Chapter 7: The Forbidden Mother
The walk to Cade’s house was a blur of smeared streetlights and simmering fury. Ethan’s hands were jammed deep in his pockets, fingers curled into useless fists. The elders’ praise, his mother’s mocking whisper—it all played on a loop, a grating soundtrack to his humiliation. He had no plan. Just a need to stand in front of the golden boy, to maybe see a crack in that perfect façade.
Cade’s place was a stark silhouette against the night sky, all sharp angles and cold glass. Ethan paused at the edge of the property, the manicured gravel crunching under his worn shoes. The house should have been silent, a monument to austere discipline. It wasn’t.
A sound leaked from a second-story window, cracked open to the cool air. Not conversation. Not prayer.
It was a cry, high and strained, tipping over into a guttural wail. A woman’s voice. Alina’s voice.
Ethan’s feet moved before his mind could protest, carrying him around the side of the building, drawn to the source like iron to a magnet. A drainage pipe offered purchase. His old clumsiness was gone, burned away by a new, feverish agility. He scaled it with quiet desperation, his muscles singing with an unfamiliar efficiency.
He peered over the sill into a dimly lit bedroom.
The scene was a blasphemy carved in shadow and sweat. Alina was on her knees at the edge of a massive bed, her back arched into a deep, painful curve. Her hands were braced against the footboard, knuckles white. She was naked, her skin sheened and glowing in the low light, every powerful muscle in her back and legs corded with tension.
And her ass, that round, firm, impossible ass he’d heard whispers about, was the focal point. It was framed, possessed. Cade stood behind her, equally bare, his athletic body a sculpture of control and force. His hands gripped the voluptuous swell of her hips, fingers digging into the flesh as he drove into her with a slow, deliberate, and devastating rhythm.
It was anal. Deep, claiming, ruthless.
Alina’s head was thrown back, her short hair damp with sweat. A grimace was etched on her face, but it wasn’t pain. It was something beyond pleasure, a raw, unhinged ecstasy that had stripped away every vestige of her pious mask. Her eyes were squeezed shut, her full lips parted in a continuous, choked gasp.
“Again,” Cade commanded, his voice low and thick, nothing like the respectful tenor he used in the Sanctum. He wasn’t guiding a devotee. He was taking what was his.
“Y-yes,” Alina whimpered, the sound utterly broken.
The pace increased. The wet, rhythmic slap of flesh on flesh filled the room, a counterpoint to their ragged breathing. Alina began to chant, but the words were all wrong. They weren’t cries of passion. They were fractured pieces of doctrine, hurled into the air like shattered glass.
“Thou… shalt not… corrupt… the son!” she gasped, her body jerking with a powerful shudder.
Cade grunted, pulling her back onto him harder. “Too late.”
“The… the mother… shall be… respected!” The commandment became a scream as he hit a depth that made her whole body convulse.
“You’re respecting it,” Cade growled, his own control fraying. “Every inch.”
“Incest… is… a… a abomination!” she shrieked, the word ending in a sobbing wail of release that racked her frame. Her legs trembled violently, but he didn’t stop. He drove her through the peak and into another, her cries morphing into unintelligible, animal sounds.
Ethan watched, frozen. His jealousy curdled into something colder, clearer. This wasn’t just hypocrisy. It was a sacrament of their own. They were rewriting the rules in this slick, dark room, and the power he’d seen in the Sanctum, the unassailable authority, was forged here, in this sweaty, taboo truth.
Cade’s movements became frantic, his own end approaching. He leaned over her, his mouth close to her ear. “Whose are you?”
“Yours!” Alina cried, the admission ripped from her.
“Louder.”
“I’m yours! Yours, Cade! Fuck!”
The final thrusts were brutal, a punctuation mark of dominance. Cade stifled a roar against her shoulder, his body locking into hers. For a long moment, they were a single, trembling statue of exhaustion and release.
Then, the tension seeped away. Cade stepped back, running a hand through his hair. Alina collapsed forward onto the bed, her body a spent, beautiful ruin.
“See?” Cade said, his voice returning to its normal, easy tone, laced now with a tangible smugness. “Nothing purer than the truth.”
Alina mumbled something into the sheets, too wrecked to form words.
Down below, Ethan’s grip on the windowsill was so tight the metal groaned softly. The fire in his chest wasn’t jealousy anymore. It was a cold, clarifying rage. He knew their truth now. The real one. Not the sanitized version for the elders.
And knowledge, he realized as he slowly lowered himself back down the pipe, was a kind of power. A quiet, patient power. It coiled in his gut, next to the embers of his anger, and for the first time, he felt not weak, but waiting. The memory of Alina’s bliss-grimace, a direct contradiction to every law she enforced, was a weapon. He just needed to learn how to hold it.
But Ethan didn't realize it; they already knew that he knew. And they chose Ethan's own mother, Andressa, to set a trap for him. She would tempt him, and he would fall for it.