Prologue

Shame, guilt, disgust. I can name any number of things that drove me to the cloth.

When I spoke to my peers, my story never aligned with theirs. They described their love of God. The light. The various visions they received, or the whispering of angels urging them to do holy work, to commit themselves fully to our God above.

Not me.

If I was hearing anything at all, I was hearing the Devil.

Blasphemy before I’ve introduced myself? The scandal.

I am Don Alessandro: thirty-six, crinkled around the eyes, tall but soft in body. Who I am boils down to very little because I am meant to be a vessel of the Lord. Long ago, I gave up any chance of knowing myself.

Which is why I want to ruin my life, you see.

I am older. I am jaded. And I no longer think God is merciful.

The first lustful thought I had taught me the severity of shame: that in recognising my body and its desires, I would be condemned. I had said the wrong thing; I was a child, and I saw an older boy pulling water from a well in my village, bronze arms tense and straining as he pulled—and I compared him aloud to an angel.

I still remember the look on my mother’s face, a disgust that was only dislodged when my father tried to beat desire out of my flesh. I became something else very quickly, which was quiet. The best defence is to say nothing incriminating at all.

Ever since then, the damned rot of shame had taken hold of me. It was insidious. I pride myself on being rather insightful; I have always been told my counsel was sound. Compassionate. Brilliant, even. But all that insight did for me was turn me around in circles. I knew where the shame came from and why I had it in me. Also, maybe, that God’s test for me bordered on the cruel.

What didn’t help me was that, in all my years of prayer and work and hope, nothing was enough to stop the dream.

I knew what I was. I knew what I wanted. I knew, in the eyes of the institution I had dedicated myself to, I was worth very little. I had been touched by the wrong force—that the Devil himself had corrupted me. Perhaps that was true. Perhaps he had. And perhaps I had been combating that influence for most of my life.

But where had shame gotten me?

I knew where it had sent me. Shame drove me to the church—sent me running like I was fleeing God’s wrath itself. I knew if I were to linger in the world, then I would do the unthinkable.

I would fall in love with a man. I would touch him. I would love it.

Years after joining the monastery, I still loved it. Still craved it. But shame had such a hold on me—it had me leashed—that I found I didn’t want to leave the church. I couldn’t walk away. Perhaps part of me wanted to blaspheme more than anything.

Let Hell take me. Let my soul burn forever. Let me be disgraced in the eyes of men and God.

I knew what I wanted.

The only thing that remained for me to do was take it.