The room was thick with incense and intent.
She knelt, naked but for the blood-red cord tied in bows down her spine, each loop a promise, each knot a sealed secret. The floor beneath her was warm—heated slate, like an altar. Shadows writhed across the stone walls, cast by the low flicker of pillar candles that lined the perimeter in precise ritual symmetry.
He stepped into the chamber, wearing only a mask shaped like a raven’s skull. Silent. Measured. Divine in his restraint.
She didn’t speak. Not yet. That was not her role.
A chain—thin, silver, deceptively gentle—was looped around her throat. Not tight. Not cruel. Just enough. He tugged once, and her breath hitched, not from fear, but from recognition. He was her shadow priest, her dark flame, her sovereign of ache.
With a single hand, he drew the blade—not sharp, not steel, but obsidian—just enough to write stories into her skin without drawing blood. He carved sigils into her thigh: not with violence, but reverence. He was opening her. Unlocking the door to where she kept her deepest ache, her sacred wound. Where the feminine weeps for union but is told to smile instead.
He did not fuck her. Not yet. This was no act of pornographic haste. This was an invocation.
He whispered ancient tongues into the hollow of her ear. Words that bypassed thought and struck the womb like thunder. She moaned—not from touch, but from memory. The chain cinched as he pulled her closer, one hand guiding her to the stone chalice between them.
“Drink.”
It was dark wine, infused with damiana and night-blooming jasmine. She drank, throat working, tears rising, chest opening.
Her hands—still bound—were guided to his chest. Not to take, but to feel. His heart beat steady beneath her palms. She pressed her forehead to it, trembling. In this silence, she was seen. Feral. Filthy. Divine.
Then, with the gentlest cruelty, he tipped her chin up.
“Now,” he said, voice low, velvet on blade, “confess.”
And so she did.
Everything.
Her breath trembled.
The chalice left a trace of dark wine on her lips, a bloodstain kiss from the gods. The masked priest didn’t flinch. He waited, still as the statues that lined the perimeter of the sanctum—guardians carved from stone and shadow.
“I hated the light,” she whispered.
Not the sun, not warmth, but the blinding, false light she was taught to worship. The light that demanded her smile when she was drowning. The light that called her body sinful unless it was starving, silent, or scrubbed clean of want.
“I fantasize about being owned,” she confessed, tears glittering now. “But only by someone who sees the parts of me I buried so deep even I stopped digging.”
His thumb brushed her lower lip. She opened her mouth, inviting touch. Not because she was weak. Because she wanted to be unraveled.
“I want to be ruined,” she breathed. “But beautifully. I want bruises shaped like blessings. I want to beg—without shame.”
He coiled the chain in his hand, wrapping it around his fist once. Twice.
“I let men inside me who never looked me in the eyes,” she said. “I let them fuck a body, not a soul. I kept waiting to be used in the right way. Not as garbage. As gold.”
Silence. The masked priest dropped to one knee before her, pressing the chalice between them again. She drank, deeper this time, and kept going.
“I’ve faked moans. Faked love. Faked safety. But never here.”
She looked up. Her voice steadied. “Here, I want to be real.”
A pause. Then:
“I want to be punished… for every time I lied to my own hunger.”
Her face, wet with tears, was radiant now—feral, cracked open, raw.
“And I want to be forgiven… by being taken all the way to the edge.”
The priest raised the chalice to his own lips now. His voice, when it came, was like dusk peeling back the veil of day.
“Then rise, my confessionary flame. And come be undone.”
0 comments