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Fuck , I can’t feel my hands, my feet. I lost feeling in them minutes ago, hot blood dripping down from where I’m hung, down my forehead and into my eyes.

There’s music encompassing the room—so loud it feels like it’s coming from directly inside my head. The notes are dark and ominous but the sound . . . it reminds me of my songbird, her fingers playing over the keys of the organ during Mass.

I smile to myself, thinking of her . . . thinking of her soft brown hair twirled in my fingers. Thinking of her lips as she kisses me. Thinking of her plump ass hanging off the back of the bench when she feels the music encompass her as she plays for a church that doesn’t deserve her.

And as I smile, I finally start to feel . . . everything.

I don’t know when I blacked out—I can’t even remember it happening. But one moment I was being dragged across the room, and slammed onto a wooden slab, as my limbs were yanked and pinned by the hands and knees of others. It had been like a nightmare—until they flashed the metal nails they planned to use to permanently pin me to what I only now realized is a cross.

They crucified me then, just like the demon from my childhood had done to my mother, nailing my palms to the wood, my feet together. I screamed myself hoarse, my throat raw, and at some point, everything must’ve gone black.

Now, I’ve been thrust at the front of the convent, just behind the altar at the head of the church.

Stabbing pain mars my scalp, as I feel a crown of thorns jabbing into my forehead. Yet, through the blood dripping from my brow into my eyes, I can see the floor below me. The hooded figures are all crouched in a half circle, their heads bowed toward the altar. The organ music continues to rise, notes blaring in a tumultuous dumpster fire filling every sliver of space in this decrepit room.

What follows is silence. Cold, eerie silence for prolonged minutes, hours—I can’t tell anymore. The pain in my hands buzzes up through my arms, the stabs into my scalp rendering me incoherent. Confused. All I hear are the sounds of my own blood dripping from my toes to the stone below me.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

The faceless cloaks still bow.

The space is unmoving, like a photo.

I am nothing but an ornament in a room of evil.

I want for the notes to coalesce around me once more. For the damage to be done.

How easily I can give up, after all these years. After all the demons, after all the cultists. After my parents. After June.

I’m not ready to give up.

Drip.

Drip.

Step.

Faintly, I hear small footsteps against stone. Nothing in the room moves, and yet . . . the footsteps sound like they’re coming from the stairwell leading to the basement.

Drip.

Step.

Step.

Drip.

And then . . . she’s here. My beautiful little angel. My . . . Salvation.

I pray and pray it’s a delusion—the blood loss has gotten to my head, making me see what I so desperately want to see. I pray the stabbing crown is making me lose my mind. I pray the demon is influencing me with more visions of what I desire.

But I know this isn’t a vision. I know June is really here, wearing my mask, my hoodie. She flinches when her eyes finally land on me, and I can feel her taking me in as though I were truly her God being crucified.

“Marcelo?” she whimpers. “What have they . . . are you . . .”

“J—June.” I try but even the movement of my lips pulls the dregs of pain through me once more. I grunt, my throat on fire, but I don’t stop. “June, get out of here.”

She stands at the top of the stairs, her palm clasped around my silver rosary, and Diablo is curled around her neck, somehow propped within the hood at her neck. Those green eyes land on me, and I swear I almost see something like anger flash through them. June steps forward, the white cross on my mask catching the small flickers of candlelight.

“June,” I beg. “Please. Run.”

But she doesn’t. My girl pulls Diablo from her neck, yanking him as he digs his claws into the fabric in objection, and gently places him on the floor. With a final scratch between his ears, she stands straight, her shoulders moving as though she’s taking a deep inhale, and then she struts forward—toward the cloaked figures.

“Valac!” she calls and every part of me wants to yell, beg, plead, something to just make her go the other way. To get out of here and as far from the cloaked figures as she can. “Let him go!” she screams as I ignore every instinct in me telling me not to move, every ounce of pain that nearly blinds me as I attempt to pull myself free.

My hands move along the thick nails, metal through flesh and muscle, but—I have to get to June.

I have to get—