Chapter 17: Sacrilege
The family chapel was a vault of silence and forgotten devotion. It existed in the east wing of the estate, a cold, slender space of gray stone and stained glass that depicted martyrdoms in jewel-toned agony. Adrian never came here. He’d avoided it since his mother’s funeral, the memory of incense and dirges clinging to the place like mold.
Yet, his feet carried him there now, Marissa’s hand small and cold in his. He’d told the driver to bring them to the estate, not the penthouse. The basement could wait. First, he needed to spit on the ghost of his brother in the one place the fucker might still feel holy.
The heavy oak door groaned open. The air inside was several degrees cooler, smelling of damp stone and the faint, sweet residue of old candles. Banks of votive lights flickered redly near the altar, casting long, dancing shadows up the walls. And there, kneeling before a statue of the Virgin Mary, her plaster face serene in the gloom, was Luca.
He was shirtless, the bandages wrapping his head and jaw a stark white against the ink and tan of his skin. The sutures on his cheek were just visible, a dark, meticulous track. His head was bowed, his hands clasped. He looked like a fallen angel at prayer.
Adrian stopped just inside the doorway, Marissa halting beside him. He felt her fingers tighten.
Luca didn’t turn. “I knew you’d come,” he said, his voice a ruined, slurred thing, distorted by the injury to his face. It was worse than Adrian had imagined. The words were wet, mangled. “Bringing your whore to church. Classy.”
“Get up,” Adrian said, his voice flat.
Luca unclasped his hands and stood slowly, turning. The firelight caught the ruin of his face. The sneer the wound forced was grotesque, permanent. But his eyes, one partly swollen shut, burned with a lucid, hateful fire. He looked past Adrian to Marissa. “Still wearing his cast-offs, sweetheart? You know, he’ll get tired of you. He always does.”
Marissa said nothing. She just stared back, her chin lifted.
Luca took a step forward, his movements loose, uncoordinated. Painkillers, Adrian thought. Or something stronger. “She took my dick, you know,” Luca said, his gaze locked on Adrian, a slow, malicious smile twisting his usable lip. “Right there in your precious lounge. Downtown. She took it all the way and moaned. Came on it. She loved it.”
Adrian didn’t move. A strange, cold clarity settled over him. The lie was obvious—a pathetic, wounded animal lashing out. But the image, the violation of it, seared through the logic. His lounge. His brother’s cock inside her. His property, defiled.
He saw Marissa flinch beside him, not from the memory, but from the poison of the words.
“He’s lying,” she whispered, the sound swallowed by the stone.
“I remember the taste,” Luca slurred, pressing on, his bandaged fingers tracing the line of his sutures. “Like cheap champagne and regret.”
That was it.
Adrian crossed the space in three strides. His open hand connected with Luca’s face with a crack that echoed like a snapped branch. Luca’s head whipped to the side, his body following, collapsing sideways onto the low step of the altar. He grunted, stunned, spittle flying from his torn mouth.
Adrian stood over him, breathing hard. He looked down at his brother, a broken mess on the cold stone, then he looked at the Virgin Mary, her painted eyes looking blankly over his shoulder. A savage, profane idea bloomed in his mind, perfect and terrible.
He turned to Marissa. She was still by the door, her body rigid, her eyes wide.
“Come here,” he said, his voice not loud, but it filled the silent chapel.
She came. Her steps were hesitant, but she came. She stopped before him, her gaze flicking from his face to Luca’s prone form, then back.
Adrian took her face in his hands. “Do you trust me?” he asked, his thumbs stroking her cheeks.
She searched his eyes, seeing the storm there. After a heartbeat, she gave a single, tiny nod.
“Good.” He released her, turning to the altar. It was a simple slab of white marble, worn smooth by centuries of piety. He swept his arm across it, sending a brass candlestick and a dusty Bible clattering to the floor. The noise was shockingly loud.
Luca groaned, pushing himself up on one elbow. “What the fuck are you doing?”
Adrian ignored him. He looked at Marissa. “Take off your clothes. Now.”
Her breath hitched. In the dim, holy light, her face paled. She understood. This was no bedroom. This was a desecration. A statement. Her hands went to the hem of her sweater, trembling slightly. She pulled it over her head, let it fall. She unbuttoned her jeans, pushed them and her underwear down her legs, stepped out of them. She stood naked before the altar, her skin glowing in the votive light, her body a sinuous curve of flesh and shadow.
Adrian’s blood hammered in his ears. She was magnificent. A living sacrifice.
“On the altar,” he commanded. “On your back.”
She climbed onto the cold marble, lying back. The stone bit into her skin. She shivered, but her eyes never left his.
Adrian undressed quickly, his own movements sharp, furious. He tossed his clothes aside, his body a pale, muscular contrast to the dark chapel. His erection was already thick, heavy, jutting from his body with an almost violent intent.
Luca had managed to sit up, leaning against the altar steps, watching with a stunned, drugged horror. “You’re insane,” he slurred. “This is holy ground.”
“It’s stone,” Adrian snarled, not looking at him. He positioned himself between Marissa’s spread thighs. He didn’t touch her, didn’t kiss her. He simply guided the head of his cock to her entrance, already slick with her fear and her arousal. He looked down into her eyes. “You hear him? He says you worship at this altar.”
He thrust into her, a single, deep, unforgiving invasion. She gasped, her back arching off the cold marble, her nails scrabbling for purchase on the smooth surface.
“You don’t,” Adrian grunted, beginning to move, setting a relentless, pounding rhythm. The slap of their flesh echoed off the stone vault. “This cunt,” he said, driving into her harder, “doesn’t worship plaster saints.” He glanced at Luca, who was staring, transfixed, his good eye wide. “It worships me.”
He fucked her with a brutal, possessive fury. Each thrust was a punctuation mark, a claim staked in the very heart of his family’s false piety. Marissa’s moans started as shocked little sounds, then grew into full-throated cries that bounced off the stained-glass martyrs. She wrapped her legs around his waist, pulling him deeper, meeting his violence with a surrender that was its own form of power.
“Tell him,” Adrian demanded, his pace never faltering. He was slick with sweat, his muscles coiling and releasing. “Tell him who you belong to.”
“You!” she cried out, her head tossing side to side on the hard stone. “Adrian! God, yes, you!”
“Louder.”
“YOU!” she screamed, the word tearing from her throat, a profane hymn. “I belong to you! Only you!”
Her climax hit her suddenly, a convulsive wave that made her body bow upwards, her inner muscles clamping around his cock in a series of frantic, fluttering spasms. She screamed, the sound raw and triumphant, echoing in the sacred space.
The sight of her, the feel of her milking him, the sheer blasphemy of the act, pushed Adrian over the edge. With a final, deep grind that pinned her to the altar, he came. He roared as he emptied himself into her, a guttural, animal sound of possession. Pulse after pulse filled her, a hot, claiming rush.
He stayed there for a long moment, buried inside her, his body draped over hers, both of them panting, slick with sweat, on the cold marble. The only other sound was Luca’s ragged breathing from the floor.
Adrian finally pulled out, slowly. He stood, looking down at Marissa. She was sprawled across the altar, utterly spent, a masterpiece of debauchery. He helped her sit up, then down onto unsteady feet. He handed her her clothes, his own hands surprisingly gentle.
As they dressed in silence, Luca began to laugh. It was a wet, broken sound, dripping with despair and a sick admiration. “You really are a monster,” he mumbled through his ruined mouth.
Adrian fastened his trousers, not looking at his brother. He took Marissa’s hand. Her fingers were ice-cold, but they laced firmly with his.
“No,” Adrian said, his voice calm now, empty of all rage. He finally looked at Luca, a pitiful creature huddled at the foot of the altar. “I’m the heir. And this…” he gestured vaguely at the chapel, at Marissa, at the act still humming in the air between them, “this is the kingdom. The basement is next. You should prepare.”
He led Marissa out, leaving Luca in the darkness with the silent Virgin and the scent of sex and sin. The heavy door thudded shut behind them, sealing the desecration inside. The hallway outside was warm, bright, normal. The transition was disorienting.
Marissa leaned against the wall, her legs trembling. “Why?” she whispered, her voice hoarse.
Adrian leaned in, his lips brushing her ear. “Because now,” he said softly, “every time he prays for forgiveness, he’ll see you on that altar. He’ll hear you scream my name.” He pulled back, cupping her cheek. “There are no sanctuaries left for him. Or for me.”
He took her hand again. “Come on,” he said, his tone shifting, becoming deliberate. “There’s one more ghost to put down.”
He led her deeper into the belly of the house, away from the chapel’s echoed cries, towards the stairs that led down into the dark. The basement awaited.
The basement awaited.
Its door was set flush into the paneled wall of the second-floor library, a seamless, hidden thing Adrian hadn’t opened in eight years. The polished brass handle was cold. He turned it, the mechanism clicking with a well-oiled finality, and pulled. Darkness yawned, bringing with it a gust of air that smelled of old dust, damp concrete, and something else, something sweetly chemical and long stale.
A narrow staircase descended into black. Adrian didn’t reach for a light. He knew the steps by muscle memory, a count of fourteen. He went down first, his shoes scraping on the raw wood, Marissa a silent shadow behind him.
At the bottom, his hand found the switch. A single, caged bulb buzzed to life overhead, casting a jaundiced pallor over the space. It was smaller than one would expect, perhaps twenty feet square, and largely empty. The walls were unfinished concrete block. The floor was stained cement.
In the center of the room sat the car.
It was a vintage Alfa Romeo Spider, its classic lines now a grotesque sculpture of crumpled metal and shattered glass. The driver’s side was caved in, the windshield a spiderwebbed eye staring blindly at the low ceiling. The once-bright red paint was dull under dust, marred by long, violent scratches and a dark, rust-colored stain on the collapsed roof.
Marissa stopped at the foot of the stairs, her hand flying to her mouth. “My God.”
“It’s a tomb,” Adrian said, his voice flat and echoey in the hollow space. He walked forward, his footsteps loud, and ran his fingers along the cold, twisted edge of the door. “They pulled her from this. What was left of her.”
He could see it, the memory playing behind his eyes with photographic clarity. The rain-slicked road. The call from the hospital. His father’s ashen face, not from grief, but from the scandal of it all. And Luca, eighteen, beautiful and broken in a different way, the scar on his face still stitches, screaming that it was his fault.
“Luca was driving,” Adrian said, not looking at her. “She was in the passenger seat. He walked away. She didn’t. My father had the car towed here. Not salvaged. Not destroyed. Hidden.” He finally turned to Marissa. Her face was pale, her eyes huge. “He wanted a monument to the cost of weakness. To the price of losing control. This is what it looks like.”
“Why did you bring me here?” Her question was a whisper.
“Because you asked for the truth,” he said, stepping away from the wreck. “Because after what I just did to you on that altar, you deserve to see the rot in the man who did it. This is where it lives.” He gestured around the empty room. “This, and the silence upstairs. The money is just the wallpaper.”
He moved to her then, the grief and fury curdling into a different, more urgent need. The need to feel alive against all this death. He backed her against the cold concrete wall, his body caging hers. The scent of the chapel still clung to her skin, mixed with the basement’s decay.
“He screamed for hours after they sedated him,” Adrian muttered, his mouth against her throat. “Luca did. Not for her. For himself. For his fucking face.” He bit the tender flesh where her shoulder met her neck, not hard enough to break the skin, but enough to make her gasp. “That’s the blood you’re tangled in. Selfish, fucking, rotten blood.”
His hands were rough as he pushed her sweater up again, palming her breasts, his thumbs circling her nipples until they pebbled into hard points. “Tell me you want to leave,” he challenged, his voice low and dangerous. “Tell me this is too much, and I’ll have a car take you anywhere you want to go. Right now.”
She didn’t speak. Instead, she fumbled with his belt, her fingers clumsy but determined. The buckle gave way. The zipper hissed down. She reached into his trousers, wrapping her hand around his hardening length. Her gaze was unwavering.
“I’m not leaving,” she said, and there was no poetry in it, just a hard fact.
A raw sound tore from his throat. He spun her around to face the wall, pressing her cheek against the gritty concrete. He yanked her jeans and underwear down to her knees in one brutal jerk. He spit into his hand, slicking himself, and positioned the swollen head of his cock at her entrance.
“Then you get all of it,” he grunted, and thrust into her, unyielding.
She cried out, her body stretching to take him, her inner walls fluttering around the sudden, thick invasion. It was different from the altar. This was darker, more desperate, a fuck against a grave. He held her hips, his fingers digging into the soft flesh, and set a punishing rhythm, slamming her into the wall with each drive forward.
The sounds were obscene in the silent space: the wet slap of skin, their ragged breaths, the soft impact of her body against the unfeeling concrete. The wrecked car watched, a silent witness.
“This is what you signed up for,” he snarled, pumping into her, each stroke a punishment for the world, for his brother, for the dead woman in the car. “A fuck in a crypt. You get my demons. You get my shit. You take it.”
“Give it to me,” she moaned, pushing back against him, meeting his force. Her hand scrabbled against the wall. “I can take it. I want it. All of it, Adrian.”
Her acceptance, her demand, broke something loose in him. The careful control he wielded like a weapon shattered. His thrusts became erratic, deeper, more possessive. One hand came around to cup her breast, the other gripped her hipbone so tightly he knew he’d leave bruises.
“Come for me,” he ordered, his voice frayed. “Come on this fucking cock while I’m buried in this tomb. Show me you’re not afraid of the dark.”
As if his words commanded her body, her climax surged. She tightened around him violently, a series of clutching, greedy spasms that pulled a guttural groan from his chest. Her cry was muffled by the wall, a sound of surrender and victory.
It tipped him over. With three final, deep plunges, he came, his release hot and endless inside her. He spilled into her with a hoarse shout, his forehead dropping against her shoulder blade, his entire body trembling with the force of it.
For a long minute, they stayed like that, joined, breathing the dank air, the ghost of gasoline and blood in their nostrils.
Slowly, he softened, slipped out of her. He turned her around, his hands gentler now, wiping the tears from her cheeks he hadn’t realized were there. She leaned into him, her body pliant.
“We’re burning it,” he said quietly, looking past her at the ruined Alfa.
“What?”
“The car. This room. All of it.” He said it with a calm certainty. “Tomorrow. I’ll have it doused in gasoline and I’ll light the match myself.” He looked down at her, his eyes clear for the first time that night. “You can watch.”
She searched his face, then nodded slowly. “Okay.”
He helped her dress. They climbed the stairs, leaving the bulb burning, a single eye in the dark. He closed the hidden door, the library’s warmth a shock against his skin. The grandfather clock in the hall ticked, measuring a new kind of silence.
“Take me home,” Marissa said, leaning into his side. “Your home.”
He led her out, past the portraits of dead DeLucas, past the chapel door where Luca still bled, out into the night where their car waited. The basement, with its twisted metal and old stains, remained behind them, but the decision hung in the air, fresh and combustible. He had given her his worst truth. And she had taken it. The next move was fire.
The car was a silent steel cocoon, the city lights streaking past the tinted windows in liquid ribbons. Marissa sat curled against the door, her cheek pressed to the cool glass, watching the world blur. The smells of the chapel and the basement seemed to cling to her skin, a layered perfume of incense, sex, and damp concrete.
Adrian watched her from the opposite seat, his profile etched in shadow. His knuckles were white where they rested on his knee. The decision to burn the car felt like the only pure thing he’d done in years. A cleaner fire than the one in his blood.
“He’ll never forgive you for that,” she said quietly, her voice barely audible over the engine’s hum. “The chapel.”
“I don’t want his forgiveness.” Adrian turned his head to look at her fully. “I want his understanding. That’s worse.”
The penthouse greeted them with sterile, conditioned air. It felt alien after the raw history of the estate. Marissa walked to the vast window, hugging herself. Adrian went to the bar, pouring two glasses of whiskey. He handed one to her. Their fingers brushed, a static charge jumping between them.
“To ghosts,” he said, his voice flat.
“To fire,” she countered, and drank.
The alcohol was a familiar burn, but it didn’t warm the cold knot in his gut. He studied her—the defiant set of her shoulders, the vulnerability in the way she held the glass with both hands. She had taken everything. The violence, the blasphemy, the confessional rot of the basement. She was still here.
He set his glass down with a sharp click. “Why are you?”
“Why am I what?”
“Here.” He gestured vaguely at the room, at himself. “After today. After all of it.”
She turned, her eyes meeting his across the expensive space. “You told me to pack a bag. I did.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I have right now.” She took another sip, her gaze unwavering. “You dug me out. You don’t get to ask why I’m still in the hole with you.”
Her words were a punch to his diaphragm. He crossed the room in three strides, closing the distance. He took the glass from her hand and set it aside. He cupped her face, his touch deliberate, almost rough.
“I would burn the world for you,” he said, the admission torn from a place deeper than pride, deeper than anger. “I would salt the earth of everything I’ve built if it meant you’d look at me like you are right now.” He searched her eyes, his own blazing with a terrifying honesty. “Do you understand how fucking dangerous that is?”
She didn’t flinch. She leaned into his palm. “Yes.”
The simplicity of it undid him. He kissed her, but it wasn’t like before. There was no fury, no calculated defilement. It was deep, slow, and desperate, a claiming that felt more like a surrender. He tasted the whiskey on her tongue, the lingering fear, and something else—acceptance.
He walked her backward, their mouths never parting, until her legs hit the edge of the low, modern sofa. He broke the kiss, his breath ragged. “I need to feel you,” he murmured against her lips. “Not against a wall. Not on an altar. Just you.”
He lowered her onto the soft cushions, following her down. His hands were different now—not instruments of possession, but of discovery. He peeled her sweater off, then her jeans, his movements focused, almost reverent. She helped him, pushing his shirt from his shoulders, her nails tracing the muscles of his back.
When they were both naked, skin to skin on the expensive fabric, he paused, hovering above her. The city glittered behind her like a stolen galaxy. He traced the curve of her breast, the line of her hip, as if memorizing a map.
“You’re the only thing that’s ever been mine,” he whispered, his voice raw. “Not the money. Not the name. You.”
He entered her then, not with a frantic drive, but with a slow, inexorable push that made her arch and sigh. He filled her completely, a perfect, aching fit. He stilled, buried to the hilt, their bodies joined. He looked down at her, her hair fanned out, her lips parted.
“I love you.”
The words hung in the air, simple and seismic. He hadn’t planned them. They just were. A truth as foundational and destructive as the fault line under the city.
Her eyes widened, a sheen of tears glazing them. She didn’t say it back. Instead, she moved her hips, a subtle, rolling motion that made him groan. She wrapped her legs high around his waist, pulling him deeper.
“Then show me,” she breathed, her voice thick.
He began to move, a slow, deep rhythm that was all connection. Each thrust was a punctuation to his confession. He kissed her throat, her collarbone, her mouth. “I love this mouth,” he growled, capturing her lips again. “I love this skin.” He shifted, sliding a hand between them, his thumb finding her clit. She cried out, her body clenching around him.
“This cunt is mine,” he said, but the words had lost their edge of ownership, transforming into a desperate, awed declaration. “It’s beautiful and it’s perfect and it’s where I want to die.” He increased the pressure of his thumb, his hips driving in a relentless, deep cadence. “Come for me. Let me feel you come while I tell you.”
The climax built in her, a rising tide. Her breaths came in short gasps, her fingers digging into his shoulders. “Adrian…”
“I love you,” he repeated, driving into her, his forehead against hers. “God, Marissa, I love you.”
It shattered her. Her orgasm ripped through her, a silent, powerful convulsion that locked her body around his. Her eyes squeezed shut, a single tear tracking into her hairline. He watched her fall apart beneath him, and the sight unleashed his own release. He came with a broken groan, pouring into her, his own body shuddering with a vulnerability more terrifying than any violence.
He collapsed atop her, spent, his weight a welcome anchor. They lay tangled, slick with sweat, their hearts hammering against each other. The confession lingered in the air, a new ghost in the room, more frightening than any that haunted the estate.
After a long time, she spoke, her voice muffled against his shoulder. “You’re going to burn it all down, aren’t you?”
He kissed her hair, his arms tightening around her. “Yes.”
“And then?”
“And then we build something on the ashes.” He said it with a conviction that surprised him. “Something that’s ours. Not DeLuca’s. Ours.”
She tilted her head back to look at him. In the reflected city light, her eyes were clear, resolved. “Okay.”
He knew the path ahead was littered with wreckage—Luca’s hatred, his father’s icy wrath, the empire itself. But for the first time, holding her in the quiet aftermath of a truth so vast it scared him, he saw a future past the fire. It was a dangerous vision. It was the only one he wanted.