After receiving his orders, Gabriel returned to the Praecia Veil.

He was walking on thin ice with Eli. Gabriel had bushed boundaries before, but he knew the cost of testing the patience of a man who had once saved his life. He’d since learned that debts owed to Eli were never paid in full. Still, he couldn’t ignore the truth: he’d be long dead if not for that man’s intervention, and perhaps worse if Eli hadn’t found another use for him. 

The mission was supposed to be simple: find the merchant, extract what was needed and dispose of him quietly. 

The secondary task, concerning the courtesan… well, he tried not to think about that.

God willing, it wouldn’t come to that.

And then—

Damn it. 

From the corner of his eye, Gabriel caught movement on the staircase.

The same boy from the night before.

He was dressed in green tonight, and Gabriel thought, unwillingly, that it made the boy’s eyes gleam. 

He watched as Cain walked down the spiral staircase, pausing to exchange soft words with other courtesans. There was something effortless in the way he moved. It was a quiet grace that made the rest of the room feel clumsy by comparison. 

Gabriel exhaled through his nose.

He told himself it was just observation, just another habit of his work. But his pulse said otherwise. 

When their gazes met, Gabriel felt something flicker.

He hadn’t meant to look. And yet, when Cain approached and offered a flame to his unlit cigarette with a hand that didn’t tremble, Gabriel’s intent faltered.

For a moment, there was no mission, no god, no sin. Only the faint scratch of flint, the burn of tobacco and a pair of eyes that watched him with curiosity instead of fear. 

He could have done it then. All it would have taken was a little probing, a few carefully placed words, and a smile that loosened the boy's tongue. Information would spill, and with a single, precise motion, it would be over. But something inside of him stiffened—a refusal he couldn’t name.

Instead, he watched. And the longer he did, the more the weight inside his chest shifted.

“Still deciding.” 

He didn’t know the true meaning behind the words he spoke. He had his orders, but something in him hesitated. 

He told himself he just needed to find the merchant, finish the job, and leave this place behind. 

But the longer he lingered, the more the edges blurred.

He was supposed to be a clean, obedient weapon. But instead, he found himself caught between duty and desire, wondering when exactly the lines between them had started to dissolve.

 He stubbed out his cigarette and stepped into the night. 

Seviel folded around him, while his pulse drummed. He had to slow it down, to put the mission back into the neat box Eli had given him. He couldn’t return empty-handed.

The scent of church incense lifted from somewhere. With it came the cold stone under his knees, and the rasp of Father Issareth’s voice in the nave: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?” 

The lash remembered his back. Iron remembered his blood. 

The memories arrived without invitation. 

He walked till the edges of the memories blurred and the fog swallowed them.

Get your shit together. Find the merchant. Finish. Leave.

 Hours passed like a slow tide. 

When he returned to the Praecia Veil, a hymn, thin and off-key, carried through the mist. 

Mocking. 

Wrong. 

The sound scraped at the scabbed places in his mind. 

He felt the flashbacks like hands at the base of his skull. 

From the haze, a figure emerged—gold flashing at the fingers, fine fabrics catching the lamplight.

The merchant. 

Gabriel’s stomach twisted. The man reeked of wine and sweat, his shirt half-buttoned, his neck marked with the faint bruises of pleasure. His lips glistened, swollen from indulgence. Every inch of him gleamed with the kind of satisfaction that came from forgetting one’s sins entirely. 

He closed the distance. 

No flourish, no theatrics, only the cold press of steel at the man’s throat and the soft inhale that followed.

“Don’t move. Don’t scream.” 

The man stilled. 

“Caleb Arba,” Gabriel said. “Nod if that’s your name.” 

He nodded.

Gabriel lowered his voice until it was inches from the man’s ear. “Tell me, Caleb Arba. How does a man with no family and no inheritance buy emeralds and courtesans? How does nothing become this kind of fortune? It doesn’t add up.” 

A raspy sound left the merchant. “I—” he began, voice frayed. “I had luck. Connections. People helped me. That’s all.”

“Don’t lie to me.” The blade pressed a little harder, just enough to draw a white thread of fear. “Tell the truth. If you do, I’ll make it quick. Lie, and I will make you remember every second until you beg me for the end.”

The man’s answer came in a rush: “Father Enoch—he… helped me. He knew people. He set me up. He takes a portion. I’m—” he groped for words and found none. “I swear, I swear I don’t know much. He does good, he helps the poor—”

Gabriel’s laugh was dry. “Does he help the children?”

“N-no. I don’t—please, I don’t know...” The plea turned into a sob.

“Try again,” Gabriel said.

The surrounding streets narrowed to the pair of them: a merchant’s ragged breath, the small insistence of the blade, the sick hymn in the air that matched the rhythm of his own remembered sermons.

The story came out in fits.

Father Enoch had introduced Caleb to back-channels—donations that never returned to the parish, loans that expanded into estates, introductions to men who liked their entertainment bought and paid for. The priest took a cut, quietly. It made a mockery of his sermons, and that mockery tasted like bile in Gabriel’s mouth.

With every word, the hallucination of the nave pushed closer.

Candles guttering.

Father Issareth’s thunder

Whips striking skin.

His rational mind tried to translate the merchant’s sentences into evidence, into the neat file Eli wanted. Still, some other part, perhaps an old scar, was suturing itself into the present.

The hymn distorted, hacking into his throat.

“You’re wasting my time.”

His breath came jagged.

The blade felt heavier.

The merchant’s voice blurred into the steady rhythm of the lash.

Memory and now were indistinguishable.

Something in him unthreaded.

He had trained himself to be precise, to make violence surgical. Tonight, however, precision slipped like oil through fingers.

The world narrowed to the metal at his palm, the scent of incense and a voice that had taught him holiness by the stick. The holy words had always worked like an anvil, pressing out whatever shape the Church needed. Tonight, they hammered him raw.

Caleb’s eyes widened.

Gabriel’s jaw locked.

He could count the pulse in his own wrist.

One… two...

The hymn rose—a grotesque litany.

He could see the lash, feel the heat of torches in his childhood doorway.

There was a single, terrible clarity: the face of authority and the smell of sanctimony were the same thing.

He moved before thought could align with action.

The blade was no longer an interrogation but a punctuation.

Steel met flesh.

And everything: memory, discipline, prayer—

Imploded into sound.

The body fell.  Silence followed.

He knelt beside the man. His hands no longer shook. His breath was even. Controlled.

He slit Caleb’s shirt clean down the middle, the fabric tearing apart.

Then came the flesh.

Then the ribs.

A crack like thunder, and the body opened before him.

Gabriel bowed his head, almost reverently.

He reached in, fingers steady before using his blade again.

And lifted the heart free.

It was still warm. Still trembling.

He held it for a moment, as if it might speak, as if it might beg for mercy, then laid it gently on the stones beside him.

His breath slowed.

The ringing in his ears softened to a dull hum.

But the quiet didn’t bring peace. It only deepened the void.

He looked down again, at what had been a man, at what might still be forgiven. And something inside him whispered, make it right.

He obeyed.

The trousers came away easily.

The knife moved again.

He removed the seat of the man’s sin and placed it where the heart had once beat.

A transposition. A parody of resurrection.

Blood ran like scripture across the cobblestones.

Gabriel watched it, and for the first time that night, he felt something close to grace.

He rose. Wiped the blade clean.

Lifted his eyes toward the sound of the cathedral bells tolling in the distance. Their echo followed him as he stepped into the dark.

“If God will not forgive me,” he murmured, “then let the Devil make use of me.”

And with that, he was gone, swallowed whole by the mist.

Hours later, the mist had thickened into rain. It fell in fine, silver needles, washing the blood from the pavement, but not from Gabriel’s hands. He walked until his legs trembled, until the noise of the city softened to a heartbeat in the distance.

When he finally stopped, he found himself at the edge of the district once more, just beyond the golden light spilling from the Praecia Veil. Laughter drifted faintly through the open windows, the kind that belonged to the damned.

Through the blur of rain, he saw him again. Cain, standing by his window, framed in candlelight and smoke, his dark hair draping softly over his shoulders. He was smiling at someone just out of sight, lips curving like sin whispered into prayer.

Gabriel’s throat tightened. For a moment, the world held its breath.

He pressed a bloodstained hand to the wall beside him, eyes lifted to the faint glow of the pleasure house's sign. The lamb that bites, he thought bitterly. And I, the wolf too cowardly to devour him.

The rain came harder, blurring the image into streaks of light.

He turned away at last, his footsteps echoing down the empty street. By the time dawn touched the rooftops, there was no sign he had ever been there.

Only the faint trace of smoke and sin, clinging to the air like a benediction turned sour.

༻𐫱༺

Alecto's Kiss: Alecto was born from the blood of Uranus, spilled when Cronus castrated him. With her sisters, Tisiphone and Megaera, she roamed the world as a Fury: snakes in her hair, wings at her back, blood forever weeping from her eyes. Her purpose was to punish mortal crimes, especially wrath and cruelty. Where Nemesis struck at offences against the gods, Alecto struck at the guilty among men, driving them to madness until their sins devoured them.

"The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?" (Jeremiah 17:9)