Chapter 36: Divine Schism
The cries of the dolphins came first, a high, chittering song that cut through the pre-dawn stillness. Then came the silver splash of their arcs against the blood-orange sky.
Bruce watched them from the veranda, a cup of bitter black coffee cooling in his hand. This was the hour he’d come to crave, the hinge between night and day where the world felt newly made, unburdened by the weight of what he was. Behind him, in the sprawling villa, his family slept, a silent, powerful hum beneath his consciousness. The bond was a quiet river at this hour, flowing with dreams and the deep, satiated peace left over from the night before.
His private phone, resting on the weathered teak table beside him, vibrated with a specific, insistent pattern.Not an alert. A call. The ID read: ROMANUS I.
He answered. “Father Matteo. You’re up early. Or late.”
“I haven’t slept, Bruce.” The Pope’s voice was thin, scraped raw. Not by fear, Bruce thought, but by a profound, restless energy. “There have been… developments. Conclaves. Accusations. They have voted.”
Bruce took a slow sip of coffee. The dolphins dove, disappearing into the dark water. “Out with it.”
“I am being… removed. Excommunicated. Officially, for ‘spreading doctrines contrary to the faith and engaging in obstinate heresy.’” A dry, brittle laugh crackled down the line. “The blasphemy, they say, is my insistence that you are the Son of God. That the things you told me, the things I witnessed with my own eyes, are true. They say I have lost my mind. That the stress of the office has broken me.”
The news landed not as a shock, but as an inevitable tectonic shift. Bruce had felt the rumble of it for days, a subtle pressure change in the bond, a foreshadowing.
“I’m sorry,” Bruce said, and meant it. “What can I do for you?”
“Nothing. I called only to thank you.” The old man’s voice strengthened, finding a core of iron. “You showed an old priest that the story he devoted his life to is not a story. It is a living, breathing man who drinks wine and… and has a family. You gave me the courage to choose truth over tradition. For that, I am grateful. And I would like, if it is acceptable, to keep our line of communication open. As I… begin anew.”
Bruce leaned against the sun-warmed rail.“Of course. I enjoy our talks. What’s the new church?”
A pause, filled with the sigh of the sea. “Although I suspect you already know.”
“I have a feeling.”
“It is a church to you, Bruce. To the truth. Not to a symbol on a cross, but to the living man. A church that worships a God who walks among us, who fucks and fights and drinks good wine.” The Pope—no, Matteo now—said the raw word with a scholar’s precision, stripping it of vulgarity, leaving only fact. “I have witnessed miracles with my own eyes. Things that are impossible.Water into wine. Your… transportation. The gold in the eyes of your women. These are not theological concepts.They are data points. The foundation of a new understanding.”
Bruce closed his eyes.A church.Followers. The very thing he’d spent lifetimes, in one form or another, trying to avoid. The weight of it pressed on him, a different kind of gravity.
“I’d rather you didn’t use my real name,” Bruce said, his voice low. “Or disclose my location.”
“I understand,” Matteo replied instantly. “You will be a symbol. An idea. The Man of the Vine. The True Son. The details will be parable. Your privacy is sacred. This I swear.”
Bruce let out a long, slow breath. The first sliver of the sun breached the horizon, turning the sea from ink to liquid fire. “And what will the Church—your old Church—decide to do about me, then? Clearly, the arguments between you and them have moved beyond theology.”
Matteo’s silence was heavy. When he spoke again, the weariness was back, edged with cold concern. “That is the question. Publicly, they will condemn me as a madman. They will bury my testimony, discredit any evidence. They will declare you, if they speak of you at all, a delusion of a failed pontiff. But privately… Bruce, you have humiliated them. In their own heart. You demonstrated a power that makes their rituals seem like empty theater. The Cardinals who voted me out are not just theologians. They are princes of a two-thousand-year-old empire. They do not like their power questioned, especially by a power so blatantly… real. They will not move openly. Not yet. But they will watch. They will search. And they have their own ancient archives, their own guarded secrets. Men who believe they serve God can justify any sin in His name. Be wary.”
The line hung with the unspoken threat. Bruce watched the sun rise fully, bleaching the color from the sky. “Let them watch,” he said finally, a quiet statement of fact. “Let them search. My home is not on any map they know. Thank you for the warning, Matteo.Build your church. Preach your truth. But keep our channel clean.”
“Always. Go in peace, my friend.”
“You too.”
Bruce ended the call. He stood there for a long time, letting the sunrise warm his skin, letting the warning settle into his bones. It wasn’t fear he felt. It was a cold, clarifying focus. Another border had been drawn. Another kingdom had declared him, if not an enemy, then a rival god.
He felt her presence before he heard her. A shift in the air, a warmth at his back.
Camille slid her arms around his waist, pressing her soft, naked body against him. She’d heard. Not the words, but the tension in the bond, the shift in his energy. “Trouble?” she murmured, her lips against his spine.
“A change in management,” he said, covering her hands with his. “The old guard didn’t appreciate the new testament.”
She made a small, understanding sound. Her hands slid down, palms flattening against the hard planes of his stomach, then lower, finding him already stirring, a primal response to the threat, to her touch. “Do we need to be concerned?”
“We always need to be concerned.” He turned in her arms, looking down at her sleep-soft face, her dark eyes full of a fierce, unwavering light. “But not right now.”
He kissed her, deep and claiming, tasting coffee and sleep and her. The simmering energy from the call—the defiance, the territorial surge—channeled instantly, seamlessly, into desire. It was their alchemy, the way they metabolized threat into need.
The sound of the kiss woke the others. It was a soft signal through the bond, a ripple of shared arousal. Bruce felt them stirring, their individual consciousnesses flickering awake and focusing on the veranda, on him.
Lena appeared first, a shadow detaching itself from the deeper shadows of the villa. She was naked, her lithe body gilded by the dawn. She didn’t speak. She walked to him, took his hand from Camille’s hip, and guided it between her legs. She was already wet, hot silk. “Mine first today,” she breathed, her amber eyes glowing. “I need you to fuck the worry out of me.”
He obliged. He bent her over the wide teak rail, the ocean sprawling before them. He pushed into her from behind in one smooth, forceful stroke. She cried out, a sharp, guttural sound that scattered the seabirds. He held her hips, fingers digging into the perfect, rounded flesh of her ass, and set a ruthless pace. The veranda posts shuddered with each thrust.
Camille watched, her own hand moving between her legs, her breath coming faster. Then she turned and kissed Sophia, who had joined them, her trainer’s body taut with anticipation. Their tongues met, a fierce, shared hunger.
Soon, the veranda was alive with them. Elara and Julianna tangled together on a wide sun lounger, Julianna’s mouth on Elara’s breast, Elara’s fingers buried in Julianna’s wetness. Anya and Moira were on their knees before Bruce and Lena, their mouths and hands worshiping any inch of skin they could reach—Bruce’s thrusting hips, Lena’s swaying breasts, the slick junction where their bodies joined.
Ketut brought oil, warm and scented of jasmine. She poured it over Bruce’s back as he drove into Lena, her slender hands massaging the coiled strength of his shoulders, sliding down to stroke the clenched muscles of his ass, feeling the powerful mechanics of his fucking.
The air filled with the symphony of them: the slap of skin on skin, ragged breathing, filthy encouragements swallowed by moans. “Fuck, yes, just like that,” Lena panted, her words broken by each deep penetration. “Harder, Bruce, fucking claim it…”
He did. His cock, thick and demanding, stretched her, filled her completely. He was owning her, owning this moment, this dawn, pushing back against the distant, crumbling empire with the sheer, undeniable reality of this pleasure. He felt Lena’s climax building, a tight, fluttering coil in the bond, echoed by the rising peaks of the others.
But he didn’t let her fall. Not yet.
He pulled out of her, his cock glistening. Lena whimpered at the sudden emptiness.
“On your back,” he growled.
They moved for him, a choreography born of perfect understanding. Lena lay on the woven rug, her legs spread, her body gleaming. Sophia straddled her face, lowering her cunt onto Lena’s waiting mouth. Camille came to Bruce, kissing him hungrily, her hands guiding him as he knelt between Lena’s thighs.
He entered her again, and the connection was electric, amplified. Lena’s muffled moans vibrated against Sophia’s clit. Sophia threw her head back, her own cries joining the chorus. Bruce fucked Lena with deep, measured strokes, watching her eyes roll back in her head from the dual sensation.
Then the bonds fully opened. Not just pleasure, but emotion, image, memory. Bruce saw, felt it all.
He saw the Vatican through Matteo’s eyes—not as a holy seat, but as a gilded cage of fear and petty politics. He felt the old man’s shocking liberation upon being cast out, the terrifying joy of freefall. Simultaneously, he felt Camille’s fierce pride, a mother lion’s protectiveness. He tasted Anya’s adoration, sweet and sharp as a berry. He felt Julianna’s powerful, matching energy, a mirror of his own defiance, channeled into the rhythmic clench of her muscles around Elara’s fingers.It was too much. The sensory tsunami, the emotional crucible.
With a roar that was part anger, part ecstasy, part pure release, Bruce let go. His orgasm tore through him, a white-hot line of fire from his core. He emptied himself into Lena in pulsing, endless waves, the physical release triggering the psychic cascade.
Lena screamed, her body convulsing as her own climax detonated, fueled by his and by Sophia’s grinding rhythm on her mouth. Sophia followed, shuddering violently. Across the veranda, Julianna and Elara came together, a silent, twinned seizure of pleasure. Anya and Moira, their mouths still working, shuddered through their own releases, overwhelmed by the feedback.
Camille was last. She had been waiting, a steady flame. As Bruce’s peak subsided, she climbed onto him, guiding his still-hard cock into her own soaked heat. She rode him slowly, deeply, her eyes locked on his. This was consummation, communion. She took every drop he had left, her own orgasm building not as a storm, but as a rising tide, until it finally crested and broke over her with a low, trembling sigh.
They collapsed into a heap of sweat-slicked limbs and tangled hair, the risen sun now warm on their skin. The dolphins had returned, playing in the bay below, indifferent.
Bruce lay on his back, Camille’s head on his chest, Lena’s leg thrown over his. He stared at the sky, now a flawless blue.
The phone call, the warning, the new border—it was still there. But it was held at bay, framed now by the reality of this: the smell of sex and salt, the weight of his lovers, the quiet hum of the bond, strong as a fortress wall.
Let them have their councils and their condemnations. Let them write their encyclicals and search their dusty archives. His truth was here, breathing and real, etched in sweat and completion on a sun-drenched veranda by the sea. A church of flesh and sacrament, where the only prayer was a gasp, and the only promised land was the one they built with their own bodies, every single day.