Chapter Nine: The Body Remembers What the Soul Denies
"She prayed until her mouth went dry, but the devil answered first."
The dreams no longer waited for her. They took her.
Sleep once came to Isabeau like a silken descent — gentle, prayer-laced, guided by the breath of devotion. Now it seized her like possession. She would close her eyes, rosary tight in hand, whispers of Ave Maria crumbling against her lips, and within a single heartbeat, the world around her would shift.
There was no passage of time. No slow falling. One blink — and she was
there. Heat. Scent. Skin. The weight of something unseen pressing against her chest, her thighs, her conscience. The air in her chamber felt too close. Her shift clung to her skin with sweat that had no source but shame. And when the dream came — as it did, now, every night — it came not as torment, but as rapture.
Lucien was always waiting. In the dream, the space changed. Sometimes it was a room of red velvet walls and firelight, other nights a stone chamber lined with shadow and silence. But Lucien was always the same — shirtless, barefoot, his gaze lit with something between cruelty and worship. He never spoke first. He let her feel the pull. And her body always betrayed her first.
Her thighs would part instinctively. Her breath would catch. Her nipples, already stiff under her shift before sleep, would ache when his eyes swept over them. Her sex would pulse with something hot and slick, and she would feel the dampness between her legs before she even registered desire. She tried to resist. But resistance came slower now.
Each dream began a little closer. A little bolder. Tonight, he was behind her. She stood trembling in a pool of golden light, and his hand curled around her waist as if it had always belonged there. She didn't recoil. She should have. But instead she shivered — not from fear, but from anticipation.
"My little saint," he murmured, lips grazing the shell of her ear. "You're trembling." She swallowed, her voice lost. "I can feel how wet you are already," he whispered. His fingers slid over her belly, then lower. Beneath her shift. The heat of his skin on hers made her hips jerk, the muscles of her thighs clenching in betrayal. "You ache," he said. "Every day. Every hour. And only I can take it away." "Please…" she gasped. She didn't even know what she was pleading for.
He didn't ask. His fingers found her center — slick, swollen, unbearably sensitive. He pressed, circled, teased. She moaned. She tried to stifle it, biting her lip hard, but the sound still came. He pressed her forward. Bent her at the waist. Her hands braced on unseen furniture, her breasts swaying beneath the thin fabric, shift riding up to bare her backside to the heat of him. She could feel his arousal, thick and hard, brushing the crease of her ass. He didn't push inside her. Not yet.
Instead, he slipped two fingers into her from behind, slow and deep. She choked on her own breath. "You're already so tight," he murmured. "And you're begging to be ruined." He curled his fingers. She whimpered.
The rhythm he set was unrelenting — slow enough to drive her mad, deep enough to bring her to the edge in seconds. His free hand snaked around her front, thumb circling her clit with brutal precision. Her legs trembled. "Don't fight it," he whispered. "You want this." She tried to pray. Tried to whisper
Hail Mary. But the words tangled in her throat. All that came out was:
"Lucien…"
And then her climax took her. It wasn't like the first time, weeks ago — not the trembling, shocked surrender of a virgin's body discovering pleasure. This was violent. Pulsing. She came with a scream, her back arching, thighs jerking uncontrollably, fluids gushing down her legs as her body spasmed.
She heard herself sob. Not from pain. From the sheer force of it. From how good it felt to give in.
She woke in darkness. Gasping. Slick. Her body throbbed with aftershocks — nerves still alive with the pleasure that had detonated in her sleep. Her shift was soaked, clinging to her skin in damp patches of sweat and something far more humiliating. Between her thighs, her flesh still quivered, the pulsing of her release echoing long after her mind had returned to wakefulness.
The sheets were ruined. She pressed her hand to her chest. Her heart beat like a drum. Her rosary lay forgotten beneath her pillow, its crucifix cold, useless. She wanted to cry. She wanted to vomit. She wanted to fall to her knees and scream her prayers until her throat bled. But instead… she reached between her legs. She touched the slippery heat still there. She pressed her fingers lightly — and her hips jerked. She moaned. And then, ashamed, she curled into herself and sobbed.
The next day she could hardly walk.
Each step sent a twinge of heat up her thighs. Her hips ached from the dream — not from the imagined thrust of him inside her, but from the way her body had twisted and bucked against phantom fingers. Her breasts were sore. Her nipples so sensitive, the brush of fabric made her wince.
She prayed in the chapel for hours. But the prayers were dry. Mechanical. She mouthed the words without meaning. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw
him. Felt him. He hadn't even taken her yet. Not truly. And already, she was being undone by the anticipation.
That night, she tried to fight sleep.
She splashed cold water across her face, knelt for prayer until her knees went numb, held the crucifix so tightly it left an imprint in her palm. But her body was exhausted. Her soul even more so. And when she finally gave in, the dream took her immediately.
She was lying on her back. Naked. Her legs were spread, but not by force — by want. Lucien knelt between them. His eyes met hers, and the hunger there made her breath catch. "Tell me you missed me," he said. She couldn't speak.
He dipped his head, and then his mouth — warm, firm, devout — closed around her clit. She cried out. His tongue moved slowly at first, teasing, tasting. Then faster. His hands pinned her hips down, holding her in place as she began to buck, to writhe, to gasp his name over and over again. "Lucien… oh God… Lucien—please—"
She climaxed with a sob. But he didn't stop. He licked her through it. Then again. Her legs shook. Her eyes rolled back. She screamed. A second orgasm crashed through her, harder than the first. By the third, she was begging him to stop. But not because she didn't want more. Because she couldn't take it. Because she was
breaking.
When Isabeau awoke, the first thing she noticed was the wetness. The sheets beneath her were not just damp — they were soaked, heavy with sweat and something slicker, saltier, darker. Her shift clung to her body like a second skin, sheer with moisture, drawing a perfect outline of her breasts and hips beneath the fabric. She could feel it between her thighs — the telltale heat, the soreness, the tenderness of flesh rubbed raw by relentless stimulation. Her thighs pressed instinctively together, but it only heightened the awareness, sent another tremor through her overstimulated core.
Her chest rose and fell in shallow, uneven breaths. Her heart pounded as if she had run for miles, but her limbs felt weak, her muscles jelly-soft and unresponsive. She tried to shift, to roll to her side, and a quiet, involuntary sound escaped her throat — a whimper of oversensitive nerves and the ache of being undone again and again by hands that were never really there.
The room was steeped in silence, the lone candle having burned down hours ago, its wax hardened on the table. Moonlight filtered faintly through the narrow slit of the window, painting silver patterns across the floor and her disheveled bedding. She didn't move. Didn't reach for the rosary. Didn't cover herself. Because for the first time, Isabeau did not wake in horror. She woke in longing.
She lay in the mess of her own pleasure and shame and let the weight of it settle over her like a second blanket. She could still feel him — Lucien — not just his touch, but the presence of him. The scent of him seemed etched into her mind. Musk. Fire. Leather. A heat that memory could not purge. Her nipples tightened at the thought of his mouth. Her legs shifted again without permission.
And then it hit her. The truth she had tried so hard not to name. She wanted to go back. Not to the convent. Not to her prayers. To the dreams. To
him. The realization curled cold and slow through her gut, a rotted serpent coiled in velvet. She had not simply surrendered to sin. She had begun to
crave it.
The tears came not from guilt. Not yet. They came from the ache. From the empty place inside her chest where the voice of God used to whisper, and now there was only silence — and the memory of moaning his name as she climaxed. She curled into herself, small and broken in the center of her ruined bed, and listened to the absence.
No angel wept for her. No prayer came to her lips. Only breath. Only want.
She did not go to the chapel the next morning. She didn't eat. She dressed slowly, carefully, choosing her simplest habit, tying it tighter than usual around her waist as if she could physically bind herself to what remained of her vow. But the fabric chafed her sore skin. The brush of linen against her nipples made her breath catch. Even the weight of the veil over her hair felt oppressive. She was hot beneath it. Flushed. Swollen. Like her body had become a wound the dream had reopened again and again until it could no longer close.
She sat by the window all afternoon, staring out across the hills in the distance — the forest, the village, the sky smeared with gathering storm clouds. Her thoughts were slow, thick with heat and guilt and need. She twisted the rosary in her fingers, not out of piety but as a desperate tether to the world outside her own unraveling.
And still her body responded to nothing but
him. She tried to think of her prayers. Tried to remember the verses that once filled her with light and certainty. But all she could remember was the sound of her own moans as he took her apart. And how easily her soul had gone quiet beneath her skin.
That night, she didn't fight sleep. She welcomed it. She blew out the candle with trembling hands and crawled beneath fresh sheets, though she already knew they would be ruined by morning. Her shift was thinner than the one before — not by choice, but by circumstance — and she didn't bother changing it. Her legs slid together with a soft, shivering friction, and her hands curled beneath her pillow, no longer clasped in prayer.
When the dream came, it did not come as punishment. It came as invitation. She found herself kneeling, bare-skinned, in the château's forgotten chapel — the same chapel that had once been her refuge, now twisted into something unreal, dripping with candlelight and sin. The altar loomed ahead, shadowed and empty. The air carried the scent of incense and heat, and beneath it all, that unmistakable aroma of him — of Lucien.
She didn't hear him enter. She felt him. He stood behind her, warm and silent, his breath brushing the nape of her neck. "You still come here," he said softly, amused. She closed her eyes. Her mouth opened. But no scripture came. "I came to pray," she whispered. "Then kneel." She already was.
He moved around her, steps slow, controlled. She looked up — and he was watching her with those dark, gleaming eyes, as if she were something sacred… or something already his. Lucien reached out. His fingers, long and sure, caressed the curve of her cheek. Down her neck. Across her chest, where her nipples stood stiff in the cool air. He didn't hesitate. He brushed a thumb across one peak, then the other, and her breath caught audibly. "You're holier like this," he said. "On your knees. Worshiping."
She didn't speak. Her body spoke for her. He unfastened his trousers, slow, deliberate, the sound of fabric sliding open loud in the vaulted silence of the chapel. He revealed himself to her — thick, hard, already gleaming at the tip. "You've dreamed of this," he murmured.
And she had. She had imagined it every night — the weight of him, the heat, the taste. "Open your mouth." She obeyed.
Lucien stepped closer, his presence stretching the air taut with hunger and dominion. The head of his cock hovered inches from her lips, thick and flushed, a bead of arousal glistening at the tip like the first taste of a sacrament profaned. The scent of him filled her nostrils—warm skin, iron, something darker, male and primal and suffocating.
Isabeau's breath hitched, her lips parted without conscious command. She should have looked away. She should have recoiled. Instead, her eyes lifted to his, wide and wet, pleading without words. Not for mercy. For permission.
His hand curled into her hair, not harshly, but with authority — like he was claiming something long overdue. He ran his fingers through the golden strands, gathering them at the nape of her neck, holding her still as he guided the crown of his length to her lips. He didn't need to say it again. She opened her mouth.
Her tongue met the salt-slick heat of him and her spine arched in response, a shudder wracking her frame from the base of her skull to the tips of her toes. He pushed forward slowly, letting her feel the stretch, the weight. The head slid past her lips, then deeper — testing the softness of her tongue, the give of her throat.
She moaned. The sound vibrated against his shaft. "Good," he whispered. "So good, little saint…"
He pulled back, then pushed in again — deeper this time. Her jaw ached already, but she did not resist. Her hands gripped his thighs for balance, her fingernails digging into the firm flesh as he began to guide her pace. His hips rocked slowly, each stroke filling her mouth more fully. Saliva spilled over her lips, slicking his cock, running down her chin in glistening strings.
"You were made for this," he growled, hand tightening in her hair. "Made to kneel. To serve. To
feel me…" She gagged as he slid to the back of her throat, but didn't pull away. Her body trembled with the shame of how much it turned her on. Her nipples were tight, painfully so, aching for attention. Her sex throbbed, empty and slick, as if jealous of the attention her mouth was now receiving.
Tears welled in her eyes. Not from resistance. But from how badly she
wanted it. Lucien pulled her off with a soft pop, the strand of spit connecting her lips to his cock catching the candlelight. "Look at you," he said, thumb dragging across her lower lip, gathering her saliva, then pressing it into her cheek. "You don't even need to be touched to come anymore, do you?"
She gasped, chest heaving, lips swollen. Her eyes fluttered closed and a low, keening sound spilled from her throat as her thighs clenched tightly. The pressure, the fullness, the filth of what she'd just done — it brought her to the edge like the flick of a match near oil. Lucien leaned down, mouth at her ear. "Come for me."
And she did. Her body bucked violently, a cry torn from her as the orgasm ripped through her core. She collapsed forward onto her hands, body wracked with tremors. Her sex contracted wildly around nothing, slickness coating the insides of her thighs. She was breathless, ruined — her own moans echoing off the high chapel walls like the death of something holy.
He watched her, satisfied. Not with cruelty. With possession. She was his.
When she woke, it was still dark. Her shift was twisted around her waist, bunched and soaked. Her thighs were spread, trembling. The bed beneath her — drenched. A thick, pungent scent of sex clung to her skin, her sheets, the air itself.
She tried to move, but her limbs were weak. Her jaw ached. Her tongue was still coated in phantom taste. She whimpered and curled into herself. The rosary lay on the floor, half buried in the folds of the blanket. She reached for it, fingers brushing the beaded chain, but stopped. Because it no longer meant anything.
Not when the only name she moaned in the night was not God's. It was Lucien's. And she moaned it again. Even now.
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