Excerpt from Sins of the Father (Patreon)

 Hey guys. I wanted to share with you an excerpt from the first chapter from my next dark contemporary romance called Sins of the Father...and yes, there is a priest ;)

$5 and up patrons are got the whole first chapter. $1, $3 patrons are getting what will be released in my newsletter but you get it first!

 Thank you for all your support. 

Chapter One:

The angel sat in his usual spot on a ledge in the back corner of the nave. Today he wore faded jeans and a button-down shirt.

Track lighting threw out halos of gold and crimson glinted of the stained-glass window at his back casting streaks of red in his silvery brown hair. 

Hidden in the confessional box, Dorian allowed himself to pretend the young man was there because he wanted to see him and not because he came there with the man he worked for. 

Most days Aiden waited on the church steps while Kovak made his confessions. But on rainy days, cold days, or close to dark, he waited inside. Sometimes one of the other prostitutes Kovak ran would keep him company. That night, the black haired boy covered in freckles and with big green eyes accompanied Aiden. 

Even after years of watching his angel, Dorian wasn’t sure about the color of his eyes. Because when close enough to tell Dorian worked very hard to ignore him and the screen on the door of the confessional made it impossible to see such details.

A small sacrifice to make to keep Aiden from knowing Dorian watched how he laughed, smiled, and moved his elegant hands carving out conversation with his friend in American Sign Language. 

The bench creaked. Fabric shuffled. Sweet tobacco mixed with faint cologne. It could have been the soap Kovak used but it was still a pleasant change from the parishioners who bathed in their chosen perfume.

The tight confines did not contribute to good air flow.

“You are staring at him again aren’t you, Father.” Kovak’s silhouette shifted on the other side of the partition separating the two halves of the confessional box. “He is beautiful isn’t he.” 

“Yes.” And why Aiden would always be an angel in his mind.

Kovak chuckled. “Yes, you are staring, or yes, he is beautiful? Or perhaps it is yes to both.”

Heat burned Dorian’s cheeks. At least in the dark no one would see it. “Both.”

“I will let you fuck him if you like.”

Dorian choked. 

Kovak laughed.

“I don’t think that’s necessary.”

“He’s my whore. He’ll spread his ass for anyone I tell him to. And I do not tell him very often. I prefer to keep him to myself.”

He might not have shared Aiden often but Kovak had brought many beautiful young men to meetings with Dorian’s father, Christo.

As a boy, his father’s office with its closed doors had simply held secrets he wasn’t old enough to see. As a man, he’d learned the real reason why his mother cried in the bathroom at night. Protecting Dorian from the truth about that room, the horrors behind those doors, had taken her to the grave far before her time.

It wasn’t the sex that broke her but the knowledge of who her husband destroyed. Knowing blood spilled so he could fill his bank accounts, buy his cars, and his villas in Italy. Facing the truth she’d married a monster, and not a man, had cut her life short.

“Did you hear what I said?” Kovak leaned closer to the divider. “Or are you daydreaming about him again?”

“Are you here for confession or to pry into my private thoughts?” Dorian forced himself to look away from Aiden.

Kovak clicked his tongue. “Can’t I do both?”

Dorian exhaled a measured breath. “I’m a priest, or haven’t you noticed.”

“And you’re leaving the church, when? A week? Two?”

As soon as the papers were signed on the building three blocks south, near the textile mill. The apartment overhead wasn’t stunning but it wasn’t a part of the church. And the garage under it would let Dorian do metal work to support himself.

Dorian had put off long enough leaving a place he never belonged.

A place he stayed because he’d been too much of a coward to walk away for fear of what his father would expect of him. Dorian’s brother had told the man no, and in an act of defiance joined the police department. Less than a year later, he’d been shot in his patrol car after stopping to offer help to someone on the side of the road.

Before they dug the grave to bury him, Dorian’s mother sent him to seminary school. Becoming a priest had given him reprieve from being forced to follow in his father’s footsteps. 

But after his father’s death, the man’s business associates hadn't been as forgiving.

Sweat trickled down the back of Dorian’s knees, soaking into the pads of his prosthetic legs.

“You do realize it’s normal for a man to have a crisis of faith. Even a priest,” Kovak said.

“This isn’t a crisis.” Dorian pressed his thumb against the fresh cut on his right thigh.

“Then what is it?” There was no mockery in the man’s tone.

“More of an epiphany.” The ache blossomed into a sting.

Kovak made a thinking sound. “Africa.”

Dorian flinched. Dampness clung to the pad of his thumb, painting the tip red.

“You don’t talk about it.”

“There are some things better left buried.”

Children laughed. Their footsteps tapped the floor of the nave. They ran past the confession box, and the screen on the door broke apart a pink dress and miniature gray suit.

Ghosts of village children wearing worn out T-shirts and shorts followed.

Copper replaced the scent of tobacco.

The hum of flies filled the air.

Dorian clenched his eyes shut but it only stripped away the here and now leaving the wide expanse of savannah and the small white missionary church with its clinic.

The screams.

“Father Gill told me you won’t see anyone.” The bench squeaked from Kovak’s side of the confessional.

Africa disappeared, leaving Dorian behind in the two-hundred-year-old wooden box tucked against the wall of the cathedral.

“But I cannot blame you. Head doctors are useless. Drugs are useless. Nothing more than primer to cover up the stains of mold you hope won’t make its way back up through your new coat of paint. And even if that coat of paint succeeds it does nothing for the soul.”

No, it didn’t. Talking to psychiatrists hadn’t given Dorian a moment of relief. But neither did sitting here while Kovak tried to dig into the fifteen years of Dorian’s absence from home.

The only reason Dorian didn’t walk away was because he owed Kovak for burying his father’s legacy and convincing the Sokolov family there was no one left to pick up where Stephan Christo had left off.

“Please, I’m here to absolve you, not talk about me.”

“Yes, I suppose that is true.” There was enough sadness in the man’s tone to make Dorian pause. “I give to you my transgressions, Father Dorian. I have lied no fewer than a dozen times in the past week, I have deceived, and I have wallowed in the pleasure of flesh. The first two I regret because they can get innocent people hurt. The last, I do not.”

Dorian laughed a little. “Then why bring it up?”

“In case God might make an exception. I admit I am wrong, but I will not lie about regretting it.”

“If you don’t regret it, then technically God can’t forgive you.” Dorian smiled even though the man wouldn’t see it. Even though the expression held no happiness.

“Technically.” And Kovak said the word as if it held all of Dorian’s secrets. Kovak had been around almost twice as long as Dorian had been alive so perhaps it did. And he’d survived into old age for a reason. He didn’t need to wave around his strength to prove himself to his enemies. 

He quietly chose to eliminate them.

Although Kovak did not have the bloody reputation of most men in his circles. 

Unlike Dorian’s father.

“Father, do you ever find yourself afraid of something you never feared before?” Vulnerability laced Kovak’s words. 

“Yes.”

“There are things I must do.” Kovak sighed, and it was impossibly loud in the small box.  “And I must do them because there are people who will destroy others if I don’t. They are not innocent, but they are not deserving of the kind of death those people are capable of.”

The kind of people who’d served Dorian’s family and later turned on them. Faceless names except for one.

“I’m sorry.” Dorian had no idea what else to say.

“Tell me, Father, what do you fear?”

Dorian rested his head against the wall. There were so many things. His father’s voice, his mother’s screams, the face of his dead brother.

The faces of his dead friends.

Instead of any of those, Dorian said, “Silence.”