I’m not sure I know who I’m becoming anymore.
The False Penitent Reveals a Truth She Shouldn’t Know
The silence stretches again—longer this time. Not evaluative. Not hesitant.
It feels like an approach.
She inhales slowly—one, two—then exhales softer, warmer, like she’s drifting closer even though there’s a wall of carved wood between us. I swear the booth shifts with her, the air tightening, thickening.
Then—her voice, quiet but precision-cut.
“Do you believe in sin, Father?”
The title should slide off me. The collar is what I wear. I chose this life. I should hear Father a thousand times and feel nothing.
But from her?
It lands like a dare. A challenge pressed straight into the part of me I keep locked behind bone and discipline.
“Yes,” I say, my voice low.
“And…” She pauses. I hear it—the faint drag of her fingertips across the screen, like she’s tracing the outline of my shadow. “Do you know what it’s like to want something you should never touch?”
Adrenaline punches through my system—fast, cold, invasive.
She knows exactly what she’s doing.
She knows that question doesn’t belong inside these walls, under this roof, in this booth.
She knows it’s the line people don’t cross unless they have a reason—a dangerous one.
My jaw tightens. I stare at the dim shape of her through the lattice. The forward lean is slight. Breaths that are measured. Like tangible sin, the heat of her presence bled through the wood.
“Speak,” I say.
It comes out rough. Too rough. It betrays more than I want her to hear.
She exhales—slow, deliberate — like she’s considering every shade of truth she wants to show me.
“I can’t,” she whispers.
I don’t believe that for a second.
But the way she says it—
calm, certain, not a hint of shame—
presses into me harder than the words themselves.
“Why?” The question snaps out of me.
“Because saying it outright would put both of us in danger.”
Everything inside me goes still.
This isn't seduction.
Isn’t provocation.
