Saving the Sinner (Curvy for Keeps Book 9) Read online

  Bring on the darkness.

  Bring on the evil.

  Do your fucking worst.

  6

  YURI

  I want to fuck her in the worst way. The need is so powerful it is like a beast lives in me, perhaps the Beast himself. I don’t remember what the Ravarnian faith says about the devil, but perhaps I do not need to remember. Perhaps I just look at myself and read the answer in my own heart, yes?

  “Ten years ago we were running the show, Ivano and I,” I mutter as I kiss her breasts and stroke the front of her thick bush with the back of my hand. She shudders against me and I feel her going back and forth between pulling away and letting herself be drawn to me. I smell her arousal clear and strong, and her cunt is sticky to the touch. I want to taste her on my tongue, drink from her like a wolf at the river. But somehow I am talking, saying things I have never said to another—perhaps not even to myself.

  “Go on,” she says thickly. I know it took effort to say it. I know she feels my darkness and hates it. I cannot blame her. I hate it too.

  “No,” I say, choking back a sickness in my throat. But my arousal smothers the sickness, and I kiss her breasts and rub her mound and smile when I realize that she is drawing the words from me, pulling the confession from the depths of my soul by trapping me with her flesh. “Yes,” I mutter as her scent soothes my throat like honey. “All right. Yes. I will tell you, Yasmin. Fuck it. I’ll tell you everything.” I swallow and grimace and then close my eyes and focus on the softness of her skin, the warmth of her scent, the safety of her touch. Her large breasts cast shadows over me and I wonder if the Goddess is in that shadow. I decide that she is, and I pinch her nipples without opening my eyes.

  “You called them girls,” Yasmin says. I feel the hesitation in her heartbeat. She doesn’t want to know but she’s forcing herself to ask. “Were they really . . .”

  “No,” I say quickly. “We called them girls but they were all women. Young but of age. Virgins all.” I pause and take a breath. “At least they were when they came to us.”

  Yasmin tightens and I tighten my grip on her. One hand presses on the small of her back and my other hand is between her legs. My face stays pressed against her belly like I’m listening at the womb. “That’s what you did, you and Ivano?” she says. “Take them for yourselves first? Exercise your power and dominance over them.”

  I grunt. “Power and dominance, yes. But not over the women.”

  She looks down at me and I smile up at her. The lights shine down through her open hair, sending splinters of light into my eyes. “Power and dominance over other men,” she says softly. “Over your bosses. Your customers. Perhaps even each other?”

  “Especially each other,” I say with a grin. “We grew up together like brothers. But like brothers we were always in competition. Always trying to outdo each other.” The grin fades as I remember what I worked so hard to forget. “The things we did, Yasmin. Unspeakable things. Unforgivable things.”

  “Nothing is unforgivable,” she whispers. Her fingers slide through my hair and I groan and fight back a sudden urge to cry.

  The emotion startles me, and I recoil and stare up at her. “You’re a liar,” I snap, gritting my teeth and tightening my grip. My right hand cups her crotch tight, and although I yearn to slide my fingers up her cunt and drive deep inside, I won’t do it. I know what she is. I know this is a test for me. Why else would the Goddess send a virgin nun to my dark cave?

  She’s not a true virgin and she’s not a real nun, Yuri, comes the whisper from the darkness in my heart, the cave in my soul where the beast lives. Take her hard and deep like you used to in the old days, your eyes closed because it was not about the women but about you. Take her like you took those nameless, faceless women back then, sent them out into the world with your mark on them, your scent on them, your scars on them. Show this fallen angel that she is wrong, that some men are so broken they cannot be fixed. Show this failed nun that some sinners are so forsaken they cannot be forgiven.

  I almost do it, almost grab her by the hair and push her face down into the booth, smack her ass and spit on her asshole, lick her slit until it’s red and gaping, spread her so wide she screams the name of the Goddess, take her so deep she sees hell with every thrust.

  But then I relax my hand between her legs and pull my face away from her skin. “You don’t know what you’re saying, Yasmin. You’re sweet and kind and fucking clueless about the darkness in the world.”

  “I don’t care about the darkness in the world. Right now I only care about the darkness in you, Yuri.” I frown up at her and try to see her eyes. The light comes from behind and her face is in shadow. For a moment a chill goes through me and I feel like I’m looking at the Goddess herself. “You’re my test, Yuri. The Goddess wants to see if I’m ready to face the worst and forgive it. That’s the duty of a nun. That’s the only duty of a nun.”

  “You’re not a nun,” I snap.

  “Shut up,” she snaps back. “Mother Supreme doesn’t get to decide who becomes a nun and who doesn’t. She doesn’t own the religion! No one can own a religion. She doesn’t have any power over me! To hell with her!”

  I grin when I see her eyes flash as she shakes her head. “Now you’re talking. Fuck her, right? To hell with the Mother Supreme!”

  I slide my hand up along her bare back and grasp her neck from behind, pulling her in so I can kiss her lips. But she turns her head and I graze her cheek hungrily, my cock flexing as I fight back the urge to grab her hair and make her mine right fucking now.

  “I didn’t mean that,” she says. “Mother Supreme was just following the rules. She’s got her own tasks, her own tests, her own path to the divine. I can’t judge her.”

  “You just did,” I whisper, a perverse need to push her buttons taking over. I saw the anger behind those brown eyes, felt the venom behind those gentle words. She’s got her own darkness inside. That’s why she’s here.

  That’s why she’s mine.

  “I did just judge her, didn’t I?” she says, curling her tongue up over her upper lip. She shrugs and smiles down at me. “Well, I forgive myself. See? It’s easy. Now you do it.”

  “I forgive myself,” I deadpan. “Yes. Very easy. Now will you kiss me?”

  “No,” she says. “I’d never forgive myself for that.”

  I’m about to laugh and remind her she’s bare breasted and her panties are halfway down her thighs. But then I realize that everything we did was me doing something to her. She hasn’t reciprocated. She hasn’t told me to stop, sure. But she hasn’t begged me to go on either. She’s doing what she needs to do, doing what will draw out my confession. This is a holy interrogation—not with the FBI but the Ravarnian Goddess herself.

  “You know I can make you mine and there is nothing to stop me,” I growl.

  “Except your conscience,” she says.

  I chuckle. “That train left the station years ago.”

  “I don’t think so. I heard you speak to the Goddess when you were alone with Ivano’s body,” she says. “You asked to be forgiven. You asked to be saved. You asked to be . . . loved.”

  I snort and look away. “You didn’t hear me right.”

  She smiles and looks right at me. “Have you never been loved, Yuri?”

  I stare up at her and swallow hard. That emotion I can’t name swells in my throat and I wince like I’m being stabbed behind the eyes. “Is that from the nun textbook?” I say, trying to smile but not managing it.

  “Yes,” she says, managing an easy smile that’s warm and intimate. Perhaps a woman in love would smile like that. Though how the fuck would I know.

  “Love is a trick you play on yourself,” I say.

  “OK. So have you played that trick on yourself yet?”

  I look up at her and wonder what kind of trick this is and who’s playing the trick and whether it’s a trick at all. She shows me that smile again, and it has that aching, haunting warmth of a woman in love. Of cour
se it can’t be. It must be my own mind playing a trick. But didn’t I just say that’s the secret of love? That love is your own mind playing a trick on itself? “I . . . I think I’m . . .” I start to say as my vision narrows and suddenly I’m in a tunnel where the walls are lined with images that are my memories, my deeds, my transgressions. I blink up at her and wonder if I’m dead, if Ivano got a shot off when we fought, if the joke’s on me not him.

  But that smile on her lips isn’t a joke, and that look in her eye isn’t a trick, and those words on her tongue aren’t a lie. I blink three times with the calm bewilderment of someone who’s just been stabbed deep and clean, with such precision that there’s no pain, just the clarity that comes before death.

  “I think my mind is playing that trick right now, Yasmin,” I whisper as that clarity burns a path through my mind, drenching that dark tunnel with a light that obliterates the memories, incinerates those images, destroys the darkness. “It tells me that you love me, Yasmin. My trickster mind says you’re smiling like a woman in love, that what I see in your eyes is . . . is . . . oh, hell, Yasmin . . . it’s forgiveness, isn’t it? Forgiveness is just another name for love, isn’t it? Is that what I’m seeing? Is that what I’m feeling? Is that what you’re feeling?”

  She doesn’t reply, and the last question hangs above my neck like the executioner’s ax, like the guillotine’s blade. Suddenly I don’t know what I’m asking, don’t know what I’m doing, don’t even know who I fucking am right now. All I know is what I see in her eyes, and so in my desperation I reach for it like a drowning man.

  And before I can stop myself I grab the back of her neck and pull her in. I pull her down. Just like a drowning man sometimes pulls down the one who tries to save him, I pull her down.

  Down into me, down onto me, down with me.

  And I kiss her.

  Hard on those forbidden lips, I kiss her.

  By the Goddess, I kiss her.

  7

  YASMIN

  He kisses me before I can stop it, and when Yuri’s tongue enters my mouth I know I failed my test. I know it because my lips part and my throat opens and my tongue twists around his like we’re two snakes in the Garden of the Goddess, frolicking in the forbidden, tasting the temptation, savoring the sin.

  But the need burns in me, and I kiss him back as that question echoes in my head:

  Is that what you’re feeling? he’d asked me.

  And when he’d asked the question I saw the fear in his green eyes, sensed the vulnerability behind that scarred face, understood the simple truth that even the worst sinner has a story, even the cold-hearted need warmth, even the most hateful yearn for love.

  So I didn’t answer the question. I let him believe what he saw in my eyes. I let his mind play that most ancient of tricks.

  A trick my own mind is playing on itself now too.

  “I love you, Yasmin,” he says to me as he breaks from the kiss and then almost breaks my nose as he lunges back for another that’s brutally deep. “Say it, Yasmin. Fucking say it. Please say it. I beg you. Say it and I’ll be saved.”

  “I love you, Yuri.” I say, my heart doing that thing where it feels like I just died for a moment and came back. I know I can’t mean it and he can’t mean it. But that mind-trick is so darned powerful it feels like we both mean it.

  Now I’m scared, but the fear only makes things more vivid, more real, more inescapable. And so when Yuri tosses me against the cushioned couch and rips off my jeans and panties and holds my big thighs apart and rams his face into my crotch, I scream and hunch forward and without knowing what I’m doing just plunge my fingernails into his thick bare shoulders and arch my neck back and scream again as I come with a violence that blinds me, a wildness that wounds me, a brutality that breaks me down the middle.

  Warm blood trickles down my fingers just as Yuri’s thick tongue curls inside my cunt, and I slam my head back into the couch and buck my hips up and spread my legs so wide it’s like I’m giving birth.

  He’s inside you, comes the thought as I come again like a river breaking its dam. Oh, hell, he’s inside you, Yasmin. You’re going to hell, Yasmin.

  She’s already in hell, you idiot, comes another thought like my thoughts are talking to each other without bothering with me. Who am I if not my thoughts, I wonder.

  You’re his, comes the answer to something I didn’t know was a question. You’re his now. You saved him, Yasmin. You saved him but you lost yourself to do it.

  I groan as Yuri holds me down and pumps his tongue into me with a fury that makes me shudder. I’m so wet I feel myself flowing like a waterfall, and when I look down past my breasts I see Yuri’s scarred face buried in my bush, his nose moving back and forth as he tongue-fucks me like the whore-nun I am, the slut-savior I am, the hymenless-harlot I was born to be.

  I giggle in my delirium as I imagine Mother Supreme frowning down at me as Yuri’s tongue darts in and out of my pink pussy. My own tongue curls up over my lip and I’m about to giggle again but then suddenly Yuri presses his thumb hard against my clit and curls his tongue up against my vagina wall and slides his other hand under my butt and pushes his middle finger into my asshole and with a gurgle and a groan I come again all over his face like a little girl who can’t hold it in, can’t hold it back, can’t stop herself from being dirty, so dirty, so fucking dirty.

  I’m sobbing as I come, and I wail up at the dark ceiling and clamp my thighs closed tight, trapping Yuri’s face in my crotch. His tongue is still inside me, and I’m still coming like that filthy girl. The climaxes keep coming, one rolling in as another recedes, the waves crashing into each other and sending secondary orgasms rippling through my body all the way to my curled-up toes and my bloodied fingernails. I gasp and hold my hands up and see Yuri’s blood, and I wonder if all the blood is now on my hands, if saving him has doomed me, if that’s what saving a sinner does to the savior.

  Now I’m losing my shit, and I gasp for air and open my thighs and wriggle away from Yuri. He looks up wild-eyed and panting, his nose and chin dripping with my wetness, his lips glistening with my syrup. I blink and put my hands between my legs, forgetting that his blood is on them.

  And now there’s blood streaking my inner thighs, and I stare and my heart flutters and flips and slows down and speeds up. I blink at the blood and blink again and then suddenly I smile when I realize what it looks like.

  “Huh,” I say, sitting cross-legged and bending over and smiling as I enjoy a weirdly shameless moment. Not shameless in the ordinary sense of the word, but shameless as in really without shame.

  Yuri sits down hard on the floor and props himself up on his arms. He keeps his gaze firmly on my face even though I’m looking at my own crotch in childlike fascination.

  “Did I hurt you?” he says after a while.

  “Huh?” I say, snapping my head up and blinking like I just got woken mid-dream. “No. I was just . . . I mean I was just . . . I don’t know. Oh, I don’t know, Yuri.”

  “You don’t know if I hurt you? Does anything hurt? Let me see. Oh, shit, there’s blood, Yasmin.”

  “It’s yours,” I say, smiling as that no-shame shame-less feeling stays with me.

  Yuri frowns and looks down at chest. His eyes go wide when he sees trickles of syrupy blood on his pectorals. He looks at his shoulders and chuckles and exhales and shakes his head. “Thank hell for that.” He shakes his head again. “For a second I thought it was your blood from . . . that maybe I broke your . . . well, that perhaps the Mother Supreme was wrong.”

  “I think we said to hell with the Mother Supreme,” I say, moving my crossed legs up and down like butterfly wings. I’m giddy and glowing, and I know this can’t be wrong, that the way my body’s humming can’t be wrong, Then I look into Yuri’s eyes and I decide that this isn’t wrong either. After all, once a sinner’s been saved he’s no longer a sinner, right? That’s how it works, right?

  That’s exactly how it works, I think as I see my wetness on Yuri�
��s face and think about how we anoint people with oils to bring them into the faith. I look down at the blood that anoints me and back at Yuri as it suddenly makes so much sense even though it shouldn’t, even though it doesn’t, even though it can’t.

  Because if it does make sense, then maybe I am in hell finally.

  “Finally hell is come to earth,” comes a woman’s voice that makes me gasp and leap off the couch for my clothes. Yuri steps in front of me as I dress in a frenzy, shaking my head and praying that I wake up from this nightmare.

  Because it has to be a nightmare. Why else would she be here?

  “Who the hell are you?” says Yuri. He puts his hands on his hips and narrows his gaze at the tall, lithe figure of the Mother Supreme. I barely recognize her without the black habit and white head-covering, and although now I see that it’s her, I still don’t believe it. Did she follow me here? Why? What’s going on?

  “Where’s Ivano?” she says, her gaze lingering on me before she looks at Yuri. He stays silent, and the Mother Supreme glances back at me and I see that she’s as surprised as I am to find me here. Of course, I don’t know if that surprises me more than if she’d followed me here.

  “That’s the Mother Supreme,” I whisper from behind Yuri. My bra is useless and my top is ripped down the middle. My panties are missing and my jeans are open at the crotch because somehow Yuri destroyed the zipper with his big hands. I smell like sex and blood, and I decide that this is exactly what hell would be like. My personal hell.

  Yuri turns his head halfway towards me, his jaw tight, his forehead creased deep again. He rubs his chin and slowly turns back to the Mother Supreme. “What business do you have with Ivano?”

  She hesitates. “The same business I have with you, of course. Hasn’t Ivano arrived yet?”

  “Ivano has come and Ivano has gone.” Yuri’s body stiffens, and I stiffen behind his body. He thinks and then grunts. “But yes,” he says slowly. “He did mention a donation to the Church. He left the money with me. I will send it on. Sorry you had to come all this way, Mother. But Ivano is a busy man. You understand.”