When I look at Santiago again, I find him watching me, and I take him in. His scars. The tattoo on his face. I glance at those photos again.

He walked away scarred but alive.

They died.

Something inside me feels a tenderness I can’t describe in that instant. I don’t know what it is. Why this matters. I don’t know if it’s the look in his eyes. The loneliness he wears like a coat. No, a second skin. Not something one can remove.

Is that why all this hardness?

But then he slips the rosary out of his pocket and sets it on the altar and bends to open a chest set beneath the altar.

“Strip, Ivy,” he says without bothering to look at me.

My heart does a double beat. “What?”

He glances behind him as he rummages through the chest. “Strip and kneel.”

“We’re in church.”

He pauses, turns to look at me and half-laughs then shakes his head and resumes his work.

“Strip and kneel. I won’t ask you again.”

I glance back at the door, but no one will come in. I turn to look up at the altar. At Christ. Apart from the wedding, I haven’t been to church since I left home. I told my father I went weekly but I never did. I haven’t been to confession since then, either. Do I even believe anymore? I don’t know.

“Ivy.”

I blink to look at Santiago’s back as he sets things on the altar. He’s not looking at me, but he’s warning me all the same.

I pull the nightie off, shudder at my nakedness as I lay it over the back of the nearest pew. He’s just turning to me when I slip off my panties and set them on top of the nightgown, and I watch his eyes as he takes me in. They’ve darkened. And when he meets mine, I see the hunger inside them. Something insatiable.

And it’s like my body feels it. Or maybe it’s that it remembers his touch. Remembers the orgasm because my nipples tighten, and there’s a dampness between my thighs.

I lower myself to my knees and look beyond him to the altar. To what he placed on it. And my stomach falls away. I know the long, innocuous-looking cane from my years at the nun’s school. And the wooden paddle, although thankfully I’ve never felt that. The cane, though. That was Sister Mary Anthony’s favorite.

There are other things too. A short leather strap. Another heavier cane. More paddles. They don’t look new. In fact, they look well-worn.

I swallow, turn my gaze up to his.

He studies me for a long minute, the silence heavy around us. The air in this place weighted.