hisses, and I know why. I don’t bother to look at her. She can see the wounds, see the mess.
All the blood.
The barbs in the whip make more of a mess than the leather itself. But it’s only when I bleed that I feel clean once more.
I don’t hear her, it’s almost like she uses those wings of hers to fly over to me, but she’s there all of a sudden.
Her arms slide around my waist, her face pushing into my arm.
She doesn’t say anything, she just holds me, and somehow, that’s what has my eyes burning with tears.
I don’t let them fall.
They’re not for me anyway.
They’re for the fallen. The innocent.
“Why?”
One question, and it resonates inside me, throbbing like it has a life of its own.
“They took me because they wanted me to absolve them,” I answer huskily. “They wanted me to hear their confessions, and for me to permit them to commit the atrocities while whitewashing their souls.”
“You refused.”
Not a question.
“I did.”
She squeezes me.
“I refused to the point where they decided to choose a different means of gaining my compliance. They’d take a woman from a village, from a town, or wherever they were attacking. Sometimes, it happened once a week, sometimes it was once a month. But they always did the same thing.
“They’d bring them, strip them of their clothes, and rape them in front of me. It was—”
“Hell on Earth.”
“Yes.” Even that couldn’t describe it. “I fought, I even killed some of the rebels, but they’d torture me beforehand. Punish me until I was nothing more than a shaken bag of bones and I had no will to do anything other than lie on the ground.
“That was when they’d drag me out and do it.” I cleared my throat. “About two weeks before I was liberated, they brought a little girl.”
The sob that escapes me this time is impossible to contain.
She squeezes me so tight that it hurts, my wounds, my organs, but it feels so fucking good.
And I know, all of a sudden, what I need.
I drop out of her hold—literally, sinking to the ground so she has no choice but to release me or fall with me.
When my knees collide with the wooden floor, I bow over, pressing my forehead to her knees as I rasp, “I couldn’t do it anymore.”
Her hand strokes through my hair, mimicking the touch I gave her earlier.
“You absolved them,” she intones calmly.
“Y-Yes. I couldn’t let them—”
She hushes me, bows over me, and she reaches for my chin, tugging my head back until we could press our foreheads together.
“And they did it anyway?”
Tears burn.
I can’t answer.
“This is why you struggle with your faith,” she whispers. “This is why you go through the motions, because you know that confession means nothing. If you truly believe that God will allow those monsters into heaven because you absolved them, then I’m not the one who’s crazy here, my darling.”
I flinch at her endearment, but the rest of her words?
They sink into me like a stone through water.
Is she right?
I’d never thought of it that way.
When all I heard was the child.
And those fucking animals.
No.
She was right.
God wouldn’t...
He couldn’t.
Would he?
And if he did, what use is this faith? What point is there to my position as a priest if the God we cherish, revere, would allow that?
How do I only see this now?
Confession is a pivotal point of the religion I preach, but I can’t believe in it.
If I do, my shattered sanity will fall around me, until I’m nothing more than a walking bag of bones.
It’s only now when she says this, phrases it like that, that I know how right she is.
Confession is more than just an act. Without the desire for forgiveness in one’s heart, it means nothing, and if anyone is going to know that, it’s God.
As a crisis of faith that’s a decade in the making blows me apart, my arms slip around her thighs while the broken fractures in my mind cluster together like a cancer, tossing out poison for me to process, I whisper, “The screams.”
Another husky hum escapes her, and it sounds crazy, but it soothes me.
I feel it in my being.
It whispers through my body, making me feel at ease, even as I want nothing more than to sink into her.
“You’re not a priest, my love.” A kiss goes to my forehead as she pulls away. “You’re not. You’ve seen the reality of life. Just like I have. I didn’t hear it or endure