The Nun's Vow To The Devil

Lost In The Cold

Celeste's POV

The first thing I felt against my skin was cold.

Not the biting cold of the underground club or the stone floors of the convent, but a creeping, bone-deep chill that told me I had been unconscious long enough for my body to forget warmth entirely.

Something rough and thin covered me, a cloth, barely enough to count as covering, and beneath it, I was naked.

I didn't move immediately. I lay still, blinking my eyes at the gray morning light filtering through tinted car windows while my brain tried to assemble itself into something that wasn't a heap of grogginess.

The car.

I was in a car.

I groaned, my body ached in all the terrible places. My n*****s burned with a slight sensitivity as I moved, the cold air made it worse.

I remembered the club.

The amber lights and the pulsing music and the man with storm-gray eyes who had watched me and destroyed me too. I remembered the glass he'd pressed into my hands, the burn of whatever was in it, the way the edges of the world had gone soft and golden and how I saw myself from a different eye view.

And then…there was nothing.

Nothing but a blank wall where the rest of the night should have been.

I tried to sit up.

The world tilted violently sideways. My vision exploded into white and spinning darkness all at once, and I grabbed the seat with both hands, gasping, waiting for everything to stop moving so fast.

It didn't, not really. The stars behind my eyes kept dancing no matter how hard I blinked.

The car had stopped.

I hadn't even noticed, too busy trying to keep my own skull from floating off my shoulders.

Through the windshield I could make out the familiar stone face of the convent, its iron gate, the dead flower beds along the front path. The driver was outside already, standing near the hood with his back to me, hands in his pockets.

Trying to focus too many things into my eyes.

My stomach rolled. I reached immediately to the door, my hands frantically looking for a way to open it.

“Where…” Found it. I shoved the door open and immediately vomited onto the ground.

It came in waves, graceless and awful, my whole body heaving while I gripped the door frame with both hands to keep from sliding out entirely. The cloth slipped. I didn't care. Dignity felt like something that had happened to a different person in a different life, and that person felt very far away right now.

Footsteps crunched on gravel. A pause.

"You really are messed up."

The voice was dry. A faint accent was heard from it, and it sounded like those old narrators in those scary movies. I turned my head, still gripping the door, and looked up at him through eyes that couldn't quite focus.

He was older. Not too old, but old. Tattoos crawled up his neck above his collar, dark ink disappearing beneath his jaw. He was looking down at me with an expression that wasn't cruel, wasn't sympathetic, wasn't much of anything really. Just tired.

I opened my mouth to say something. I had no idea what.

He sighed, shrugged out of his coat, and draped it over my shoulders. Then he bent and lifted me, one arm under my knees and one at my back, like I weighed nothing worth commenting on.

"You—" I started.

"Hush."

The word wasn't unkind and beside I doubt I had the energy to do anything right now.

He carried me through the gate, up the front path, through the heavy doors that someone had left unlocked. The motion made my head swim again and I pressed my face against his shoulder and focused on breathing through my nose until the nausea settled back into something manageable.

Mother Superior was waiting in the front hall.

She stood with her hands clasped at her waist, her expression carrying the particular blankness of someone who had already decided how she felt about this situation before it arrived. Her eyes moved over me once — the coat, my bare legs dangling, the state of my face — and then moved to the man holding me.

"Drop her on the table." She gestured toward the long wooden table against the wall. "And then go. We have the morning service to prepare for."

He set me down. The wood was cold against the backs of my thighs.

"Why did you bring her back this late?" Mother Superior asked, already turning away. "It's nearly dawn. The sisters will be rising for lauds in an hour."

The man didn't answer. I heard him shift his weight, then his footsteps moving back toward the door. He paused. I could feel him looking at me — one last glance, brief and unreadable — and then the door opened and closed and he was gone.

The silence he left behind was very loud.

"My head," I said. My voice came out smaller than I intended, rough and scraped raw. "It hurts."

Mother Superior made a sound in the back of her throat. "Stop being a fuss. You aren't the first girl to come back like this, and you won't be the last." She moved toward the inner corridor door, her habit sweeping the floor with its usual quiet authority. "Get yourself to your room and clean up before anyone sees you. You have until the first bell."

She paused at the door with her hand on the frame, not turning around.

"And Celeste." Her voice was perfectly level. "If you vomit on my floors, there will be a punishment. I won't be lenient about it simply because you had a difficult evening."

She shut the door with a bang that made me flinched.

“Rude…” I muttered to myself.

I struggled to sit up, even with the dizziness. I hated feeling like this…this weakness. This girl that had no control over her body or her mind. Me who was sitting here in nothing but a coat.

They didn't even have the decency to cover me up. My body ached, my v****a ached, but my heart ached the more.

I felt like a Devil's w***e. Used and dumped as if…I was nothing.

Was I nothing? Did I not at least deserve to be treated as a woman? Or at least a human being?

I banged my hand against the table, biting my lower lips, my teeth pinching the flesh until I coulf taste the faint iron on my tongue.

I sat on the cold table in a borrowed coat that smelled like cigarettes and someone else's life, and I waited for the tears to come.

They didn't.

My eyes burned.

My throat ached with the particular tightness that usually meant crying was seconds away. But nothing came. Just dry, hollow pressure behind my eyes and the distant sound of morning birds beginning outside the window like the world hadn't noticed anything had changed.

And then the memories did.

Not all at once — in pieces.

I pressed both hands over my mouth.

The vibrator. The table. The way my body had arched toward him without my permission, chasing sensation I had spent six years praying away. The sounds that had come out of me. The things I had said.

“Come back. You bastard, come back and finish it.”

Nausea climbed my throat again, but this time it had nothing to do with the drug.

“Oh Jesus. Jesus, what…what have I done? What demon possessed me?”

I slid off the table immediately.

My legs didn't cooperate. They gave out completely the moment my feet hit the floor, and I went down hard, one knee cracking against the stone, the borrowed coat fanning out around me. I stayed there, palms flat on the cold ground, head hanging, breathing through the shame that was crawling up from somewhere so deep I didn't think prayer could reach it anymore.

"Oh, this is perfect."