but what he reveals with that look?
Stuns me.
The striations in those obsidian orbs seem to fluctuate, flickering and surging with dark browns. It’s impossible, a trick of the light, I know, but still, it affects me. Makes warmth flood me in response to his visceral reaction.
“I already told you that,” I whisper huskily.
“You can’t want me.”
His flat reply has me quirking a brow at him. “Why can’t I?”
“I’m a priest.”
“You’re not a priest.” I snap my hand out and cup him through his pants. He’s hard. “See? You’re a man. My man.”
“You’re crazy,” he breathes, his hand darting to mine. He shoves my wrist, trying to pull it away, but my grip tightens around his cock. A hiss escapes him, and he grinds out, “No.”
Because I have no need to force anything, I back off. Even move a few feet away.
“I was just reminding you of what you are,” I tell him calmly, and ignoring his scowl, I retreat, wandering back into the building where I find a kitchen. The light’s on, like he forgot to turn it off, and I spy the busted kettle on the ground.
What happened between that and now?
I move over to the kettle and start to bend down to pick it up, but when I do, my knees buckle and I almost slam into the floor.
He’s there.
Like I knew he would be, even if I hadn’t anticipated falling.
My damn body, letting me down again.
His arms sweep under mine, and he catches me before I can collide with the tiled ground. Within seconds, I’m sitting at the table, on one of the small stools that circle it.
He’s crouching in front of me, and his expression is concerned now. The rage is gone.
That concern?
It’s like a balm to my soul.
“You’re still—”
“I’m not sick,” I counter, unsurprised that he knows about my illness. I feel like everyone does.
He reaches up, and his hand hesitantly rubs over my head. “The first time I landed in Rome when I was transferred here, I saw on the news that you were being operated on.” His jaw works. “You have beautiful hair. Like an angel,” he whispers.
The words sink into me like stones slipping through water. Not only his choice of words, but that, on his first day here, he saw me on TV.
Fate... yet again.
Could it be more obvious?
My tongue feels thick in my mouth as I tell him, “I used to think I was an angel.”
I’m not sure why I say that. I never intended to, but the words slipped out, just like everything else I said tonight.
He frowns at me, then his fingers trace along the crispy part of hair which I use to control how much of the scars are visible. I’ve had a haircut since it grew out, and I kept some parts longer and use gel to cover the thick ropes of mangled flesh that expose my surgery to the world.
That he touches me there, in such an intimate a spot, doesn’t seem to register.
It isn’t the touch someone gives a stranger, and while I know that’s because we’re not strangers, he doesn’t. Yet he touches me like he knows me.
Because he does.
He just doesn’t realize it.
Well, not consciously.
“The cyst?” he asks simply.
“The cyst.” I tip my chin up. “It caused delusions.”
“Are you well since—I mean, should you be out and traveling if you were sick?”
“I discharged myself.”
Surprise has his brows lowering. “Why did you do that?”
“Because I’m as well as I can be within the length of time since surgery. But the truth is, being in the hospital would have been detrimental to me. I’m a nomad. I travel around a lot. Being stuck in there was sucking the life out of me.”
“If you needed to be there, then you shouldn’t have left,” he chides, and I shiver when his fingers collide with a scar.
It isn’t sensitive.
If anything, it’s still numb, but I can feel him.
Feel his touch, and it’s like heaven.
I tip my head toward him, letting the curve of my skull rest on his hand.
“I’m as well as I can be.”
“You almost collapsed—”
“I tried to keep up with you. I failed,” I tell him dryly. “I exerted myself too much. Plus, before that, I followed Paulo.”
“You did?” His brow puckers. “Why?”
“Because his response was strange to your absolution. I was angry at first. So angry with what he said.” I blink at him. “I’ve been friends with a lot of victims of domestic abuse over the years, and I knew how his niece had to be feeling.”
“Like shit.” His voice is thick with emotion. “I won’t let her be attacked just because no one will—”
“The police have to help.”
His scowl makes a reappearance. “With what? Something he hasn’t
done? Something she hasn’t even confessed to with me? Why would she speak with the police when she won’t talk about it in confession?”
I gnaw on my bottom lip, hating that he’s right.
But I’m also torn, because I felt the bloodcurdling rage earlier. I felt the loathing and the hate for a man who could be self-piteous when he was the abuser.
“I don’t hurt people who don’t deserve it,” he murmurs softly, and his hand trails over the curve of my head and toward my chin.
When he reaches down, and turns my fingers over to bare my palm, he sees the blood there, and his fingers trail over them too.
It’s absentminded.
Like his thoughts are elsewhere and his fingers represent him wandering, meandering through his mind, and I’m not about to complain, not when his touch is a thousand times more magnetic than I’d ever imagined.
All of a sudden, the body that had never responded to all the cute guys in school, college, or at the frickin’ gym, is flaring to life as if a police siren has just started flashing.
Every part of me—body, mind, soul, and heart—flutters in response to his touch. I feel like a flower, a bud that has been tightly furled in the dark, slowly opening and blossoming now that the sun is kissing its petals.
Only, Savio isn’t the sun.
If anything, he’s the dark.
The moon?
Maybe.
Even that projects a faint kiss of light, just not one as powerful as the sun.
I stare at his hand as he traces patterns on mine, and I whisper, “Even Adam had Eve.”
He stills. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He doesn’t look up at me, so I reach forward, and tip his chin up so he’s staring straight at me. “You know what it means.”
“I don’t know you. So how the hell can I know what you’re thinking?”
“You do.” Where it matters. “You know me.”
He shakes his head. “This is crazy. You’re—”
“No. I was crazy,” I admit. At least, in the eyes of the world. “But not anymore.”
He’d been crouching in front of me, however, my words have him flooding the space with energy. He surges upward and backs away from me.
“You can run from me, but you can’t hide,” I intone softly, staring at the blood on my fingers. “I’ll do what I must to keep you safe.” Finally, I look up at him. “Even if it’s from yourself.”
Savio
She’s crazy.
That’s the only thing, the only way I can accept what she’s saying.
Frowning at her and her words, I demand, “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Is it true what they wrote in the articles? About the rebels who held you?”
I tense up, not expecting her to speak about my past. No one ever does. It’s there, a big shadow that looms over everything, but it’s avoided by all—be they my flock or the higher ups in the Church. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. There were many articles written about them. How am I supposed to know which one you mean?”
She ignores my defensive retort and clarifies, “The authorities said they found dozens of women’s and girl’s bodies buried on the compound when they finally infiltrated it.”
My throat feels too tight, too thick to swallow. Air doesn’t penetrate my lungs as I’m transported back to that time, to that place.
To the heat. The stench. The screams.
A hand touches me, bringing me back. Grounding me. I stare down at it, at the soft palm that’s free from calluses, but stained red from my back.
She touches my chest like she has the right to touch me there, and fuck, if I hadn’t felt the same way when I rubbed my hand over her hair.
This is weird. Beyond strange. But what about my life isn’t?
“They were all raped before they died,” she says huskily, stepping closer to me now she’s back on her feet, not allowing me to move away from her.
Not allowing me to hide.
“Yes. All of them,” I rasp, shuttering my eyes like I wish I could shutter my mind to the memories.
In front of me.
My jaw clenches at the memory.
Sixty-six women.
All butchered in front of me.
Sixty-six victims that were used as leverage to force me to absolve souls who deserved to rot in hell.
“It’s amazing you’re still in one piece,” she whispers, her eyes wide as she stares up at me.
But she’s wrong.
I’m fractured into a million pieces. I’m not whole. I haven’t been since Oran.
People have suspected, but they never come out with it. That’s the only joy to no one ever discussing my past.
“God sent me to you,” she rasps. “To help you.”
She’s crazy.
“He gave me wings to fly to you.”
Insane.
I shake my head. “You need help.”
“No. You do. You need mine.” Her smile is wry, crooked. God help me, it’s charming too.
Once upon a time, she’d have been my type. Exactly what I went for.
But that was back in the past. When that troubled time had been like a fairy tale in comparison to this one.
“You need help,” she repeats, “and if you don’t let me in, then I’ll find someone who will.”
The words are strained, uttered like she doesn’t want to say them, but feels like she has no choice.
She already admitted that the illness she suffered had affected her mind, and for the first time, I sense a threat from her.
Not when she spoke of the bodies that litter my past, not when she spoke of my crimes... I didn’t feel the threat then.
But now?
I do.
“What are you talking about?” I rumble, feeling wary and starting to believe she just cornered me in.
“Prison is penance. This life you lead, it’s a prison in itself.” She shakes her head. “I know what you fear most, and I’ll feed it to you if you don’t let me in.”
Despite myself, I bark out a laugh.
She’s a pocket rocket, barely comes up to my chin, has blonde spikes for hair on one side, short curls on the other, a face that puts Grace Kelly’s to shame, and a body made for sin—the good kind.
Her threatening words should be ridiculous, but somehow, even though I laugh, something uneasy settles inside me.
She means it.
And while she’s addled, while I know the police would believe me where Paulo was concerned, she already mentioned five names who were my victims.
“Trapped inside your own mind with nothing to think about and nothing to do other than focus on your past. And with that past, you’d never go to jail,” she states with a humming lilt that, once again, makes me question exactly what kind of crazy has walked into my life. “We both know that.”
My jaw works as her assertion hits home.
“So, what is this? Blackmail? To what? What do you want from me?”
Her smile sends chills down my spine. “Everything. Nothing less than that will do.”
My nostrils flare when she slips her arms around my waist, and somehow, she avoids the areas that were bleeding, raw from my ministrations.
Her body collides with mine, branding me on one side with a heat that seems to penetrate me.
Soul deep.
I barely refrain from shuddering in response.
I have no idea what to do, no idea what she wants, but I know she’s a threat to the one thing I have left.
My sanity.
It’s barely there, hanging on by a thread, and she’s put that on the line.
She’s right.
A prison cell I could handle. I already had once. Fuck, it would be a walk in the park after Oran. But an asylum? A ward where I was doped up, medicated so intensely that every part of me was locked down until my mind was the jail cell?
No.
Just... no.
The words spill from me. “Eve didn’t threat
en Adam.”
“She tempted him with knowledge,” she whispers, and God help me, she sounds so... authentic.
Like she really believes what she’s saying.
Did she suffer brain damage or something?
Would the hospital she was in really have let her discharge herself if she was still ill?
I have to believe that she’s okay. That she’s well-adjusted, but somehow, the stuff she’s spouting sounds like it should be coming from a crazy person, yet she says it in such a way that it sounds like fact.
“What kind of knowledge do you tempt me with?” I whisper.
“The oldest knowledge in the book,” she teases, her eyes sparkling when she pulls back to look at me.
Disgust flares inside me. “I won’t break my vows.”
“You’ve broken every other,” she counters easily, like she knows there’s little use in arguing.
Only, I get the feeling it has nothing to do with how staunch I sound, but because she knows that all men fall into temptation eventually.
Like she knows it’s only a matter of time.
Damn her.
I start to pull away, but her hands flatten on my back, except this time her fingers touch my wounds, and I tense up, pain spearing me.
It’s messed up, but my cock hardens as the agony fucks with my nerve endings, and I know she feels my erection. She can’t not. We’re standing close together, our bodies brushing, my dick nestling against her stomach.
My response, however, doesn’t trigger satisfaction or smugness. No, it triggers pity. And that messes me up, fucks with my head some more, especially as she sadly whispers, “Oh, sweetheart, they really did mess you up, didn’t they?”
I can’t answer that, can’t say a word, because there’s nothing to say. They did mess with my head. They did shatter my sanity.
I’ve known that for years.
Have been hanging on by a thread for years.
Her forehead pushes into my chest. “I can guide you, Savio.”
“Guide me where?” I whisper thickly, suddenly feeling like I truly am lost. Like I truly do need someone to guide me.
“Back toward the light. To where you need to be.”
Pain, of a spiritual variety, tangles with the physical. For a second, I’m speechless with the agony of knowing she’s wrong—of knowing that I want her to be right. “Only God can guide me there, only He can bring me home,” I murmur brokenly.
The Vows We Break: A Twisted Taboo Tale Page 10