Sukuyuj

You stand with your back toward him and stare through the little lattice window meant to separate sinner from priest, even though there is nobody seated on the other side tonight. The adjacent compartment is empty. You can see only a piece of darkness through the carved screen, the vague suggestion of the chapel beyond it, and one wavering stripe of amber from a candle burning somewhere far enough away that it can't help you.

He has entered your side.

The realization should have come the moment he guided you toward the booth with his arm around your shoulders. You remember the touch. You remember the unbearable normality of it, the way his fingers rested over your sleeve as though steadying someone feverish, someone confused, someone in need of pastoral care. You remember the abbess watching the two of you go with concern softening her face.

She entrusted you to him.

Everyone did.

And now the little compartment built to protect confession, to preserve distance, to let a soul speak without being made vulnerable beneath another person’s direct gaze, has become something else entirely.

There is hardly enough space for two people. His chest touches your back before you can convince yourself that it does not. You inhale. The breath barely reaches your lungs.

He is too hot.

That thought arrives with strange clarity among everything else that has become useless static in your head. Too hot for an ordinary man. Too hot for the winter seeping through stone, for the cold corridors you crossed barefoot, for the hour when the monastery seems to turn inward and hold whatever warmth remains in its walls. Heat rolls from him through his cassock. You feel it across your shoulders, along your spine, at the backs of your arms where his body nearly brackets yours.

You can smell him.

Incense first. It has gotten into everything he owns. His cassock, his hair, perhaps even his skin. Beneath it sits the smell of clean cloth and the faint mineral quality you have come to associate with him even though you have never found any reason for it in daylight.

Blood, perhaps. Your mind supplies that explanation immediately.

You killed him less than an hour ago.

No.

You imagined killing him less than an hour ago.

No.

You felt the knife slide through his body.

There was a knife.

There is no knife.

There was blood on your hands.

Your hands are clean.

His body fell beneath you.

His body stands behind you.

You remember the expression on his face when he looked at you from beneath your body, chest ruined, lips darkened, one hand resting over the place where you thought another heart had begun beating inside you.

You remember the weight of the blade when you considered using it on yourself afterward.

You remember walking through the corridor covered in him.

And you remember looking down at your own hands and finding nothing.

There is nothing now either.

No blood beneath your nails. No cut across your palm from the slippery knife handle. Nothing on your nightgown except the faint wrinkles from sleep and the places where damp hair has touched the fabric near your shoulders.

You close your eyes. It makes him worse.

With sight removed, every other sensation expands until your own skin seems too thin to contain you. The warmth of him at your back is enormous. In this narrow little enclosure there is no cold corridor to dilute it, no monastery air flowing through arches, no night wind coming under a door. His body gives off heat as though there is a furnace somewhere under his ribs.

Behind you stands a living man.

No.

You swallow painfully.

Something stands behind you.

His breath brushes the shell of your ear and you jerk so badly your shoulder strikes the wooden wall.

He does not laugh. You can picture his expression without turning around — the slight lowering of his eyelids, the calm mouth, the almost infuriating patience. He has watched you come apart piece by piece and never once seemed startled by what he found underneath.

His hands settle on your upper arms, not gripping hard, simply catching you before you can stumble sideways in a space too cramped to allow escape. His palms travel down slowly, following the trembling length of your arms until they reach your elbows, then your waist. He does it as though calming a frightened animal he has no wish to startle further.

“There,” he murmurs. “I have you.”

Your eyes stay fixed on the lattice. You can't look at him. You can't make yourself turn.

“Father…”

It barely comes out. You don’t know what you mean by it anymore.

Title. Accusation. Plea.

It embarrasses you even now.

After everything you think you have seen him do. After the wine. The nights. His body over yours in memories that behave like dreams. The whipping. The way he touched himself while punishing his own flesh. The impossible child-hand beneath your skin. His death beneath your knife.

Father.

The word remains where every other certainty has collapsed. His mouth is so close to your ear that you feel the smallest movement of air when he answers.

“Yes, little dove.”

A terrible pressure builds behind your eyes. You want to cry again. You want to scream until the abbess returns and tears this door off its hinges. You want to demand that he show you his chest, that he tear open the cassock and prove there are no wounds beneath it.

Most of all, you want him to explain.

The desire is almost childish in its desperation.

His palm slides along your upper arm again, not gripping, only following the tremor through the thin sleeve of your nightgown. You are acutely aware that you are still dressed for sleep. No veil. No habit. No scapular. Your hair is loose around your shoulders, half tangled from the hours spent tossing against the pillow before the nightmare — or vision, or memory, or whatever it was — drove you from your room.

You are standing in a confessional in your nightclothes with a priest behind you.

Nothing about this can be justified. Nothing about the weeks leading here can be justified.

Your mind races toward every possible sentence you should say.

You were dead. I stabbed you. There was something in my stomach. I followed you. I saw what you did. You come to my room. Do you come to my room? What are you?

“I don’t understand.” You whisper instead.

He makes a soft sound. Recognition.

“No,” he agrees. “You don’t.”

His fingers reach your wrist after sliding down your arms. His chest closer to your back, the side of his face near the side of your head. You feel your pulse hammering beneath them.

He turns your hand over and studies your palm as if the darkness does not matter to him. His thumb follows the center line, passing over the place where you remember the knife handle cutting into your skin.

Nothing is there.

Not a blister.

Not a smear.

“Look,” he tells you.

You stare down.

At first all you see is the pale blur of your own fingers. He raises your hand nearer the little ribbon of light filtering through the lattice from the chapel beyond. Moonlight has found one of the tall windows somewhere outside and spilled itself across the floorboards.

Clean.

Entirely clean.

Your breath catches.

“I had blood here.”

“I know.”

The certainty with which he says it makes your head turn. Your shoulder brushes his chest. The contact sends you forward again, but his other arm is there before you can strike the wall. It comes around your middle, broad forearm spanning your waist.

“I had blood,” you repeat. “I had—”

“Yes.”

“You were—”

“Yes.”

“I killed you.” You say out loud, eyes widening, breathless.

His cheek nearly touches your temple.

“You tried very hard.”

Your stomach drops. You go rigid inside his arm. He should not know that. He can't know that.

The abbess heard your confession in the hallway, yes, but not everything. Not the sound the knife made. Not the strange peace on his face. Not the exact way one of his hands rested against your belly after his body had gone still.

You didn’t tell anyone that. You think you didn’t.

God, you don’t know anymore.

Your mouth opens, but nothing comes. You need one clean answer.

Were you in my room? Did I see you in the sacristy? Were you at the side of my bed? Did I kill you? Was there something inside me? Am I mad?

The questions crowd your throat until none can pass. His hands move over your waist. They do not rush. That is another cruelty you recognize in him now — Sukuna never seems hurried when he has you alone. Whatever waits outside the room can wait. Whatever clock governs everyone else loses jurisdiction over him. He touches you with the composure of someone who knows nothing can interrupt unless he permits it.

His palms slide across the curve of your hips, thumbs pressing gently through your nightgown. Your breath changes.

“You are trying very hard to think,” he says.

You close your eyes shut. Your hands remain clasped against your stomach. You have been holding them that way since leaving the sisters, fingers threaded so tightly the joints ache. A posture of prayer without prayer.

“I killed you.”

He is silent for long enough that your heart begins to hurt. Then his nose passes lightly beside your temple.

“Did you?”

Your eyes snap open.

“I remember it.”

“Memory is not proof.”

“I felt it.”

“So you have told me about many things.”

His hand settles over your lower stomach. Your entire body stiffens. He must feel it.

There is no possible way he does not.

Your lungs stop halfway through a breath. His palm spans the part of you that terrified you this morning, resting with obscene familiarity over the skin concealed beneath your nightgown. You feel only one pulse now, yours, racing too quickly to count.

You try to step forward. There is nowhere forward to go. His other arm closes around your waist and brings you back against him.

The contact is immediate.

Solid.

Undeniable.

Your spine fits along the front of him. His chest rises behind your shoulders with each breath. You feel the line of his body from shoulder to hip, the hard evidence of his interest pressing through layers of black cloth, — his arousal — and shame comes alive so suddenly that your knees nearly weaken.

He catches the change in you with a quiet hum. You press your clasped hands harder together.

“You were dead.”

“Was I?”

“You had blood in your mouth.”

“Perhaps.”

“You were not breathing.”

“That sounds inconvenient.”

The answer is so absurdly calm that something inside you cracks. You twist halfway in his hold, enough to look at him over your shoulder.

His face is close. Closer than you expected.

The confessional is too narrow for anything else. His features fill your vision, the faint candlelight filtering through the lattice barely reaching him. The outline of his jaw is stronger in shadow. His eyes look almost black until he moves his head and red catches somewhere deep inside them.

You search his expression.

No fear. No anger. Not even annoyance that you have just confessed to murdering him.

There is interest. Tenderness, almost. That may be the worst.

“Why are you doing this to me?” You whisper, hurt, confused, mad.

His gaze travels slowly over your face.

“You assume I am doing something.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Do I?”

Your breath shudders.

“You come into my room.”

“Do I?”

“You touch me.”

His mouth changes slightly. Not a smile yet.

“Do I?”

“You make me…” You stop because the rest of the sentence can't exist inside a confessional. Not aloud. Not when the chapel waits beyond these wooden walls. “You make me dream things.”

“Now we have changed the accusation.”

You stare at him.

“You said you were in my room.”

“Did I?”

“I remember...”

“There is that unreliable witness again.”

Your throat tightens.

He knows.

The certainty lands differently now. Not proof, still, but something inside his voice is too precise. He knows exactly where each doubt lives and presses them one by one, not enough to break them, merely enough to remind you that none are stable.

“You are cruel,” you whisper.

His eyes brighten. The red becomes visible.

“You have called me holy more often.”

“I was wrong.”

“Perhaps you are wrong now.”

You hate him. You think you do. Your body offers no support for the conclusion. His body presses more fully against your back when you begin trembling again.

Undeniably alive. Hot. Demanding.

Your mind tries to solve it and fails so completely that for a moment you feel almost calm.

There must be a point where the human mind simply stops attempting to reconcile contradiction. Perhaps you have reached it. You have spent days forcing evidence into categories — dream, temptation, hallucination, sin, physical fact. You have tested doors. Watched hands. Followed him through corridors. Bitten him. Spied through cracks. Checked your own skin in the morning until you left fingernail marks searching for bruises that refused to exist.

Nothing has held.

Now you have murdered him and even murder refuses to remain true.

Your shoulders sag. His arm feels you surrender before you understand that you have done it.

“Good,” he murmurs.

Something inside you flares weakly.

“I didn’t doanything good.”

“No?” His thumb moves once against your stomach. “You have stopped fighting reality for the first time since I arrived.”

“What reality?”

His mouth comes closer to your ear.

“This one.”

You feel him behind you. Not merely the suggestion of him, not the pressure of darkness over your bed. Chest against your shoulders. One hand resting at your belly, the other sliding slowly from your wrist to your elbow.

You can feel the rise of his breathing. That should comfort you.

Living men breathe.

Demons probably do too, your mind offers unhelpfully.

You squeeze your eyes shut again.

“Tell me you’re real,” you plea.

“I am real.”

“That— it doesn’t help.” You say after a beat, hopeless.

“No,” he says. “I don’t imagine it would.”

“You could be something I’m making.”

“Then you have an impressive imagination.”

The words almost irritate you, something like a sob catches behind your sternum.

“I’m going insane.”

His face lowers until his lips nearly graze your hairline.

“Perhaps.”

Your eyes snap open. You expected denial. Comfort. Some priestly reassurance about exhaustion and temptation. He gives you none.

“Perhaps?” you repeat.

He sounds thoughtful.

“Madness has always been a convenient word for experiences other people can't verify.”

His warmth has already seeped through the thin fabric of your nightgown. Your back knows the shape of his chest too well. The hand over your belly feels more reassuring than it should, even after what happened earlier. Especially after what happened earlier.

He sees too much. His thumb drifts once across the cloth.

“Nothing there now, is there, my little dove?”

The world goes still.

You look down.

His hand.

Your belly.

You did not tell him.

Not in the corridor. Not coherently. The abbess heard fragments, perhaps, but you never explained the hand. You could not. You remember trying to speak and choking on words — knife, blood, heartbeat — but did you say baby?

You can't remember.

You did not.

Did you?

That realization almost sends you apart again.

“How do you know?”

He lowers his face beside yours.

“Know what?”

You try to turn again, more forcefully this time.

He allows it.

That surprises you enough that when you finally face him, you nearly forget why you wanted to.

The booth is too small for this position too. Your back presses against the lattice. He stands inches away, filling what remains of the compartment. Moonlight touches only fragments of him — a pale section of collar, one cheekbone, the edge of his mouth.

His eyes need no light. Carmine finds you through darkness. For several breaths you simply stare.

They look normal.

Human.

Then his pupils contract.

Not because the light changes. It does not change at all.

You see it happen.

Round becoming narrow — a vertical black cut down the center of red.

Your heart gives a painful kick.

You blink.

Round again.

You actually make a small, exhausted sound at that.

His mouth curves. You look up at him, searching for mockery.

There is none.

“You know what I felt.”

“Tell me.”

“No.”

His eyebrow lifts. It is such a human expression that it nearly makes you laugh.

“No?”

“I’m tired of telling you things you already know.”

“Then you are learning.”

The quiet satisfaction in his voice makes anger flare hot enough to temporarily overcome fear.

“You make me confess things so you can enjoy them.”

“Sometimes.”

The admission is immediate.

You stare.

He has never done that before. Not plainly.

He watches the shock spread across your face and seems to savor it.

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“You—”

“I enjoy your confessions.”

Your mouth opens, then closes.

“You…”

“Articulate yourself, lamb.”

“You are supposed to help me.”

“Who said enjoyment prevents me?”

“It should.”

“Why?”

“Because it is wrong.”

His gaze lowers to your mouth.

“And you believe righteousness requires disgust?”

“That isn’t what I said—”

“No. You said I should not enjoy listening when you tell me the truth.” He leans in by a fraction, eyes still on your lips. “I disagree.”

Your pulse beats hard beneath your tongue. He knows exactly what he is doing now. He knows you know. Perhaps that has been the point of tonight.

You killed him, or imagined killing him, and apparently that crossed some threshold he has been waiting beside. His fingers find your jaw.

“You want me to lie to you.”

“I want you to tell me what’s happening.”

“You have asked that question badly every time.”

“How else am I supposed to ask it?”

His thumb brushes beneath your lower lip.

“Ask what you actually want to know.”

You stare at him. Your mind produces too many possibilities.

Are you a demon? Are you the devil? Are you human? Did you defile the wine? Did I see you scourge yourself? Do you enter my room? Have you touched me? Have you made me dream? Did I kill you? Was there something alive inside me? Are you making me insane? Do I want you because of something you’ve done to me? Or did you only notice I wanted you before I did?

Your mouth is dry.

“Have you been in my room?”

There.

Small question. Simple question. The center of everything.

His smile almost disappears.

Almost.

“How many nights?”

Your lungs refuse to fill properly.

“That isn’t an answer.”

“You asked whether I have been there. You did not ask when.”

Your hands curl against the wood behind you. He watches them do it.

“Have you?”

“Yes.”

The world does not end. That feels obscene too.

You expect thunder, perhaps. The crucifix above the chapel altar cracking in half. Bells ringing without hands. Some proof that a single word has rearranged your life.

Nothing.

The monastery remains silent. The man in front of you continues breathing.

“No.” You hear yourself saying.

He tilts his head.

“You wanted the truth.”

“No.”

“You followed me looking for it.”

“No.”

“You bit me looking for it.”

Your stomach twists. His smile returns, then he says, lower this time, filthier.

“You really should have drawn blood.”

A broken sound leaves you.

“You remember that?”

“Quite fondly.”

You shove him. Or try. Both palms strike his chest. He gives perhaps half a step because there is nowhere else to go.

“You—”

The rest jams behind your teeth. His hands close around your wrists before you can hit him again. You struggle once. Then again. He doesn’t wrench. Doesn’t twist. He simply holds them together between you, looking down at you with infuriating composure.

“You were there.” You gasp, trying to conciliate. “All those nights.”

“Many.”

“The things I—”

Your face burns so fiercely that you can't continue. The humiliations of the past weeks return as a single flood. The way you woke breathless. The way your body ached with memories you dismissed as fantasy. The voice speaking against your ear. His hands. His mouth. The sense of being watched before touch ever began.

The nights where nothing happened except his presence.

Perhaps those are worse now. You remember lying perfectly still while a shadow stood beside your bed, heart beating so hard you thought it might shake the mattress.

He had been there. Actually there. Watching.

“What did you do to me?”

The question leaves on almost no voice. His eyes stay on yours.

“Less than you fear.” He offers. “And more than you told yourself.”

Your stomach turns. He releases your wrists. You don’t strike him again. You can't seem to move at all.

“Why?”

Now that one comes easily. He looks amused.

“You know why.”

“No.”

“You confessed it often enough.”

“I confessed my dreams.”

“You confessed desire.”

“They were dreams!”

“Some were.”

Your knees nearly fail. His hand catches your waist, your fingers grip the front of his cassock because the floor seems momentarily unreliable.

“How much?” You beg. He says nothing. “How much was real?”

“Does it matter now?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I need to know what belongs to me.”

That finally quiets him. His eyes sharpen. You can feel his attention settle fully onto the sentence as though you have offered something precious without realizing it.

“What belongs to you,” he repeats.

“My thoughts. My sins. What I wanted.” Your chest rises too fast. “I need to know whether I wanted those things or whether you put them there.”

His hands become very still. When he answers, his voice is quieter.

“I did not put hunger in you.” You swallow. “I noticed it.” You look away. “I fed it.” Your eyes close. “I gave it a shape you could hate.” Your breathing goes uneven. “And when you hated yourself enough to begin wanting punishment for it, I gave that desire a shape too.”

You open your eyes.

His expression has no apology in it.

None.

He says the ugliest thing anyone has ever confessed to you as calmly as he once explained the order of the mass.

“Why would you do that?”

“Because I wanted to know how far you could bend without breaking.” Your mouth parts. His thumb settles against your cheek. “And you broke magnificently.”

You slap him.

The crack is small inside the enclosed booth but satisfying.

His head turns with it.

For one glorious instant he says nothing.

Your palm stings. You stare at the faint reddening mark on his cheek as though it is another test.

Proof.

You struck him. He has a mark. You lean forward before you can stop yourself, studying it.

His gaze returns to you, the redness is already fading.

No.

No.

No no no no no—

You reach up and grab his jaw. You don’t know why. To hold the evidence in place, perhaps. His skin is warm under your palm. You turn his face toward the moonlight.

Nothing.

Not even the beginning of a print.

You start laughing. You hate the sound immediately. It begins small and then tears loose, part laugh, part sob. You cover your mouth with your hand but it keeps coming anyway.

“Of course,” you whisper. “Of course there’s nothing.”

He watches.

“I can’t mark you. I can’t hurt you. I can’t kill you.”

“You hurt me.”

“There’s nothing there!”

“Pain does not require evidence.”

Your laugh dies. That is too close to something human. Too close to what you might say.

“You enjoyed it,” you spit the accusation.

“Yes.”

There.

No shame. No denial. You remember him on his knees, scourge cracking over his own back, blood following old scars while his other hand moved between his thighs. The vision returns with cruel clarity.

“You enjoy everything.”

“No.”

“You said you were a hedonist.”

“I was.”

“You still are.”

His brows rise slightly.

“Am I?”

“You desecrate things.”

“What have I desecrated?”

You stare at him.

The chalice.

The wine.

Your room.

Your prayers.

You.

He sees each answer without you giving any of them. A smile begins at one corner of his mouth. You hate how beautiful it looks. You hate more that you are noticing.

“You,” he says eventually, “have spent your whole life believing holiness is something fragile. White cloth. Closed knees. Quiet thoughts. An untouched body. You think holiness can be spoiled by a hand, a mouth, a thought at midnight.”

“Don’t speak to me about holiness.”

“Why not?”

“Because you don’t have any.”

He laughs softly.

“Perhaps that is why I understand it better than you.”

You push yourself harder against the lattice as he steps closer. The wood presses into your shoulder blades. He doesn’t touch you again yet.

“What did you see when you stabbed me?” he asks.

You stare at him.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You came here with a knife.”

“I didn’t.”

“You remember one.” Your throat tightens. “You remember my blood.” You shake your head. “My body beneath you.”

“Stop.”

“My hand here.”

His palm settles at your lower abdomen again, heel of his palm on your stomach, fingers spanning near your mound. Your whole body jumps.

“Stop.”

“And you remember being relieved when the second heartbeat disappeared.”

“Stop!” The plea tears out of you.

He does. Immediately.

His hand leaves.

He steps back as far as the tiny compartment allows.

That obedience is so unexpected that you stare in awe.

Silence returns.

Your breath comes quickly, uneven.

He waits.

You realize several seconds later that he is proving something.

When you tell him to stop, he stops.

You don’t know whether that makes him better or more terrifying.

“Why?” you whisper.

He studies you.

“Why what?”

“Why did you let me think I killed you?”

“I didn’t.”

“You—”

“You killed me.”

You go cold. His tone remains perfectly conversational.

“In that moment, you killed me. You felt the knife. You saw the blood. You exhausted yourself putting the blade through my chest until you could no longer lift your arm properly. You watched me stop breathing.” Your stomach rolls. “And then you walked out.”

His eyes catch what little light there is. You wait.

“Death is less permanent for some creatures than others.”

The booth feels even smaller. You stare. He gives you no more.

“What are you?”

His smile returns.

At last.

The question he has been waiting weeks to hear.

He leans down until his mouth is nearly against your ear.

“What do you think I am?”

Your skin prickles.

“I think you want me to say demon.”

“Do you believe in demons?”

“Yes.”

“Then say it.”

You can't.

Something about the word would make the situation irreversible. Priest leaves room for deception. Man leaves room for madness. Even monster can be figurative.

Demon is doctrine.

Demon means the thing behind you in bed and the eyes in the dark and the impossible body returning after death all belong to one category that has frightened humanity long before you were born.

Your lips refuse. He waits.

When you still don’t answer, he says quietly,

“Pray.”

You blink.

“What?”

“Pray.” He lowers his head another fraction. “And don’t stop until I tell you.”

You take a shallow breath. He reaches behind him and finds the little wooden stool with his foot, drawing it closer with a scrape that sounds much too loud in the enclosed space. Then he sits.

The change puts you suddenly above him.

You remain standing between his knees, stunned by the shift. His size makes sitting hardly diminish him. If anything, it becomes worse. His shoulders remain broad enough to block the narrow exit behind him. His face is level with your chest. His hands rest on either side of your waist as though this arrangement was always inevitable.

You glance at the door. His eyes follow.

“You can call them.” Your attention snaps back. “The abbess. Sister Shoko. Any of them. Raise your voice, and someone may eventually hear you.” You do not move. He waits. The monastery beyond the confessional remains silent. Somewhere far away, wood settles. He lifts his chin. “Or you can pray.”

Your heart is beating so hard it feels painful.

A pause.

“If you lose your place because you’re frightened, begin again.”

Your lips press together.

His voice changes, only slightly. The softness remains, but authority enters beneath it, the same tone he uses at the altar when the congregation must stand, kneel, answer.

“If you stop because you decide to be stubborn, I will correct you.”

Your pulse jumps. If someone stood outside the booth, they might hear only a priest giving a troubled novice instruction. You hear something else.

Authority.

The same cadence that has guided you through confessions and mass, through the terrible half-dreams in your cell. It reaches some trained place inside you before conscious thought can interfere.

“Which prayer?”

Now he smiles. You know before he says it. Your hands clasp themselves.

Habit.

Obedience.

His eyes drop to them.

“Psalm sixty-three.”

You could recite it while feverish. You could say it while half asleep. You have repeated it enough in recent weeks that the verses have worn pathways through your mind. At his instruction. Under his scrutiny. In your bed. On waking. Whenever thirst comes to mind.

A prayer about longing made into the foundation of your undoing.

You stare toward the small section of carved lattice. Your heart lurches.

“No.”

A small pause.

“No?”

“I’ve prayed it enough.”

“That isn’t for you to decide tonight.”

Something sparks in you.

Anger.

Finally something simple.

“I don’t belong to you.”

He considers that with irritating seriousness.

“Then prove it.”

Your nails dig into the backs of your hands.

“How?”

“Refuse.”

“I am refusing.”

“No. You are telling me you dislike the command.” He leans closer again, enough that the warmth of him reaches you. “Refusal is simpler.”

He waits.

You open your mouth.

Say no.

You have done it before.

Say no.

You told him to stop and he stopped.

Say no.

Instead the first words rise automatically.

“O God,” you begin.

The first words sound wrong. Too quiet. Your throat is raw from crying. You have barely slept. You can still remember the phantom resistance of a knife entering his chest.

Sukuna listens without moving.

“thou art my God...”

You hate yourself instantly.

“Early will I seek thee…”

His thumbs press lightly into your sides. His expression changes, barely. Something sharpens behind his eyes.

“My flesh longeth for thee…”

There.

That sentence.

The one that has become corrupted beyond repair.

You breathe through it.

“In a dry and thirsty land where no water is.”

The silence after the line feels deliberate even though you continue.

You know what that verse means.

You know what he has made it mean.

Your voice wavers. His grip firms at once. A warning.

You continue.

“To see thy power and thy glory, so as I have seen thee in the sanctuary.”

He draws your nightgown gently between his fingers. The fabric gathers. Your breath catches, but the prayer continues because he told you not to stop and there is a part of you that has gone terribly quiet at being given one instruction simple enough to obey.

“Because thy loving kindness is better than life…” His hands slide lower. "My lips shall praise thee..." You stare through the lattice and pretend you can't feel them. “Thus will I bless thee while I live, ” His palms move over your thighs. “…I will lift up my hands in thy name.”

The words begin to separate from thought. That scares you.

You know the psalm well enough that you do not need to retrieve each line consciously. Your mouth can form it without assistance. Your tongue knows where every pause belongs. The prayer proceeds while your mind remains somewhere else entirely, caught on his hands, on the fact that he is alive, on the question of whether the closed door is truly closed.

“My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness…” His gaze lifts to you. “…and my mouth shall praise thee with joyful lips.” You feel it. You still refuse to look down. “When I remember thee upon my bed…” Your voice thins. “…and meditate on thee in the night watches.”

He goes still. A small smile touches the corner of his mouth.

There is no verse he could enjoy more.

You know it immediately. You almost stop.

His fingers press into your thighs.

You continue.

“Because thou hast been my help…” Something in his breathing changes. So slight you would never notice if you had not spent so many nights listening for him. “…therefore in the shadow of thy wings will I rejoice.”

“My soul followeth hard after thee…” The last verses come. “…thy right hand upholdeth me.”

The enemies. The sword. The foxes. The mouths of liars stopped.

Your voice reaches the end.

Silence.

You swallow.

For one foolish moment, relief appears.

“Again.” He commands.

Your eyes close. You start over.

“O God, thou art my God…”

His hands gather your nightgown higher. Not abruptly. He has all the patience in the world. Cotton slides over your knees, then your thighs. The cool air inside the booth moves across newly exposed skin, raising gooseflesh in its wake.

You keep praying.

His fingertips follow the boundary he creates. The higher the cloth rises, the farther his touch goes, until you can't pretend anymore that this is merely a priest steadying a frightened novice.

Your knees weaken.

“My soul thirsteth…” He draws you closer to him. “…my flesh longs for thee…” Your breath breaks around flesh. His face remains level with your body. “In a dry and thirsty land…” He looks up at you again, gaze scorching your bare soul. “…where no water is.”

Those eyes.

You can't avoid them now.

The candlelight catches properly for the first time, and the red is no longer something you can dismiss as unusual coloring. Carmine burns from within, dark near the rim and vivid toward the pupil. For a second — less — you see the pupil draw narrow. Again. Vertical. You blink, eyes closed shut with too much force for a brief second. Round again.

Your next verse comes late. His hand tightens. You force the words out.

“When I remember thee upon my bed…”

“That is better.” His voice enters beneath yours. You nearly lose your place. “Do not stop.”

You obey. You hate how relieved you feel at the instruction. The world has become too difficult. Every conclusion collapses. Every observation turns against you. You can't decide whether memories belong to reality, dream, possession, illness, or punishment.

But Psalm sixty-three has an order.

It begins.

It proceeds.

It ends.

Then, because he commands it, it begins again.

There is mercy in repetition. You understand why monks copy the same lines until their fingers ache. Why beads are counted. Why bells dictate hours. Thought is dangerous. Ritual saves you from needing it. There is something soothing about not looking, too. If you don’t see him, perhaps you are back in your room, caught between sleep and waking. Perhaps the entire night is another fever. Perhaps dawn will wipe it away.

“…and meditate on thee in the night watches.”

His palms settle against your thighs. You inhale sharply.

The prayer continues.

It comes easier now because you have said it so many times. The verses no longer need conscious recall. They live in the mouth. Muscle memory. The tongue moves and Scripture appears.

You become two things.

One of you prays. The other feels.

His hands turn you around and draw you backward until the backs of your knees meet the little stool and you stand again closer between his knees. You follow without choosing to.

Behind you, he is silent, enjoying the sound of your submission. You feel his hands roam, squeezing your waist before they slide down your thighs. He kneads flesh, palms, feels. They leave your body momentarily only, and you hear the hustle of fabric, maybe a button being opened, his body shifting slightly. Then his fingers hook into the hem of your nightgown once again, bunching the fabric up, dragging it higher and higher until the cool air hits your bare skin and your thighs, ass an lower back are fully exposed to his gaze.

You don't stop. You can't. The prayer flows out of you like a river, natural as breathing.

You keep praying.

His arm comes around your waist, nightgown still bunched up, then you are lowered carefully.

Not onto the stool.

Onto him.

Your breath disappears.

For one terrifying second every sensation you have spent weeks dismissing returns at once — that is what frightens you.

You know this closeness.

You know how his body feels beneath yours even though daylight insists you shouldn’t.

You know the strength in the arm around your waist.

You know the heat.

You know the low vibration of his breath when he restrains a sound near your ear.

You let out a sharp, stifled broken moan as you feel the blunt, scorching hardness of his manhood pressing directly against your soaking wet sex.

It feels familiar — terrifyingly so.

It feels real.

Your prayer falters for a split second as he drives forward, sliding his thick shaft inside you in one relentless surge. You gasp, your back arching as he stretches you past the first strain, filling you completely.

His arm tightens further around your waist — a silent, warning squeeze — as he pulls you down to sit entirely on him, your weight settling onto his strong thighs.

“Continue.”

His mouth finds your shoulder.

The first kiss is slow. Almost chaste. It lands where the nightgown has slipped loose, warmth against skin chilled by the chapel.

You stumble over a syllable. His teeth press lightly. Not enough to hurt. A reminder.

Your prayer corrects itself.

“My soul…” Your breath shakes. “…thirsteth for thee.”

He hums against you.

“Clever girl.”

The praise sinks deeper than it should.

You continue. Your posture gradually changes without your noticing. At first your back is rigid, shoulders lifted, hands clenched in front of you as though expecting judgment.

His palm spreads over your abdomen where the faintest bulge forms. His mouth keeps returning to your shoulder, your neck, the place just beneath your ear.

The tension begins to leave.

Not because you trust him — that would be madness.

Because you no longer have the strength to resist what your body has learned to associate with him.

Warmth. Pressure. Fullness. The low vibration of his voice. The disturbing sense that when he holds you, the rest of the world can't reach.

You finish the psalm again.

“Again.”

You restart before he completes the word.

That makes him laugh softly. The sound travels through his chest and into your spine. You feel his approval as clearly as his arms.

He moves beneath you, hips bucking up, dragging mewls and soft sounds between each verse. You try to focus, even with the words etched in your soul, it’s difficult to deliver a clean prayer with him thrusting inside of you, moving his hips, letting his hot breath hit the sensitive skin under your ear.

The arm tight around you pushes you down against him, serving well as a way to hold your back flush to his chest and allow him do drive himself deep into your womb, grinding against you, forcing the words of the scripture to break into rhythmic moans.

You are a vessel for his pleasure and your own desperate piety, repeating the verses over and over, the holy words mingling with the wet, slapping sounds of skin hitting skin.

At some point, your nightgown slips farther, eventually pushed away entirely, forgotten.

You are not sure who moves it.

Perhaps he does. Perhaps you help.

That uncertainty should horrify you, and somewhere a remaining piece of your mind does register the loss. But your lips keep moving. Verse after verse. Thirst. Sanctuary. Loving kindness. The bed. The shadow of wings.

His mouth finds your shoulder more fully now, leaving open-mouthed, bruising kisses on your flushed skin. He bites you, marking you as his, his low growls and filthy, depraved whispers filling your ear, telling you exactly how you feel around his cock, how much of a blasphemous, unholy little lamb you are for praying while being fucked in a house of God.

The text stops sounding like scripture. It becomes sound. Breath trained and shaped into obedience.

His hand rises to your throat. You freeze for half a heartbeat. He does not squeeze, he merely encloses. His palm spans almost the whole front of your neck, fingers wrapping toward the nape, holding the back of your your head steady against his shoulder.

“Continue.”

You do.

His thumb rests over the place where your voice is made. You feel every word pass beneath it. That realization is so intimate that your eyes sting. He can feel the prayer before he hears it. He feels each vibration against his skin. You swallow between verses, and his thumb moves with your throat.

“Such devotion,” he murmurs. “You spent days worrying that you were losing your faith. Look at you now, dove.” You keep praying because answering him would force you to stop. He continues anyway. “You thought desire made you profane. You thought fear meant you were weak. You believed one ruined thought could drag you away from God.” His mouth touches the corner of your jaw. “What a small God you imagined.”

Your voice falters. His fingers close slightly around your throat.

Warning.

You correct.

“I remember thee upon my bed…”

“Yes.”

“…and meditate on thee in the night watches.”

“Every night.” He punctuates with his hips.

You squeeze your eyes shut. The confession booth feels hotter.

His free hand moves over your body with a familiarity that no dream should possess. Your breath turns shallow. Your mind keeps trying to separate sensation from memory, tonight from all the other nights, reality from whatever fever has been feeding on you.

You can't.

Perhaps you are still in bed. Perhaps you never left. Perhaps there was never a knife. Perhaps you are dying somewhere alone from a fever while your mind builds a priest out of desire and terror. Perhaps the priest is real and you are the only person in this monastery who has ever looked at him long enough to notice what lives underneath.

The thought makes your heart pound harder.

His mouth curves against your skin.

“You are thinking again.” Your prayer continues. “Try not to.”

That is easy enough now. You let the psalm carry you. The confessional disappears gradually — your eyes are open, you can still see the lattice, you can still smell dust, old wood, candle wax, the faint incense embedded in every surface, you can still hear the tiny complaint of the stool beneath him, the whisper of fabric when he moves. Yet the dimensions become uncertain. The booth seems wider than it should be. Your vision tunnels, then expands. The darkness beyond the lattice deepens until it looks less like the adjacent compartment and more like an opening into something without end.

You blink hard. Nothing changes. The words continue.

Your eyes flutter closed, your shoulders relaxing as you surrender completely. You don't need to think anymore. The words slip off your lips automatically, a mantra of submission.

“Thus will I bless thee while I live…” His lips press against your shoulder. “…I will lift up my hands in thy name.” His teeth graze. Warmth opens beneath your skin. “My soul shall be satisfied…” Not pain. Nothing he does seems to hurt anymore. “…as with marrow and fatness…”

That frightens you on some distant level. The mouth at your shoulder becomes firmer. His teeth sink enough to mark, and your body should recoil. Instead you feel only a spreading heat and a sudden rush of gratitude so intense it nearly brings tears.

You are being held.

That thought is absurdly simple.

Held after days of drifting.

Held after waking every morning unsure of your own mind.

Held by the very thing you fear.

You lean back more fully. His chest receives your weight.

“There,” he whispers. “You do know how to surrender.”

At some point your hands unclasp. You don’t notice until one of them is gripping his forearm where it crosses your waist. Your fingers fit between dark fabric and warm skin at his wrist.

The other reaches behind you. Finds his shoulder. Anchors there.

You are not trying to escape. You are holding him as he drives himself into you and you keep praying for him like a ruined devotee.

He does not release your throat. Instead he draws your head backward again until it rests against his shoulder.

You stare upward into darkness. The ceiling of the booth is inches away. His face is beside yours.

You can see one eye.

Red.

Watching.

Always watching.

“When I remember thee upon my bed…” You shiver. “And meditate on thee in the night watches…”

His thumb strokes once along the line beneath your jaw.

“My good little dove.” He croons and your eyes close. The praise sinks too deep. You hate how desperately you have wanted kindness from him.

Not forgiveness. Kindness. There is a difference.

Forgiveness would mean the guilt remains yours.

Kindness means you can stop carrying it for a moment.

His mouth touches your temple. He tells you something low and indecent about how beautifully you pray when your body is occupied with something else, about how much more sincere devotion sounds when it costs you composure.

Warmth spreads through you. He says he knew from the first time you looked at him across the refectory that you would be difficult to corrupt precisely because you already understood temptation. Naivety would have bored him. Innocence without awareness would have been too easy.

You knew.

You looked at him and knew there was something wrong.

Then you came closer anyway.

“You wanted proof,” he says against your ear, pulling you, moving your hips in a luscious sway while buried to the hilt inside your cunt. “Every day. Every night. You followed me through this house looking for enough evil to justify your fascination.”

“No,” you whisper before catching yourself.

His hand tightens at your throat.

The prayer.

You return to it immediately.

He gives a pleased hum.

There is no embarrassment left in the sound of your voice now. Not because you have become shameless, but because you are too far inside the ritual to hear yourself.

Verse after verse. His body moves. Your body follows.

You keep praying.

His fingers remain careful around your throat, never closing enough to take your voice. That seems important to him. He wants to hear you. He wants the psalm uninterrupted.

When your breath catches too long, his hand loosens. When words return, the grip becomes secure again. He controls nothing so tightly as the continuation of prayer.

Eventually you stop knowing how many times you have reached the final line and returned to the beginning. Your memory loops.

O God, thou art my God. Your soul thirsts. Your flesh longs. The sanctuary. The bed. The night watches. The shadow of wings.

That line begins changing things. At first you think it is only your vision. You are exhausted. Your head rests against his shoulder. Your eyes open and close without permission. The booth seems to expand and contract with your breathing.

“Therefore in the shadow of thy wings…” Something moves behind him. You stop. His hand tightens at your throat. Your lips barely work. “…will I rejoice.”

You also do not realize you are smiling until your cheeks become wet. Tears reach the corners of your mouth. They taste faintly of salt.

The psalm never stops.

At least you believe it does not as he continues to hammer up into you, relentless and rough, you start to feel a strange, shimmering happiness.

He is your salvation.

He is the only thing that can make you let go of the sins, the blood, and the mortal coil.

In this dark, cramped booth, he is your god and your savior, and you are nothing more than his devoted, broken instrument.

You think, distantly, that if God objects, He has had several weeks to say so.

Continuation.

ref from here !