1. Confession
The candlelight flickered as I stepped into the confession booth, a wavering halo that made the old oak walls glow like embered wood. The air was thick with the faint bite of frankincense, dust, and something older, the scent of secrets buried for centuries.
The door closed behind me with a sound like a coffin lid. I sank onto the narrow bench, smoothing my skirt more out of habit than modesty. It had been years since I’d been in Saint Armand’s Cathedral. Years since my father’s funeral, when I’d left without a backward glance, boarding a private jet for a world tour I thought I deserved. Now, I was back. Not for him, he was already in the ground, but for everything I’d left unfinished.
The lattice between us glowed faintly from the candle on his side. I couldn’t see his face, only the shape of him: broad shoulders draped in black, a stillness that felt... deliberate.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned...” My voice trembled, not from fear of God’s judgment, but because of the man on the other side.
I didn’t know his name, Oathkeepers never gave them. That anonymity was their armor. But I knew his voice, low and unhurried, like velvet dragged over steel. The kind of voice that could command armies with a whisper.
“What sin, fille perdue?” His accent curled around the French endearment, lost girl, with a heat that should have no place in a church.
I swallowed, my pulse an unholy drumbeat. My sin wasn’t just wanting him to touch me. My sin was remembering the way his hands gripped the golden staff during mass, the tendons flexing beneath black sleeves, and imagining those same hands at my throat, holding me still.
But that wasn’t what I gave him, not yet.
“I’ve lied,” I said slowly, “And I’ve... desired something I shouldn’t.”
The pause that followed was deliberate. I imagined him leaning closer, perhaps even closing his eyes, breathing in the faint trail of perfume I wore, Ambre noir, a Parisian blend of amber and smoke I’d picked up in Montmartre. Men had told me it clung to the skin, that it haunted rooms after I left.
“Desire is not always a sin,” he said at last.
It wasn’t an absolution. It was something else. A test, maybe.
I drew a slow breath, “Before my father died, we fought. He said I was selfish... that I cared more about the world than the blood in my veins. I told him he was bitter and old. The next morning, I left. I was halfway to Rome when I got the call.”
“And you regret this?” His tone didn’t change, but something in the timbre deepened, as if he understood the anatomy of grief.
“Yes. And no.” I forced a laugh that died quickly. “I regret what I said. But part of me... part of me still believes it.”
He didn’t speak, and the silence was heavier than any sermon. I became aware of his nearness, though the wood and lattice separated us. I imagined his head inclined, as though scenting the air between us.
It was ridiculous. He’d never seen me in person. And yet the tension felt like something alive, like the moment before a storm breaks.
“You carry guilt,” he said finally. “But guilt is a chain you choose to wear. Would you take it off, if I asked?”
The question was unexpected, intimate. I should have left then, murmured an Amen and slipped back into the shadows of the cathedral. Instead, I leaned closer to the screen, my lips almost touching the wood.
“Maybe,” I whispered.
And that was the first crack in his armor. The first hint that the Oathkeeper wasn’t as untouchable as they wanted us to believe.
