CHAPTER EIGHT

MERCY

I thought we had already begun, considering Ambrose is currently swirling the pads of his fingers over some impossibly sensitive patch of skin. He’s not even inside me, and I already feel a quaking, unfamiliar heat between my thighs.

“Why don’t we get you more comfortable?” He smooths his free hand over my hair. “That armrest looks like it’s digging into your back.”

As soon as he says it, I feel it, the firm wedge of foam and particle board jutting between my shoulder blades. “O-okay.”

Ambrose takes his hand away, and I squirm, shocked by how much I miss his touch. “Stretch out,” he says, standing up. “And spread your legs.”

That last sentence, it’s a command , dark and throaty. All I want is to do as he asks, and I don’t know why. Because all my life, all I’ve ever done is what men tell me.

But this—feels different somehow.

“Go on,” he urges.

I shimmy my hips down, not caring that my skirt rides up around my waist, not caring that my underwear is twisted to the side, exposing me to the cool air of the AC. Ambrose watches me the entire time, his hands at his side, his eyes fixed on me?—

His excitement is more than evident.

I try not to look at it, the tent in his trousers. But as I settle back on the stiff cushion, my eyes keep flicking that way.

If Ambrose notices, he doesn’t say anything.

“That’s an improvement.” He kneels on the floor beside the couch. “But let’s really give me access.”

He flashes me that sharkish grin. I feel like he’s about to devour me whole.

But he doesn’t. Instead, he gently pushes my thighs apart, draping one leg against the back of the couch and arranging the other so my toes graze the linoleum floor. Then he reaches between my legs again, sliding his fingers up between my folds.

I cry out and smother my voice with my hand.

“Make all the noise you want,” he says. “It’s one in the morning. Everyone’s asleep. The other cabins are empty.”

“You told me not to talk.” I look up at him, and he’s looking at my face, not—down there. It’s like he knows my body by touch.

Ambrose raises an eyebrow.

“So I did.” He slides a finger inside me and does something, makes some kind of movement, that draws another gasp out of my lips. “But I like hearing your desperate little pants.” He leans close, and when I breathe in, I smell him—cedar and cold wind and something that might be leather. “I’m definitely going to want to hear you moan when you come.”

Heat surges through me. He’s touching the outside of me again, although one finger still works inside me. There’s none of the painful stretch of intercourse. Ambrose is barely inside me at all. But it feels?—

It feels like the light of God .

“You’re wet,” he says softly. “That’s the first stage of arousal.”

I just look at him, silent the way he asked me to be. With his free hand, he runs his thumb over my mouth. “So are these red lips,” he mutters. “You’re on your way, sweetheart.”

Sweetheart . It’s so innocent-sounding, but it shoots right through my core. My muscles jump and tremble, and Ambrose grins and touches me a little faster.

“See what I mean?”

“What are you—” I stop, remembering I’m not supposed to speak. But Ambrose tilts his head at an inquisitive angle. Keeps touching me. It’s like he’s stoking a fire between my thighs.

“Go on,” he says.

“What are you doing?” The question comes out in a rush.

“Touching you.”

Heat floods into my cheeks, and then he does something down there that makes my hips jolt into his hand. “How are you touching me?” I ask, my voice ragged. “It feels—it feels better than when Reverend?—”

“Don’t say his name.” He massages me, inside and out. My body shakes, and that heat has started to become a kind of pleasurable irritation. I have the sudden, worrying thought that I need to use the bathroom, but I’m too embarrassed to say anything.

Ambrose changes something in the way he touches me, increasing the pressure on the outside. I cry out, my voice strangled.

“That’s your clit,” he says. “And something tells me the good Reverend Gunner has never found it once in his miserable life. He can’t be bothered.”

Some part of me—the part of me not currently quivering with pleasure—knows I should be offended on Reverend Gunner’s behalf. But the rest of me kind of curls inward that this man, this liar who nonetheless still knows how to lay on hands, can see straight into my marriage after a single day.

“Now this,” Ambrose says, and he hooks his finger up inside me, pressing against something that makes me keen and arch my back. “They call that the G-spot. But from what I understand, that’s just your clit, too.”

He evens out the pressure of his touch, and I can barely stand it, all this heat inside me. I don’t understand how he knows my body so well, or why he wants to do this to me just so I can show him where to access the adoption records. In truth, I keep waiting for him to give up and take out his penis and put it inside me the way Reverend Gunner does. The way Pastor Sullivan does too, whenever I’m asked to serve him.

“You touch these things together,” Ambrose says. “And you’ll come.”

He’s going faster now, and I can feel an embarrassing flood of wetness between my legs. I know I’m probably staining the couch. Dirtying his fingers. But Ambrose doesn’t seem to care. He just leans over me, his face close to mine. For a moment, I wonder if he’s going to kiss me.

“How does that feel?” he whispers.

I don’t have the words to describe how it feels. I feel vulnerable and exposed. I feel like I’m burning alive. I feel like something’s trying to split me apart and I want it to happen but I’m also afraid it’s going to happen.

All that, and what comes out of my mouth is?—

“I think I need to use the bathroom.”

Immediately, humiliation floods through my cheeks, and I grab Ambrose’s wrist and shove it away and move to get up. I shouldn’t be here. I belong to Reverend Gunner. And yet?—

The absence of Ambrose’s touch is almost painful.

Ambrose pushes me back down on the couch. “You don’t need to use the bathroom.”

“Yes, I do.” I try to push my skirt down, but he stops me. An agitation works up between my legs. A faint, treasonous tugging. I want him to touch me again.

But he can’t .

“How about this?” He slides his palm against my nether lips, making me gasp and buck up into touch. He laughs. “I know you’re enjoying yourself.”

“It feels like?—”

“Like you’re going to piss yourself?”

He arches an eyebrow mischievously, and I jerk my gaze away from him, my face flaming with heat.

“I told you. I think I need to use the bathroom.”

“And I’m telling you that you don’t.” He grabs my chin with his free hand and tilts my face toward him as the heel of his other palm grinds against my clit.

His fingers move through my slipperiness, my humiliating wetness, and find their way back to their previous positions: one inside me, one outside, both moving in tandem. I keen and squirm beneath Ambrose’s weight, that pressure building up again in my belly.

Ambrose presses his lips to my ear. It almost feels like a kiss.

“If you need to piss,” he rasps. “I want you to piss on my fingers.”

“ What ?” I try to sit up again, but Ambrose pins me down and rubs me faster, his finger sliding in and out of me with a steady rhythm that feels dangerous and sinful and fiery and impossibly good. Like Heaven and Hell got all entwined together.

Just like Ambrose , I think distantly.

“I mean it.” He works me with his entire arm, his breath hot against the sensitive skin of my neck. “I want you to let go, Mercy. If that means pissing on my hand, then fucking piss on me.”

His words shoot straight through me—their vulgarity. Their harshness. They aren’t the words of a preacher .

And yet Ambrose prayed over me like a preacher. He talks like a preacher, when he wants to.

But he clearly doesn’t want to right now. He keeps rubbing me with that same frantic rhythm, and even though it feels slatternly, I can’t help but match that rhythm with my hips, until the two of us are locked together, moving as one.

I groan and drop my head back, and Ambrose brushes his lips over my neck, then does the same with his tongue. More noises come out of my mouth, and it feels like someone else is making them, all those rough little grunting pants.

“That’s it,” Ambrose murmurs, moving his mouth to the other side of my neck. “That’s it, Mercy. Just let it go.”

I feel like I should tell him to stop. But I also think that if he stops touching me, I’ll die.

“That’s it,” he whispers, over and over like a chant. “That’s it. That’s it. Come on, darling. That’s it.”

I moan, and the pressure is going to erupt, and I am going to pee on his hand, I’m certain of it, but I don’t care because all I want is to keep feeling his fingers sliding through me, back and forth, fast and unceasing, and then?—

All that pressure explodes. Every nerve in my body flares like I’m doused in Holy fire. I can’t catch my breath. I can’t stop myself from jerking and flopping around, and it almost feels like I’m lifting up in the air, like it’s the End of Days and my body is ascending into Paradise.

Ambrose groans softly, a sound that draws me out of the Heavens and back to Earth—back down to this stiff, uncomfortable couch, where my legs are splayed, my dress hiked up. It’s the most unladylike I’ve ever been in my life.

I take a deep, shuddery breath, trying to slow my racing heart. I blink up at Ambrose, who grins down at me.

“Told you didn’t need to piss,” he says.

And that’s when I realize what happened.

“That’s—that’s what it feels like?” I push myself up to sitting, all my movements shaking and trembling as I smooth my skirt down, wriggling my hips to adjust my panties back into place.

Ambrose doesn’t try to push me down this time, only sits back and then, to my horror, holds up the hand he used to pleasure me. His fingers are shiny and wet.

“Yeah,” he says. “Like Heaven itself, right?”

I can’t dwell on his blasphemy, though, because he slides his fingers into his mouth, sucking them clean like chicken bones. I can’t tear myself away from the sight. From the way his eyes flutter closed and his cheeks hollow out. When he drags his fingers out of his mouth, he looks right at me.

“You taste fucking delicious, Mercy.”

The way he says my name sends little quakes shooting through me, like a miniature version of my first orgasm.

“Thank you?” I whisper, squeezing my dress up in my fists.

Ambrose chuckles and stands up. The tent of his erection seems even larger than before, and I tense myself, waiting for the inevitable.

It doesn’t come. Instead, he holds out one hand. He doesn’t have preacher’s hands, a detail I hadn’t noticed in all the times he’s touched me. They’re rough. Calloused. Strong.

A carpenter’s hands.

More blasphemy. But I take his hand anyway, and he pulls me up to standing.

“Did you enjoy that?” he asks.

I hesitate, not sure how to answer, and I’m grateful when I hear the click of a dog’s nails on the tile because it means I can look away from his black, piercing gaze to the big, black dog that comes trotting into the room.

“Hello, Roxi,” he says.

She sits on her haunches and stares at me. I keep studying her—she’s big and vicious-looking, although she doesn’t seem interested in hurting me. Ambrose brushes his knuckles against my cheek.

“You didn’t answer my question.”

I force myself to look over at him. There really is something in his features that reminds me, distantly, of Raul, and my chest clenches up. Now, grief intermingles with my guilt. Still, I answer honestly.

“Yes.” I take a step back from him, trying to get out of his reach. “But you can’t—I’m Reverend Gunner’s helpmeet. His wife.”

Ambrose shakes his head, his expression unreadable. “No. He’s forcing you to be his mistress.”

The truth of his words slices straight through my heart.

“God sent me to him,” I say quietly. “That’s why my parents died. So I could come here to him and support his work here on Earth.”

I’ve said these words, or had them said to me, hundreds of times. They’ve always felt hollow.

At this moment, they feel like a lie.

“Your parents died,” Ambrose says, interest curling in his voice. “So you were adopted, too?”

“I should go.” I turn to leave, and I’m not completely surprised when Ambrose catches my arm and pulls me, somewhat roughly, up toward him.

“We had a deal.” He speaks into my ear, and little shivers work through my body. “Tell me where the adoption files are.”

This really doesn’t feel like a fair trade, that he gave me all that physical pleasure and asked for none in return. I swallow nervously. “Remember, I don’t have access to them.”

“That’s fine. Just show me where they are.”

“They’re in the emergency bunker,” I say softly, his rough fingers burning a bracelet around my wrist. “On the western side of the campus, past the training fields. I can show you tomorrow morning before I get you set up for the prayer sessions.”

Ambrose immediately releases me and gives me a dazzling smile. “Excellent. Thank you, Mercy.”

We stare at each other for a few moments. My whole body still feels shaky. Weak.

I’m weak, for letting him do that.

And yet I desperately want him to do it again.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I say, and then I flee.