“And you didn’t stop us?” Marcus demands.
“I wanted to watch.” Elijah’s honesty is brutal. “I wanted to see her come apart for you. I wanted to memorize the sounds she made so I could imagine them later when I—” He stops himself, but we all know what he was going to say.
Heat pools low in my belly despite the wrongness of this conversation.
I imagine Charlie pressed against the confessional wall, Marcus’s mouth on her throat, her body arching into his touch. The image makes my cock throb painfully against my cassock.
“When I took her in my office,” I confess, the words tearing from somewhere deep inside me. “I quoted scripture and tried to pray away what I was feeling.”
Marcus makes a sound low in his throat. “I’ve seen how you watched her since. It didn’t work.”
“No.” I meet his gaze. “Nothing works. I think about her constantly. The way she moves through this church like she belongs here. The way her dress rides up when she reaches for high shelves. The curve of her breasts beneath her cardigan. The sound she makes when she’s trying not to cry.”
“The way she bites her lip when she’s concentrating,” Elijah adds softly. “The freckles on her shoulders. How her hair smells like vanilla and cinnamon.”
“The way her hips sway when she walks,” Marcus continues, his voice dropping lower. “How her ass looks in those vintage dresses. The pulse point in her throat that races when we stand too close.”
We’re all breathing harder now, the stone chamber filled with the weight of our shared obsession.
I watch Marcus shift against the wall, adjusting himself, and know he’s as hard as I am. Elijah’s fingers have stilled on the shelf, his knuckles white with tension.
“This is insane,” I say, but there’s no conviction in my voice.
“Is it?” Marcus pushes off the wall, moving closer. “We’ve all fallen for her. We’ve all touched her. We’ve all broken our vows. The only question is what we do about it.”
“We can’t all—” I stop, unable to finish the sentence.
“Why not?” Elijah’s voice is quiet but steady. “She’s drawn to all of us. I see the way she looks at you, Adrian. Like you’re salvation and damnation wrapped together. And Marcus…” He turns to the deacon. “She watches you like she’s memorizing every detail. The way your hands move. The sound of your voice when you speak Spanish.”
“And you?” Marcus asks.
“She trusts me.” Elijah’s smile is sad. “She lets me see her vulnerable. She brings me her midnight baking and sits with me in the choir loft like we’re the only two people in the world.”
I pace again, my mind spinning. “This is unconventional. Possibly blasphemous.”
“More blasphemous than what we’ve already done?” Marcus’s voice is sharp. “We’ve all claimed her separately. All we’re discussing is being honest about it.”
“She might not want this,” I argue, grasping for any reason to resist what my body is screaming for.
“Then we ask her.” Elijah moves closer, the three of us are standing in a tight circle in the center of the crypt. “We tell her the truth. That we’ve all fallen. That we’re willing to share if she’ll have us. That we won’t fight each other for her because losing her completely is worse than sharing her.”
I look at Marcus, see the same desperate need in his dark eyes that I feel burning through my veins. Then at Elijah, whose angel face can’t hide the hunger beneath.
“Once in this exact room,” I say slowly, “we swore never to let our fear turn us into cowards again.”
Marcus nods, remembering.
Three years ago, we sat in this crypt and confessed our worst failures.
Isabella, the married vocal coach, me almost killing a man in underground boxing.
We made a pact that night.
No more failures.
No more abandonment.
We’d protect each other, protect this place, never again let shame or fear destroy something good.
