Bestie, tonight the vault cracks open.
You wanted to know more about Priest Ward—the celibate, whip-wielding Brother Superior of the Iron Cleric and bodyguard to content creator Hailey Saintpatrick—and in Chapter One of Unhealthy Obsession, you’re getting exactly that. This is a good peek behind the curtain, into the story that forged him, the shadows that made him dangerous, and the choices that made him untouchable. Some of your juiciest questions are about to be answered… and a few new ones are going to emerge.
Ready to meet the man before the obsession? Let’s begin.
Note: Mind the triggers! This is a Dark Romance, with dark themes.
Read Priest’s first book, Unholy Intentions, HERE.
***
Monastery of the Forge
Normandy
November 12th, 2005
Father Sextus
Starvation can break a man but, occasionally and if he’s formidable enough, it can make him—into a monster. It’s those formidable monsters we’re after like greedy miners after gold, and I’ve just hit a big, fat vein.
I wring my hands, waiting for Reverend Plutarch to show some semblance of enthusiasm. If only he’d get on with it a little fucking faster. But of course the Reverend Father is taking his sweet fucking time.
“A once in a century find, you say,” he muses, eyes on the video, trying his fucking best to act unimpressed and not have to reward me for this.
“Of the twelve methods we use to discover talent, this one never fails,” I say as if he needs reminding. “And Item Twenty-Seven, Your Excellency, is a true diamond.”
Plutarch’s expression remains blank, obscured behind his thick beard and bushy eyebrows. I know that ‘talent’ isn’t exactly what he’d call this, but it’s the next best thing, and watching the footage, he can’t deny it. All I can see is the back of the tablet I handed him, but the scraping drag of iron and terrified whimpers tell me he’s at the part where the grate falls shut over the boys’ pit. Not long after, the dogs enter the scene, growling low in their throats.
Then the other thing enters.
A normal person, one with a heart, would flinch at every snarl and huff, but not Plutarch. It’s only when the sound of flesh tearing off bone hits that his fingers tighten around the tablet, his fingernails whitening. When the action stops, the kids are still whimpering. The dogs? They’re not breathing. And not because they’re dead—but because they recognized the bigger dog. The reason is staggering, and I’m pretty fucking sure the Reverend Father is shocked for the first time in his life.
I know I was.
He keeps holding the tablet for long seconds after the video has ended. Then, slowly, he lowers it onto the sleek surface of his desk, setting it down with glacial calm.
Fuck him. He’s not fooling anybody.
He thought he’d seen it all in matters of atrocities. After all, he runs the most vicious training camp for contract killers that ever existed—The Forge. Before he became headmaster, he trained the boys himself. Before he trained them, he worked as an operative, as the highest ranked Cleric. And before that, he was one of these boys. Nobody knows what he did to be recruited as a kid, but I’m pretty damn sure it wasn’t anything like this.
“Item Twenty-Seven,” he says, “what’s his real name?”
“He doesn’t have one.” I bow slightly, the way one does when speaking to the Reverend Father. “But I do know he’s twelve years old, from Memphis. The Order recruited him themselves, and they sent him here for training.”
“What made them recruit him?” It’s not unheard of for The Order to send in recruits, but still highly unusual. They normally leave the recruiting to us.
I shift my weight, my robe shuffling over the stone tiling, the big dark gothic walls amplifying the sound. “Something he did in a ghetto. And what the employees of a coffee shop found behind the dumpsters in the morning.”
The black chair creaks as Reverend Plutarch leans against its large back.
“What did they find?”
“Dead men. Big, bad men. Men that even the S.W.A.T. had failed to bring down.”
Silence stretches out into the gothic study, an invitation for me to continue. I clear my throat, the echo carrying through the dimly lit space.
“Investigators found the perpetrator fast—the boy,” I explain. “He was an ingenious killer, but not a good cover-up. His crime was savage and ‘wickedly brilliant’, as the press called it, but he was still just a twelve-year old.”
“The press?”
“His crime made headlines, but only very briefly, so he’s not a liability. The Order shut down the news fast.” I raise my eyes, finding his. “And they retrieved the boy from police custody.”
“About this ingenious kill,” he says, the question implicit.
I structure the details in my mind before relaying them. His eyebrows rise gradually as I speak and, when I’m done, he rests in silence for whole minutes.
“I don’t think the police caught the boy, Sextus,” he finally says, rising to his full size, and starting to pace the room, his long robe dragging in his wake like the cape of a vampire.
“Your Excellency?”
“He’s clearly a genius. He would have known how to cover his tracks. He simply chose not to.”
“You’re suggesting he wanted to be caught? But why?”
“You said it yourself—he’d killed big, bad men. The entire underground would have been after him. He needed protection, so he made it easy on the cops to find him.”
“An evil genius,” I say, turning the idea around in my head. The little shit is even harder than I thought.
“Not necessarily evil.” Plutarch turns to look at me from beside the pointed window like some kind of undead Pontiff. “Angry, yes. Inherently brutal, maybe. But what he did there?” He points to the tablet on his desk. “He didn’t do it only for himself. He did it for the other boys, too. In the end, he did it for the dogs, as well.”
I lower my head more. “I’ll make sure to cauterize the altruism out of him.”
“Make sure you do.”
“Shall I ask The Order to send you the full report about what happened in Memphis?” Since they’ve kept this under wraps, I was only allowed to see it when the boy was transferred from their custody to ours, but they didn’t let me keep a copy.
Plutarch bristles under his beard. We all know he hates serving The Order, and asking them for anything humiliates us even more. Few of us like it, really. They’re spoiled bastards, and even though they’re well-trained, highly efficient and uncannily capable of making money, they lack the discipline and higher purpose of the Iron Cleric. In Plutarch’s mind, it’s a shame that the world’s true elite—us—is forced to serve their inferior kind. That he, a man more powerful than the Pope himself, has to answer to Clive Ferran. Of all the Triumvirate, he’s the one Plutarch despises most.
“We need complete info on the boy.” He returns to his desk and settles back down into his chair. “Get rid of the others.”
I bow down from my waist, offering him the shaved crown of my head along with the symbol of eternal loyalty he carved into it.
A few hours after I’ve retreated from the Ebony Hall, The Order’s report has found its way into Reverend Plutarch’s hands, and I’ve gotten my reward, namely the freedom to train the boy—and to break him in all the ways I want.
The little psycho glares at me with bloodlust as I hold the whip. Maybe imagining how he’d kill me.
Turns out he adjusts his methods according to what he thinks the victim deserves. Those fuckers? He’d used a very specific cocktail of drugs to make them do each other like bitches in heat, then to rend each other like frenzied wolves. The coffee shop staff basically found rags of flesh, a man’s squashed hand still twitching.
How Item Twenty-Seven was able to achieve all that at only twelve years of age?
The town drug lords had used him as a ‘delivery boy’ for years, during which time he’d hovered around every important meeting like a ghost. He’d watched the dealers play poker in hidden basements, and discovered the locations of their underground labs. He wormed his way into the trust of their scientists, most of whom worked with a gun at their heads. Most of them were illegals who’d been lured into the country with the promise of academia and research work, but had then been forced to work for cartels.
Soon, Item Twenty-Seven learned how to combine different kinds of hallucinogens. He wasn’t even ten at the time, and he couldn’t even speak properly. It was the illegals who’d taught him to read and write, because he’d never been to school. It would be stupid of me to even try and deny his unusual intelligence, but I can remind him where he’s got it from.
“Your brainpower is how your genetics dealt with your crackwhore mother’s addiction. Believe it or not, you won the life lottery. You could have been born dead, an addict or with brain damage.” I drag the whip across the black stone floor, drawing a circle of his own blood around him. Despite the pain, he’s glaring at me like that alone could make me drop dead.
I hunker down in front of him.
“Tell me, what death would you give me?” I give him the black-toothed grin that usually terrifies the boys, but it obviously doesn’t have the same effect on Item Twenty-Seven. “Would you have me OD behind a dumpster like you had those asswipes?” I lean in closer, rolling on the naked balls of my feet. “Or would you do to me what you did to that thing in the pit?”
The glint in his eye is all the answer I need.
“Ah.” I get back up. “Of course. A far more impressive feat, I’ll give you that.” I take a few moments to study him. “Far more satisfying, too, am I right?”
Instead of holding my stare he keeps his eyes ahead. A form of defiance.
“You truly are special, you know,” I say. “Making a deadly sin look so beautiful.” Then quieter, driving the fear up his spine, “beautiful, but still unforgivable. Unless, of course, you repent.”
I walk behind him, and raise the whip. His body tenses, and I stop. I lower the whip and drag it gently down between two trenches it has already carved into his flesh.
“Tell me—did you watch them go at each other?”
Silence.
Leather whips through the air. When it lands, it cuts.
Everything in him clenches, down to the thin muscles between his protruding ribs.
“Speak, or the next one is going to break your feeble little bones.”
“Yes,” he forces out through gritted teeth.
Finally, some progress.
“And did you like it?”
He won’t reply, so I bring it down on him again, the lash splitting air and his skin.
“I liked the pit more.” The words rush out of his mouth along with a spray of spittle.
“I bet you did. But let’s go back to your original crime. Which part delighted you most? The orgy?” I hunker down behind him to spell it out in his ear. “Four grown men, fucking each other in the ass between those dumpsters? Or the squashing of each other’s hands and dicks in an animal frenzy afterwards?”
He takes a deep breath, his ribcage expanding. Next thing I know, his body relaxes, and the whole room seems to dim. The light is already minimal, the walls stripped bare, the cavernous space carrying the sound of grates dragging and falling shut.
I stand and step back to make some distance. Just enough to take in the sight of his spinal cord sticking out like the bony spikes of a dinosaur’s fetus, his skinny ribs, the strips of blood already coagulating at the edges of his lash wounds.
“The fucking didn’t last long.”
“Come again?” This can’t be right. He shouldn’t be able to speak like his spirit dissociated from anything I could do to his flesh, not yet.
A small laugh shakes his bony, bloody ribcage. It obviously hurts, but he doesn’t seem to give a shit.
“You learn things about people when they beat you up for sport. Especially so when they use you as a soccer ball as a toddler. Needs, drives and pleasures that don’t appear in their eyes until they’re locked in a room with someone weaker.” He pauses, his spine rising along with his breathing, the silence seeming to pour out from under him like black blood.
What a sight. I could lose track of time immersing myself into the unique suffering that seeps into the field of energy between us.
“Soon, you learn how to spot people like them even in the light of day. You learn even quicker how to switch on their killer instinct. For these kinds of men, fucking is just a precursor of violence.”
“Good, my child,” I encourage him in a soft voice that carries through the room. “Confession is the gateway to redemption. Walk through it, and you’re halfway saved.”
His body shakes. I’m not sure whether he’s laughing or crying, not even when he speaks.
“If men like them can be redeemed, then I don’t want it.”
“Not men like them,” I lie. “But boys like you.”
He laughs.
“If your God can forgive me, then he’s a monster, too.”
My tone goes even softer, the whip hanging from my hand like a guilty vestige, while his wounds glisten in the dark.
“There is always a lesson within suffering,” I muse, slowly lowering myself behind him, placing the whip on the ground. “We come into this world to experience the entire spectrum of being human. Pain is a large part of that.”
“A disproportionate part,” he adds, his voice smaller now. Carefully, I raise my hand, and touch his damp hair.
“You’re a smart kid, you know that?”
“Not smart enough to see the lesson.” He turns his head, just a little, leaning into my hand. I cup his head, and gently stroke his temple with my thumb. It’s cold, and wet, his pulse barely perceptible.
“What is the lesson?” he asks, his voice ghostly. When he turns his face, I don’t see trust in his eyes—but I do see a genuine search for wisdom.
“When you learned how to spot bad men, you also learned how to protect yourself from them.”
He shakes his head, his eyes not leaving mine. “Not that. Never that. There is no protection.”
“Even spotting them from a distance is a good way to keep oneself safe from them.”
I swipe the loose strands of hair from his face and hook them around his ear to get a clearer view of him. I lean in closer, trying to scrutinize his eyes. A faint smile pulls at the corner of his mouth, like an invitation. I get closer, and time snaps.
The little animal is as fast as a devil.
I instinctively slap my hand over my ear, but don’t even know what hit me until I feel the warm liquid trickling between my fingers. Then the pain hits.
“You little shit!” Goddamn it, I sound like a strangled witch. I shoot up to my feet, but stumble on my own heels and slip right back onto my ass, tangling in my own robe.
“Fuck this, and fuck you, you little dog!” I’m Forging Father of the Iron Cleric for fuck’s sakes, I don’t get done dirty like this, not by the greatest crooks, let alone little boys.
I rake the whip off the floor, straightening up so fast that I lose balance. For a moment I think it’s from the loss of blood, but you don’t lose that much from an ear some little whacko just bit off.
I look down at him, contemplating dropping the whip and stabbing him to death.
How pathetic he should look hunched into a ball on the floor, hugging his knees, his skinny, lash-streaked back protruding from the ripped sides of his shirt.
Except he doesn’t.
If anything, he resembles a possessed little creature with those grinning bloody teeth, face pale from the starvation we put him through and the loss of blood, that I’m afraid things will get worse if I kill him.
As if he might come back to haunt me.
Afraid.
That word sticks to my mind.
I can’t remember the last time I was afraid. I killed dozens of times before, and not a damn soul came back to haunt me. They all swear to, despair raging through their pores, spittle flying out of their mouths, but they never make good on those promises. If I know one thing for sure, it’s that no one ever comes back from the Afterlife.
Yet something deep and ancient stirs in the pit of my stomach, telling me that this one just might. There’s something about his will, his rage and his gravity that feels strong enough to shape reality itself.
The pain turns red hot as the little shit’s mouth pulls into a grin, a piece of my ear sticking out from between his bloody teeth. He spits it out viciously, the flesh slapping the stone floor. Then he just keeps staring at me with a fucking death wish.
Fuck, I want to hurt him. The sheer nerve on him. I grip the whip’s handle hard, ready to bring it down on him with a vengeance.
But, just as I lift it, Lavinius storms in, his robe in disarray from the haste. He braces himself against the iron doorframe, catching his breath. Gulping in air, he gives me a wild look.
“Sextus, careful!” His beady eyes dart from me to the boy and back again. “This—this can’t… It can’t go wrong.”
Wrong.
The way things have gone wrong before.
The way I discovered that no one ever comes back to haunt the living, and why Plutarch didn’t want to put me in charge of this brat in the first place, but he was forced to in the end, because I had discovered his special talent, using my means, after The Order sent him in.
The others think I don’t know, but tongues wag even at the monastery—of all the Forging Fathers, I’m the wild card. My ways have been on the agenda during many a meeting between Pontiffs.
I freeze with the whip in my hand, staring into Lavinius’ eyes. They’re dripping with warning and, of course, with the anguish that I might strike anyway.
And he’s not wrong.
Plutarch himself wouldn’t be able to stop me from teaching this little shit a lesson. Item Twenty-Seven might’ve been the bigger dog in the pit, but not here. In the cavernous dungeons under Forge Mountain, I’m breaker and executioner. Plutarch might be Reverend Father, a position he won after he forced me to my knees in the sparring ring decades ago, and carved the clerical symbol into my skull with a hot blade, but that was just a stroke of luck. Pitius had slipped poison into my porridge the night before to weaken me so he would have a chance, and Plutarch took advantage.
But all of them are very much aware that, of the seven of us, I was always the strongest. The one always ready—and able—to do what it takes to deal with little demons made flesh like this one.
I speak the last one out loud to make it clear for Lavinius I’m not willing to bend, but he shakes his head, not taking his eyes off of mine.
“Not this time, Sextus. The Order—”
“The Order,” I cut him off, “sent him. They’re perfectly aware that, once they do that, they have no more influence over the formation of—”
“This one is special.”
“All their recruits are. Every time they send one in, it means something, but it doesn’t compel us to keep them.” Not alive, anyway.
“That’s because The Order trust our judgment.” His eyes flick to the boy again. It takes a lot for The Order to deem someone worthy of becoming an Iron Cleric, and they only send in ‘talent’ extremely rarely. Still, we reserve the right to ‘fail’ recruits at our discretion.
“But things are different with this one,” Lavinius insists, adjusting his tone to the low, pacifying frequency you use with volatile psychos. “The Reverend Father informed them about the starvation test you subjected him to, and its results.”
I stick out my chin. “Oh, he did, did he? How interesting. Considering how he disapproves of my methods and how reluctantly he grants rewards.”
Lavinius looks at me a certain way. “We both know why he does that.”
“And we both know that you agree with him.”
“We all agree with him.” He looks down at the boy again, who’s been listening quietly, keeping very still. Seems he already understands the language we speak among ourselves, and maybe it shouldn’t surprise me. For a sharp mind like his, it’s peanuts.
“But this isn’t about the Reverend Father, or the others,” Lavinius continues. “It’s about the boy. The Order has already decided that he is to become a Cleric. It’s not a request, it’s an imposition. They won’t have him leave this place like—” another quick look at the boy. That’s the thing about Lavinius, he cares too much about their feelings. It’s why he should have remained an operative, and never become a Forging Father. “—like the others did.”
My lips split as they pull into a grin. “Like the other boys from the pit.”
Item Twenty-Seven stirs. Mission accomplished. I look down at him, and even though he doesn’t return the attention, I can see that protruding pale jaw ticking.
Suddenly, the blood trickling from my ear down my neck is worth it. To think that, in decades of service, no one has gotten me like this, not even the most skilled assassins. Talent indeed. The Order sure was onto something. Too bad he seems to share Lavinius’ weakness—he cares about others. That is so easily exploitable. Look at me exploiting it right now, causing him pain in a way a whip never could.
I reluctantly return my attention to Lavinius.
“Why?” I demand. An explanation is the least I deserve.
Lavinius hesitates.
Annoyed as fuck, I crack the whip, leather biting down across Item Twenty-Seven’s back. His chest snaps forward, his bloodless skin stretching over his skeletal ribs.
I laugh out loud, daring Lavinius to insist that I stop. Curious how far he’ll go. Will he throw himself down at my feet to beg? Because if one of us crosses the line and goes against The Order’s instructions, it won’t be only the perpetrator that suffers. It’ll be all of us, including him, Pitius, Morgon, Laurus, and even Plutarch.
But all he does is issue a quiet, if charged warning.
“Sextus…”
I crack the whip again, and this time flesh splits to the bone. It rips a cry from the little devil, but he manages to muffle it behind gritted teeth.
Hard little bastard.
“Stop,” Lavinius issues a second warning, and I snap.
“Or what? What can they do to us, Lavinius? We create their fucking weapons. We make the Iron Cleric! Men the Pope bows to, and world leaders cower away from. Men more influential than entire armies, deadly as human walking nukes. As for us,” I thump my finger against my chest, “we forge them! We’re the toughest bastards that ever existed. The Order wouldn’t fucking exist without us.”
“That’s exactly the thing. They’re done depending on the Forging Fathers, and they’re taking it to the next level.” He points to the boy. “Look at the little beast. The whipping, the physical torture? It doesn’t form him, like the others, much less punish him. Rather, it grounds him in his own body.” He finds my eyes again. “Containing what he’s capable of.”
My whip-holding hand starts to slacken as I begin to understand.
“They’re recruiting a different kind of brute,” I conclude, my voice fading.
We’ve all heard rumors, but I never thought they might be true. Not even The Order would go that far.
Lavinius holds my stare and, finally, I see it wasn’t pity he felt for Item Twenty-Seven. “I’m afraid it’s more than that. I hope I’m wrong. But it would make sense of what they want us to name him.”
I narrow my eyes as if that can help strip the whole situation down to the truth.
“And what is that?”
His mien darkens before he even says it. “Priest.”
***
Bestie. BESTIE.
Next week = more Priest. Sharper edges, bigger shadows, and stuff that’s gonna live rent-free in your head.
Also, because one obsession is never enough?? My revamped K-pop vampire serial is about to hit. Picture neon lights, sinful smiles, and idols who will literally bite the hand that feeds them.
We are entering full Dark, Delicious Romance Universe mode. Hydrate. Cancel plans. It’s about to get feral.
