Page 1 of The Sinner and the Priest: Part Two

Prologue

Somewhere on the busy streets of Rome, in the dead of summer, a starving homeless woman begs for food.

“Please.” She holds out her hands to strangers, both tourists and natives alike. “I have not eaten in days. Have mercy, please.”

Her words fall upon deaf ears, but they see her threadbare clothes, body of skin and bone, and their eyes are bloated with judgment. She is a ghost of flesh and blood among the living, but will not be alone for long.

“Shame! Shame on you all,” she warns, voice cracking as she shakes a finger. “Famine does not ask permission to ride. He unfurls his starvation in the creeping shadows, and no one will see him coming. He will come for you all.”

“Out of my way,” a tourist shouts nearby, waving their camera. “You’re blocking my view!”

The hungry woman moves away with slow feet, muttering, “How can you see shadows coming if you already live in the dark?”

She collapses on her chalk signboard in the shadows of an iconic monument and stares at her recently scrawled words: Judgment is coming.

A camera shutter clicks nearby.

One

Mercy

The bathroom is fogged up when I step out of the shower at midday. We were up at eight, but spent the next few hours planning for Rome despite Cisco’s insistence that we take a few days. The team is only too eager to get us out of the abbey.

I don’t blame them.

Jasmine is dead. Hannah is missing. Leila and Thea tried to kill Cisco with their relics. And I lied–I kept secrets from them after spending days fuming over how they’d done the same to me.

After Jaz died and Cisco retreated to the church, we were all a little terrified and fractious. We didn’t know what happened, and Hannah disappeared. We talked it over in the archives to try to understand. Wesley, Zeke, and Dom admitted they knew that Cisco’s evil-sensing gift had another level to it, but honestly thought it was a story the Vatican used to keep people afraid. They’d never seen it in action, and Cisco never spoke about it.

Two things are clear. Through the process of elimination, we’ve ruled out that he’s a demon, and for the most part, he’s in control. The second thing is that each of us knew Cisco had been struggling with something. None of us bothered to ask if he was okay. We pushed that nagging feeling into a little corner of our minds and hoped it would disappear.

That’s how Sinners survive—we tuck the painful parts of our souls into dark corners and pretend they don’t exist. Cisco, though, dedicated a decade to helping others find the courage to shine a light into those corners. He tried to help me do the same.

As I towel off my hair, I close my eyes and see flashes of last night. Shadows streamed from Cisco’s body, latched onto Jasmine, and then drained the life from her eyes. Before that, I watched the priest who’d just tended my wounds with compassion snap and lose control of his violence. One second, he was a silent bystander as Jaz strangled me. Next, he was brutally bashing her skull against the wall and saying things like,

You think you can feast here? In my domain? On my Mercy?

Unhinged doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Now he’s stewing in a pool of his misery, refusing to talk about it, and it’s all my fault.

If my head hadn’t been so far up my ass, I would have seen the signs. I wouldn’t have chased Jasmine in a jealous rage after seeing her in my robe and him zipping his trousers over a clear erection.

I slam my palms on the sink and turn to dress in my travel disguise. Underwear first, then the cross-shoulder back holster for the sword.

Wesley inscribed it with a cloaking spell to avoid security metal detectors during travel. I slide it on and buckle it beneath my ribs. When the long, leather sheath settles between my shoulder blades, a tingle of power thrums into my spine. I flex my arms, testing the movement. It’s not great, but the blade isn’t long. It ends before my waist, meaning I can sit well enough. The heavy robes, veil, and my hair do a good job of concealing its bulk.

I don the robe, hating every minute. Pretending to be a pious nun goes against every loud instinct in my body, but it’s necessary to access the more secure parts of the Vatican with Cisco.

As I’m slipping on my joggers, something falls out and lands with a tinkle onto the tiles. My chain cilices. I forgot that I went to the church this morning and pulled them out of Cisco’s trash.

My hand shakes picking them up. I should put them on or at least take them with me. Even with the ribbons cut, I’m sure I can find a way to fasten them onto my thighs . . . move them to a different position, so I don’t exacerbate the existing wounds.

A normal person wouldn’t have thought about fucking the monster all morning, but I did. It’s a miracle I made it to morning without Cisco realizing, or forcing myself on the poor guy. He hardly slept a wink as it was.

I know you think this helps, but in the long run, it doesn’t.

Before my brain catches up to my body, I’m at the toilet in two steps, dropping the cilices into the bowl. I press the flush, water erupts from the cistern, and the cilices are sucked down the drain.