He doesn’t answer. The only sound that breaks through is the zipping of him undoing his hoodie. Swallowing, I step into the stockings, one foot at a time, before getting into the little black lace underwear. I shuffle on the bra just as his hoodie drops to the ground and I’m awarded with a body any model would worship. His loose dark denim jeans hang off him, displaying the rim of his Calvin Klein briefs which are strapped around his waist.
“Take your hair out.” He unhooks his belt buckle and drops it to the floor.
“What are you going to do with me?” My whisper sounds defeated, weak.
He walks towards me, wearing nothing but his low cut jeans and his white mask. Every muscle moves when he does, flexing under each flicker of motion. His hand traces over the back of my neck before he pulls me into him. His touch is soft, but not enough that I would say he himself is. Running the tip of his nose down my jaw line, up under my ear, he inhales deeply. “Anything I want.”
My bottom lip begins to tremble before I catch it in my teeth. His warm breath trickles over my cheek, leaving the scent of mint behind, and warm lips glide over the thin flesh of my neck, sending goosebumps to break out everywhere. “You want it, give up now.”
My eyes drift closed as I tilt my head, before realizing that I had shown an inkling that I liked it. His deep chuckle vibrates against my chest. I swallow. “You want what you want, Millie.” His hands float over my nipples, down my tensed torso, and over my clit. His fingers slip between my folds before sinking one inside of me. “You wanna be fucked by an angel?”
My eyes slowly open and find his instantly, deep blue depths, the color of the Atlantic Ocean, and just like the Atlantic Ocean, there’s ice in his stare. Up close, I notice that it isn’t a teardrop which sits under his eye, but a red cross sitting upside down. It’s the sign of the Antichrist, and my skin crawls at the proximity of him.
“I’ll tell you something, nun, the devil doesn’t come as himself.” He steps towards me until my back collides with the wall. His hands wrap around my thighs, picking me up from the ground and wrapping my legs around his waist. Dropping his head into the crook of my neck, the slick tip of his tongue snakes over my prominent collarbone. “He comes as an angel.” Grinding his groin into me, the soft feathers of the angel wings thrust over my back. “Mmmm,” he growls deep in the crook of my neck. “There’s one hundred different ways I can make you feel thoroughly fucked without actually fucking you.”
He drops me back to my feet and I swallow, my palms pressing against the cold dead concrete wall. Gripping onto my wrists, he spins me around so my chest is now pressing against the wall and my back is to his front. His foot slips between my legs, kicking each of them wide, and stretching me out. Wrapping my hair around his fist, he jolts my head back until my scalp stings from my hair being ripped from their roots. I clench my eyes closed.
“I can make you feel as dirty on the inside as you look on the outside.” Spinning me around to face him again, his hands wrap around the back of my thighs as he lifts me off the ground. Dropping my hands to his shoulders, my chest contracts and my limbs feel as though they’re falling apart. I can feel myself slowly lose grip on my sanity. Slowly, each and every single part of who I was and what I knew, would soon mean nothing.
“Let me see you,” I manage to squeeze out in the middle of my fear.
He laughs, dropping me back to the ground. “Tsk tsk, that’s never been done.” He begins stepping backwards until he’s directly under the string that hangs from the light. Reaching up, he pulls. My vision is cut and darkness fills the cell.
“What’re you doing?” I whisper into the inky obscurity, shuffling in my spot. I feel his body press against mine again with nothing in our silence but the soft whispering of our breaths. His warm lips cascade over mine softly, sending tingles under my skin. He took his mask off. His skin is smooth and his lips feel pouty.
“This, me, you…” he begins, his groin pressing into me. “Is about you… nothing else, no one else.” He pauses, the softness of his cheeks sliding over mine ever so gently.
Smooth, his skin is so damn smooth. He takes my hand in his and presses my palm against his hard chest before sliding it down his front gently. Inch by inch, the muscles sitting under his skin lumps over my palm. My hand glides down his chest and a sob escapes me again. I’m at a crossroads inside my head, and I don’t know which way is right. I’m losing touch with what is good and what is evil. I feel as though I’m standing in front of a furnace as it slowly heats my skin, and if I stand there too long, I’ll burst into flames—but I can’t move and I don’t think I want to.
He continues his torture, placing me on the ground where his fingers grip around the outside of my thighs and his warm tongue slithers over my most sensitive part. My back arches at the invasion as my mind screams with falling tears and my body throbs with need. His tongue presses against me, licking my clit with not just the tip, but with his whole tongue. My fingers grip onto the cold cement floor.
“You see this?” he murmurs against my inner thigh. “This is exactly why you’re here, nun. You like it, you crave it, and that is exactly why we are going to ruin you.”
MILLIE
“Day 4”
My skin itches from the grainy cobble underneath me and I pull myself up onto my elbows. The burn firing around my elbow is excruciating, and I know that I can sleep on the mattress, but I really don’t want to. My eyes drift back to the block of foam, seeing the dark red stains speckled across the fabric, and I wince. I’d bet money that more than one life was taken on that thing, so there’s no way I’ll lie on that.
I clear my vision. Four days. Four days and a deep part inside of me has snapped beyond repair. I find myself slowly beginning to realize that there may just be no coming back for me. The feathered wings that hang off my back are covered in dirt and scuff marks couldn’t be more appropriate for my current situation. The walls inside my mind are caving in on me as each second passes. Each fleeting minute of the silent clock takes away a piece of my soul with it, leaving me with the empty gaping hole from its departure. I don’t want to feel. Like a big gaping hole of black abyss. Shutting my eyes, I pray that this torture will end.
Hail Mary, full of grace.
The Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou amongst women,
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
pray for us sinners,
now and at the hour of our death.
Amen.
This place is the circle of nothingness where time stands still. Nothing matters here—time, day, nothing. I shut my eyes and let blackness cloak me as I wrap my arms around myself protectively and hum myself to sleep.
A bloodcurdling scream echoes through the dark hallway and I shoot up from my sleep, standing to my feet.
“Please,” a man pleads. “Please, I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t know.”
The rushing blood pulsing through my body pounds heavily behind my ears as my breathing shallows. Tiptoeing towards my cell door, I place my hand over my mouth to calm my breathing. Reaching for the cell bars, I grasp the thin cold metal in my hand and peek out towards the ruckus.
“Please, I— I didn’t know what I was doing, I didn’t know— “
“Shut up!”
I look towards Tripp to see his hands gripped tightly around the young man’s throat. Tripp’s hand comes up to the boy’s cheeks where he squeezes tightly until the boy’s mouth forms a tight O and his face turns purple. Shoving one of his fingers into the boy’s throat, he tilts his head, studying the boy closely. There is a dangerous shift in the air whenever Tripp is around. He makes my skin crawl and my knees tremble with fear, all while continuing to be able to ignite everything south to dangerous heat levels. I don’t want to feel.
Tripp’s hand launches down the boy’s throat and my eyes widen, my panic kicking up a notch. The gargling of his suffocating breaks through the quiet night as Tripp’s arm
yanks back roughly, tugging something out of the boy’s throat. He gives it one more jerk and then blood spurts out of the boy’s mouth, all over Tripp’s mask and clothing. I gasp and step backwards, attempting to be quiet, but when Tripp’s head snaps towards me, I know I’m not as quiet as I hoped to be. A heavy thud hits the ground before the stomping of boots come closer and closer to my cell.
I drop down onto the cold concrete floor and draw my knees up to my chest. A large dark shadow blocks the dim light from the hallway of the cell. Knowing it’s Tripp blocking the light, I peer up slowly towards him. “I—I—didn’t see,” I shake my head, my voice closing in. I don’t want to feel.
“What?” he growls, throwing a long piece of… I narrow my eyes at the object he threw onto the ground and bile rises up my throat. “You didn’t just see me rip a man’s throat out?” Tripp chuckles, kneeling down on the other side of my cell door. My body begins to convulse, the smell of death seeping into my pores. “It’s one of the slowest ways to die, did you know that?” he asks, his head tilting. “You see that?” He nudges his tarnished thumb over his shoulder towards the empty cell opposite mine. “That’s where he will lie, and that’s where you will watch as his life slowly empties from his piece of shit body and eventually seeping into your cell where so many others before him have come to an end.” His hand comes up to one of the bars and I inch back, terrified that he is going to come into my cell. When he notices my jump, he laughs again. “You see what you just witnessed? That’s nothing if you don’t comply with what goes on here. Understood?”
I nod my head, swallowing the tang of vomit that is threatening to rise up my throat.
“Good.” He pushes off the cell and stand to his feet. “J? Bring him down.”
Red mask walks down, opening the cell opposite me with a heavy squeak, and throws the boy’s body onto the dirt-covered floor. Blood continues to pour out of the boy’s throat as he turns to his side, his face turning towards me. It’s then that I realize who he is.
“Oh my god,” I whisper, my lip trembling. Looking up to Tripp, I catch him staring down at me. His shoulders square, the rim of his dark hoodie shading around his mask. “That’s—that’s the cleaner from the church…”
Tripp taps his temple. “Ding dong, the snitch is dead.”
***
My leg being pulled wakes me up and my eyes snap open in the dark room.
“Wake up,” a deep voice sounds. “Kurr needs to talk to you and you have a visitor.”
I rub my eyes with the palm of my hands and get back to my feet slowly. Tripp is standing in front of me holding out a bottled water.
“Drink.” He points to it authoritatively. I reach out and take it from him before twisting off the bottle cap and taking a sip. The cool liquid soothes my parched throat immediately, so I continue to down the rest. I look into Tripp’s eyes and into the stormy blue clouds that shade around his dark irises before bringing the bottle back down and wiping my mouth with the back of my hand.
“Thank you,” I whisper, handing the bottle back to his outstretched hand. I look over his shoulder to see Ned, the twenty-year old boy who would clean the church, gone. Tripp follows my gaze before looking back to me. “Where is he?” I ask.
“Oh, he’s Soulless’ problem now.”
I’m not sure what that means and I’m not sure I want to.
“What did you mean by ‘snitch’?” I question.
His eyes narrow, the taut muscles under his shirt stretching as he tenses, but his eyes remain glued on mine, the intensity burning me from the inside out. Heavy footsteps approach behind him just as my cell door squeaks open and our stare-down is interrupted.
“Millie,” a smug voice who I’ve come to recognize as Kurr’s smirks behind Tripp’s wall of muscle. My eyes falter, so I pull them away from Tripp and back to the ground. When Kurr’s shiny wing tip shoes come into view, I swallow. “I have someone here who wants to see you. I believe you know him already.”
He steps to the side and a new set of shoes come into my view. My eyebrows knit together as I slowly bring my eyes up past the clean dark blue slacks, past the crisp white shirt, and then falling onto the fine wrinkles and face of my old priest, Father David.
I step back instinctively with my heart pounding against my chest. He matches my step, walking toward me and in the corner of my eye I see Tripp about to step in front of him before stopping and retreating back to his position.
“Remember me?” the priest questions, his hand flying up to my neck and squeezing. The crunching of the pressure he’s placing on my windpipe vibrates around my neck. “You think you can run from me?”
Air begins to come in slow, desperate waves as I tap furiously on his hand, hoping he will let up. I don’t want to feel. My checks puff and all the oxygen from my brain begins to thin out as a deep throbbing starts in my temples. He lets go and I drop to the floor with a thud, my ankle breaking my sudden fall as I land on my hip.
He drops down to his knees and I begin to retreat backwards until my back hits the wall.
“You’re lucky,” he starts, his light grey eyes lasering right into mine. His salt and pepper hair is slicked back perfectly away from his chubby face. “That you are an asset here, or I’d kill you right now for making me chase you for so long.”
“What do you want from me?” I say, my voice high on the fear scale but my blood kicking up a notch at being thrown around so much. You’re about to break, a high pitch voice giggles inside my head in a singsong voice.
“Me personally? Nothing. Not from you. You witnessed something you should have never witnessed though, didn’t you…?” he trails off, his eyes drifting to the side of the room before coming back to mine. “Do you know why that happened, Millie? Why I pulled the trigger which set off a bullet to pierce right between sister Avery’s bleak little eyes?” His head tilts to the side as he studies me carefully. “It was because she didn’t want to feed me information about you anymore.” He pauses and my eyebrows draw together in confusion. “You see, Millie, there’s so much you don’t know about yourself that you will come to learn in time, but this right here, this was written in your cards.”
He gets back up to his feet and I rub my hands over my cheeks angrily to swipe the tears which have appeared. With his back turned to me and his shoulders squared, he looks to Kurr and begins talking like I’m not right there. As if I’m a mere shadow of a being.
“When are you putting her up? The sooner, the better.”
Kurr nods his head, his hands diving into his pockets. His eyes find mine as a smirk crawls onto his mouth. “Soon. Three days, actually.”
I swallow harshly before drifting my eyes towards Tripp. He’s wearing a white t-shirt, dark blue jeans, and military boots that are loosely tied. His hair is shaved quite close to his scalp on the sides where tattoos are imprinted there, and is a little longer on the top, kinda like a slicked Mohawk. The energy that hovers around him puts up warnings like no other.
Kurr pauses before looking towards me. “But you’re right,” he begins, his eyes combing over me in a way that has my skin crawling. “This needs to hurry along.” A smile spreads across his mouth as he turns his body towards me completely.
“Tripp?” Kurr’s eyes remain trained on me as he gains Tripp’s attention. “Tell the boys that we will do her final training tonight.” His leather-like skin that covers almost all of his face crinkles when he smirks, then he and Father David disappear down the corridor outside the cell. My eyes remain on the spot where they departed before bringing them back to Tripp who’s remained in his same spot throughout the encounter. I can’t see his eyes from here, only the outline of the steel from his mask.
“Tripp?” I whisper through my clenched throat.
There is a long pause before he pushes himself off the wall and walks toward the cell door. He pauses once he’s reached outside the cell and grasps onto the door, his back remaining turned on me. The heavy lock of the cell door catching breaks the eerie silen
ce from his departure and I drop back to the floor in a mess. I bury my swollen face into the palms of my hands. This will be the last time I shed tears, but this time I’ll shed these tears for the girl I once was, and the girl I was about to become…
TRIPP
I walk down the dark concrete corridor until I reach the old stairs which lead to the first level of the main house, away from the dungeon. The dungeon that sits in the middle of a sunken dead volcano is as ancient as the old Viking days. Its old concrete walls and its candle lighting leading the way through the darkness display its true age. It holds seven large cells and one chamber where we dispose of the corpses, to put it bluntly. On the first floor above the dungeon is a large armory and meeting area equipped with a kitchen. It’s where The 6 hold the majority of our discussions. There are stairs which lead to the upstairs rooms, also known as Kurr’s “home”. There’s also a large building that is built beside the main house, where the podium is built underground, and the top is where we hold the major meetings Kurr has every month. Kurr throwing a curveball by saying he wants Millie’s final training tonight threw me off. I was expecting it to be in a couple more days, so now I have to rethink what I was doing.
The way Millie looks at me is unnerving. And that’s not something I’ve felt often. I’ve survived twenty-seven years without having a bitch come in and tap into my feelings. That ain’t about to change today. I’m a bad man, and I haven’t just done bad things; I’ve done evil things. The number of bodies that have fallen at my hands are carved into my back in a tally. Each carving, a reminder of why I am the way I am, why I am machine, not man. Man couldn’t do what I do. The adrenaline that spikes through my veins at the mere touch of fresh blood fuels me. Nothing can change that. No one can—ever.
Once I hit the top of the stairs, I walk straight past the eyes that I know are watching me carefully from the armory room where The 6 are putting away our latest shipment, and towards the large wooden front doors that lead outside. I push them open and rip off my mask, running my hands over my face angrily. I don’t know what the fuck to think of Millie. So I just won’t. Thinking too much gets you killed.