I absolutely hate the Church. They’re all up in my kitchen, telling me what to do, what I can’t do, what I’m allowed to think. They’ve hung a heavy dose of guilt around my neck and it gets so heavy sometimes I can barely move.

I think about waging war, taking on the Church and all the elders and giving them a taste of fear like they deserve. But it’s just a dream. With the shame sheets they’ve tied around us, every sin shows up red, and they know who needs punishing. It’s best to stay as pure as possible.

It didn’t have to be that way. Stan wanted her. Even now it was obvious. Maybe it had never been to Richard, who had been too busy indulging his taste for punishment. And everyone else was too scared to see anything but the inside of their own asses, but she knew it the first time he raked his eyes over her. Stan wanted everything that had ever belonged to Richard and that included her.

He could have sent someone else to fetch her back, but he wanted to find her himself. She would use his lust to her advantage.

Part Five

The idea was to keep piling bricks until you’d walled yourself into a tomb of your own making. It was all very Gothic, something straight out of Poe.

His father had forbid him to attend architecture school, so his tomb would be a monument to those abandoned ambitions.

She was forced to curtsy from a young age. The Queen required the girl to bow with the proper technique, and when she failed, the punishments were severe. The monks were called upon to drill her at all hours, contorting her body with their chaste hands until the proper form was hammered into her forever.

For her part, she deserved all the harsh treatment as she was particularly recalcitrant. She denied the Queen’s authority and would have gladly ripped out the queen’s eyes or stabbed her with the crown. She would never forgive the Queen for murdering her father.