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He reached for my hand. His fingers threaded through mine, careful of the bandage despite the blood drying over his knuckles.
The kiss had not repaired either of us. It had exposed the shape of his destruction and shown me how easily I could become part of it.
32
DEMITRI
In ten years as a priest, I had never come as close to breaking my vows as I did that night.
I had never been oblivious to the attention the collar attracted.
Women who attended Mass at Christmas and Easter began occupying the front pew every Sunday. Some lingered after the congregation left, inventing questions that could only be discussed behind closed doors. Others arrived for confession with their sins, their voices softening through the screen as they described desire in enough detail to make their intentions unmistakable.
They wanted to provoke the man beneath the collar. Some wanted absolution without repentance. Others wanted the vanity of knowing they could make a priest forget God for an hour.
None had come close.
I listened without judgement, assigned penance and returned to my rooms untouched by anything they had said. Their desire had never belonged to me. It belonged to the collar, to the forbidden nature of what I represented and the thrill of tempting a man expected to refuse.
Resisting them required no sacrifice. But Adriana was different.
She had not entered my church searching for a priest.
She had staggered through the doors with no interest in who I was beyond whether I would protect her. She had not admired the collar or tried to discover what lived beneath it. She had treated me first as a stranger, then as a necessity, and finally as the man standing between her and death.
She had seen me before she learned what I had been.
When the name Cavalho finally reached her, along with every violent truth attached to it, she had not looked at me with fascination or disgust.
She had looked at me as though the priest and the killer were not contradictions she needed to reconcile. As though both men belonged to me. Adriana had seen the ruins and stepped closer.
Now she stood within my reach, and every defence I had spent ten years constructing lay broken between us. I became aware of everything. The warmth of her body against mine. The pulse fluttering at the base of her throat. The color desire had drawn into her cheeks.
Her pupils widened when my gaze dropped to her mouth, and the small response struck me harder than any seduction ever could have.
Her body betrayed her only in fragments. A breath that caught when I moved closer. A hand that trembled after touching me. The darkness that entered her eyes whenever she believed I wasn’t watching.
She saw me.
Not Father Demitri. Not DeMarco Cavalho.
Me. The man.
I didn't know which of us wanted the other more. I only knew I was running out of reasons to care.
Her palms rose to my chest. For one suspended moment, she did nothing. Her hands rested against my shirt as though she could feel the violence of my heartbeat through the fabric. Then her fingers found the first button. They trembled, but it wasn’t enough to stop her.
She opened my shirt slowly, each released button exposing another piece of the man I had spent a decade hiding beneath black fabric and white linen.
When the shirt fell apart, her breath caught. It was only my body. Skin, muscle and bone. Yet her gaze moved over me as though I had handed her something intimate. Something extraordinary.
The scars crossed my chest and abdomen in pale lines and raised ridges. Some were clean. Others had healed badly because there had been no doctor nearby and no time to find one.
They were the history of my family written into my flesh. They told a story that had been hidden for years beneath a collar. And alongside the scars were lines of ink. Tattoos. Her eyes traced every mark, as though learning me by the sight of every line that crossed my skin.
She lifted one hand and touched the scar beneath my collarbone. My entire body locked. She looked at me but didn’t stop.
Her hand continued upward until she found the scar near my heart. The mark was smaller than the others, though the blade that caused it had nearly killed me.
