For Lucien Croft, the days were torment. The nights, endless nightmares.
By daylight, he wore the mask of the gentle, devout newlywed priest. He led prayers. Listened to the same monotonous confessions. Taught the choirboys. Buried himself in dull clerical work. Every smile pulled at his face like stiff wax. Every prayer felt hollow. And always, he felt the painted eyes of the saints watching him from the walls, heavy with silent judgement.
The parishioners' kind jokes and blessings—"Father, you don't look well. Is marriage wearing you out already?" —stabbed into him like barbs. To them it was harmless teasing. To him it was mockery. Sweat prickled at his back every time.
But what he feared most was going back to that "home".
There, in the quiet, Eleanor Croft waited for him like a gray shadow of judgement. She never had to speak. She never had to accuse. The curve of her back at the window, the soft clink of utensils when she set the table, the faint rhythm of her breath—all of it whispered the same thing: You are guilty. Your holiness is a lie. Your fate is in my hands.
Lucien stopped sleeping. At night he lay stiff in his narrow, icy bed, eyes wide open as shadows writhed across the ceiling. Eleanor's voice haunted him in the silence—cold, precise, echoing from the grove: A sin most vile. Gabriel's eyes haunted him too, that last look of mingled anger and disquiet.
Fear twisted with humiliation, and worse—something darker, a sick hunger—strangled his chest like a vine.
He needed to see Gabriel. He needed to explain. To confirm. To beg for something—anything—from the man who had given him fire and ruin both. Even rage would be better than this silence.
The chance came one afternoon. News reached him that Gabriel's unit had returned from a short border patrol. The thought gnawed at him until it broke him. Risk meant nothing anymore. He seized on a flimsy excuse about visiting a sick veteran—an excuse so weak it made him flush with shame—and slipped from the church.
He knew where Gabriel sometimes went: a shabby tavern near the stables.
Lucien drew his robe close, head bowed, hurrying through foul back alleys. His heart hammered, threatening to burst from his chest.
He found Gabriel in the tavern yard, laughing loudly with his fellow knights, tankards clashing on the table. Sweat and ale clung to him, gold hair tousled. But when his eyes found Lucien, the smile dropped, hardening into a look of dark displeasure.
Lucien gestured urgently. Gabriel frowned, cursed under his breath, then reluctantly excused himself and followed to a deserted corner behind a pile of barrels.
"What the hell are you doing here?" Gabriel hissed the moment they stopped. His voice was sharp, laced with anger and panic. "Are you insane, Lucien? What if someone saw?"
"Gabriel… please. I need to talk." Lucien's voice was raw and brittle. His fingers twisted the sleeve of his robe. "I can't endure this. That woman… she's everywhere. A ghost. Every night I—"
"Which woman? Oh. Your wife?" Gabriel laughed, short and cruel. His blue eyes flashed with fury—and something else, something tight and bitter. "Now you complain? When you chose to 'solve' it with marriage? You knew this day would come."
"No! I didn't choose it! She forced me! She threatened me!" Lucien's voice cracked, his chest heaving. "She knows everything, Gabriel. We're finished—"
"So what?" Gabriel snapped, cutting him off. He surged forward, grabbed Lucien's arm hard enough to bruise, and yanked him close. His breath reeked of ale and heat. "So you come crawling to me like a whipped dog? Listen to me." His eyes burnt, sharp and accusing. "You're bound to her now. That sudden 'wife' of yours. Not me."
Lucien flinched as if struck.
"You think I wanted this?" Gabriel's voice rose, anger roughening it to a snarl.
Lucien's lips parted, but no sound came.
"Control her. Control yourself." Gabriel's words hit like iron. "If your weakness drags us both down—" He broke off, jaw tight. The threat in his silence was worse than words.
At last he let go, running a hand over his face. His tone cooled but stayed like ice. "Go back. Keep up the act. Don't draw attention. And don't come looking for me again."
He paused, eyes narrowing, and his last words landed like stones."Not now."
Then he turned, back rigid, striding away without another glance.
Lucien slid down against the wall, stone biting through his thin robe. Rejected. Warned. Yet—Gabriel hadn't cut him off completely. Those two words, not now, and the fleeting slip of we twisted in his mind into a fragile, poisonous hope.
He sat there until the wind froze him to the bone. Only then did he stagger back, his robe stained with dirt and filth, his eyes empty like a puppet with its strings cut.
When he pushed open the door of the rectory, Eleanor was at the table, sewing by lamplight. She lifted her head, her gray eyes resting on his pale, hollow face and those green eyes trembling with fear and something darker.
Her gaze lingered for less than a second before dropping back to her stitching. No question. No mockery. Not even curiosity.
That silence, that utter indifference, chilled him more than any accusation could.
He drifted to his room like a phantom, shutting the door, hiding in darkness.
Outside, Eleanor's needle kept its steady rhythm.
She knew where he had gone. Who he had seen. What comfort he had sought.
Good.
A puppet still clutching at illusions, torn between desire and weakness, was far easier to control than one already broken beyond fear.
Father Croft's nightmare was the rhythm she needed. The first notes of her revenge.