Page 17 of Where the Dark Knelt (Worshipped by Darkness #1)

Chapter Ten

Eveline

A few months later.

Today, for the first time, I was supposed to be on duty at the monastery, guiding the parishioners, telling them about God, everything I knew about religion, everything I had studied with my father for so many years and resumed here through theology classes.

Today, it was my role to support people, to listen and to speak faith into their weary hearts.

I stood before the altar, praying softly while others moved around me, their shadows gliding across the stone floor.

The hall was filled with murmured prayers, whispers, and quiet singing.

Some people simply sat in the pews, their gazes distant, lost in silent communion with God or themselves.

I chose to remain at the front, my thoughts drifting once more into a different world, into a reality that no longer existed for me.

The past was in the past, and this… this was my new life. A life that still felt so surreal, so impossibly severed from what I once knew. One moment bang and then everything ended. No old connections, no work, no studies. No one.

Only prayers, quiet duties, and God… and, strangely, I liked it.

But no matter how hard I tried to escape myself, dark thoughts still found me. They clung to me like gnats to sweating skin.

My breakup with my girlfriend felt so stupid…

but it was still a breakup. My humiliation at work, the idiocy of university, the hatred and the bullying, it was all so far away now, like a life I had dreamed rather than lived.

Even though I’d only been here a few months, everything before felt impossibly distant.

My parents hadn’t written a single letter.

That surprised me, though perhaps it shouldn’t have.

They were always busy, surviving, if you could call it that.

My mother worked herself into exhaustion, twenty-four hours a day, and my father spent his entire life in his church…

How stupid it sounded when I thought about it like that.

Eata’s quiet voice broke through my wandering thoughts and prayers. She nodded toward the confession booths lined along the stone wall, carved from dark wood with crosses marking their doors.

“Did something happen?” I asked, puzzled.

She shook her head lightly. “Can you sit there for a while? The priest stepped away on an urgent call.”

I nodded silently and walked across the hall to the booths. Inside, the air smelled of old wood and incense. I lowered myself onto the narrow, uncomfortable bench, folding my hands in my lap, listening to the echo of whispered prayers outside as I waited in the dim, silent box.

Have they always been this uncomfortable?

I wondered, shifting on the hard wooden bench as a shiver ran through me.

It had been so long since I’d last sat in one of these booths.

After my grandmothers were gone, I simply…

stopped going to church. As for my father’s church, where he worked, where he could hear every confession I whispered, no, I never wanted to pour my heart out there. I stopped needing that long ago.

Instead, I tried psychologists. Once a week, for years. But it never really helped.

Everything they said to me was, “Oh, we are so sorry, we don’t know how to help you with your depression and anxiety all together, it usually doesn’t work like that. Sorry. But no refund though. It’s just business.”

Yeah, fuck this business then!

I sighed heavily and shrugged my shoulders, the stiff wood creaking under me.

All of that felt like a different life now.

Another reality, another me. I had changed psychologists so many times, each one probing for causes to my morning panic attacks and that horrible nausea that made me throw up before work.

They thought it was anxiety, weakness, a physical disorder, but…

strangely, ever since I came here to the monastery, the nausea vanished.

I woke up each dawn with ease. No dread. No tremors in my hands.

So the reason was my hated job and university after all…

A sad smile tugged at my lips as I realized it. Years of therapy, of pills and breathing exercises, and no one could figure out something so simple. They stuffed me with medications that only made everything worse — my mind dull, my body numb. I hated it all.

They shoved pills into my hands to seal away the symptoms, never once caring about unearthing the real cause rotting me from the inside out.

As long as I was quiet, manageable, functional, they didn’t give a damn.

Fuck them. Fuck every single one of them for thinking I was just another file to be processed and silenced with chemicals.

They didn’t want healing. They wanted obedience.

I closed my eyes and whispered a quiet prayer, asking God to forgive them, to forgive myself, to wash away the heaviness that still clung to my soul.

Even after months here, it wasn’t easy to let go of my old life…

but I was trying. I was walking towards peace, towards Him, and leaving everything else behind.

Suddenly, the wooden door clicked open and I jumped as the vibration shivered through my bones.

Someone sat down heavily on the other side of the booth, and the bench shifted beneath me.

I felt the force of him there, close yet hidden.

For a moment, there was only silence and the sound of our breathing mingling in the stale incense-scented air.

“Are you there?” asked a gentle, velvety male voice, young and hesitant.

He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five…

perhaps even my age, twenty-one. What is he doing here?

Why did he come? A strange longing stirred in my chest, to speak with him, to connect, to feel that old world again through a simple conversation.

But I pushed down the impulse. That wasn’t my place right now.

“Yes,” I whispered back.

He exhaled in relief, and the faint vibration of the bench stopped. Maybe he’d been tapping his foot in anxiety. Now he sat still.

“Thank God… Thank you for being here to listen to my sins,” he murmured softly.

“I am always at your service,” I replied, keeping my voice steady, remembering the protocols I had learned. “Speak, I listen. I do not judge. Everything is in the mouth of God and in His forgiveness.”

For now, all I could do was sit here, listening in this dim, carved booth until the priest returned… trying not to think about how badly I wanted to hear this stranger’s story — not as a duty, but as a lonely girl seeking any reminder of the life she once knew.

The man hunched in the booth let out a shuddering exhale, his voice laced with desperate longing.

“There’s this girl... I’ve been obsessed with her for so long, and.

..” He paused, dragging in another ragged breath.

“And I find myself consumed by thoughts of her, unable to shake this fixation. Every day, I take my cock in hand, jerking off with a fervor born of pure, unadulterated lust. In my mind’s eye, I see her writhing beneath me, her luscious body accepting the brutal thrusts of my enormous, barely contained monster cock.

She moans and screams, not from pain, but from the exquisite pleasure of being so utterly filled, so completely claimed by me. ”

A chill ran down my spine as I listened to his depraved confession, my skin crawling with unease. I could feel the sweat beading on my palms, my fingers twisting and squeezing the fabric of my skirt until the material strained against my white-knuckled grip.

“I’m not the man she’s destined to be with,” he whispered, a note of bitter resignation coloring his tone.

I nodded fervently, silently agreeing that no woman in her right mind would ever willingly entwine her life with such a deranged, obsessed individual.

I mentally cursed myself for even engaging with this unhinged creature, and quickly apologized for the crude language, even as the foul words echoed in my thoughts.

“She’ll never be with the likes of me,” the man spat bitterly, a cruel smirk probably twisting his lips.

“I’m a demon, a seducer of souls, and yet.

..” He paused, chest heaving with a shuddering breath.

“...I find myself ensnared by this girl, consumed by a desire so intense it haunts my every waking thought. I jerk off ten times a day, my cock harder than the stone it resembles, all while imagining her soft, pliant body writhing beneath me.”

The man’s voice dropped to an almost inaudible murmur, a dreamy quality to his tone as he continued his depraved reverie. “Mmm, I can almost feel her hot little mouth wrapped around my shaft, those pouty lips stretching obscenely as she takes me deep, sucking me with vicious abandon...”

I squirmed uncomfortably in my seat, feeling a flush of shameful heat rising to my cheeks.

My thighs clenched of their own accord, a traitorous throb pulsing between them as images of the man’s lurid fantasies flashed unbidden through my mind.

I whispered to myself in dismay, “God, what is happening? Why am I reacting this way to such a vulgar fantasy?”

The man seemed oblivious to my discomfort, too lost in his own twisted lust. “Ahh, and her virgin pussy... so tight, so untouched. I’d stretch it deliciously with each powerful thrust, claiming her innocence as my own.

..” He gasped, the sound of his pleasure mingling with the ragged sound of his breathing.

I could no longer concentrate, my face burning with mortification as the man’s filthy words painted a vivid picture. Shame and a horrified fascination warred within me, leaving me flustered and unsettled by the intensity of the scene unfolding before me.

For some reason, I decided to glance through the carved crosses in the wooden divider.

It was hard to make out anything clearly — only shadows, flickers of color.

I saw something dark, like leather, but I couldn’t be sure in the dim booth.

Unease coiled in my stomach, and I was about to look away when my gaze caught on something that made my blood run cold.

His hands were moving… definitely down there, squeezing himself through his pants. There was a large bulge pressing against the fabric, so obvious it made my breath catch in my throat. Was he… was he really hard? My heart started hammering so rigid I could hear it in my ears.

Oh my God…

He fell silent, bending forward abruptly, and I caught a glimpse of his eyes through the slits in the wood — bright, unnatural green that glowed even in the dim light.

“Well, hello, girl from my dreams,” he whispered, his voice curling around me like smoke.

I screamed. The sound ripped out of me before I could stop it. I recoiled, slamming against the back of the booth, scrambling to stand on the narrow bench. My body trembled violently, panic surging through every nerve.

The wooden door creaked open, and the priest appeared, looking down at me with confusion etched on his face. He cocked his head to one side, frowning.

“What are you yelling at? What happened? Why are you so red?” His gaze swept around the booth, but there was no one there. Just me. Alone.

I stumbled out, my breath coming in shallow gasps. The priest called after me, “Hey, where are you going, sweetheart?” but I didn’t stop. I rushed to the far end of the hall, pressing myself against the cold stone wall, trying to swallow the choking lump of terror rising in my throat.

Did he… did he see my eyes too? I felt sick with dread, my eyes glued to the booth he should have come out of. I waited there, trembling, watching as people went in and out of other booths, praying or confessing quietly.

But no one left his.

Minutes passed, and eventually a girl entered that same booth. I caught a glimpse inside as she walked through the curtain.

It was empty.

Where is he? I thought, horror gripping my chest. Where is the parishioner? My mind raced wildly. He couldn’t just disappear…

Or…

Was I talking to myself? My knees weakened. What the… shit…

I shook my head violently, trying to force the memory away. I didn’t imagine it out of boredom… I heard his voice. I saw those eyes…

A violent shiver raked through my body, goosebumps breaking across my skin. My stomach twisted with nausea at the thought of his filthy act, his vile words, those inhuman eyes boring into mine.

Please, God… I prayed silently, clutching the front of my robe with trembling fingers.

Please… don’t ever let me cross paths with him again.