Rome, Italy. The very air within Vatican City seemed thick with incense, guilt, and centuries of secrets. Marble halls echoed with hushed footsteps, candlelight flickered in hidden chapels, and private cloisters offered a deceptive sense of peace. Here, behind the sacred facades, lay not just the mysteries of faith, but the intricate, ancient financial arteries of old-world power. Lucien infiltrated this world, his presence a dark thread woven into the tapestry of piety, posing as a visiting confessor and spiritual counselor.
His target: Véronique De La Croix, a French widow managing a black-funded NGO, a front organization for Vatican wealth redistribution. Outwardly, she was a paragon of virtue, cloaked in austere elegance. Internally, she was broken, a soul hungry for punishment, for authority, for the absolute surrender she had never truly known. Lucien would penetrate her not through overt seduction, but through ritual: whispered confessions, psychological domination, and a seduction laced with theological inversion. Their climax—both emotional and physical—would take place in a desecrated private chapel, an act of profound, deliberate blasphemy. Afterward, Véronique would wire Lucien a string of ancient bank codes, granting him access to centuries-old, hidden church wealth.
Lucien entered the Vatican NGO as "Father Ansel," his fabricated identity credentials backed by a false Jesuit order. He wore the cassock with an unsettling naturalness, playing the part with a chilling authenticity. He never once pretended to be pious. Instead, he offered "modernist absolution therapy" to female staff, a concept just vague enough to be intriguing, just unorthodox enough to bypass the usual clerical scrutiny. Véronique, reserved and brittle, her eyes holding a deep, unreadable sorrow, took notice when Lucien declined a formal introduction. Instead, he simply stated, his voice a low, steady balm, "I listen, Madame. That's all I was sent to do."
Lucien orchestrated private, one-on-one "absolution" sessions in a candle-lit room, the flickering shadows dancing on the ancient stone walls. Véronique broke, slowly at first, then with a torrent of raw, desperate confessions. She spoke of faked celibacy, of years addicted to the exquisite torment of shame, of illicit fantasies involving nuns watching her during sex. Lucien offered nothing in return, no judgment, no comfort. He simply listened, inching closer to her without ever touching, his presence a silent, magnetic pull.
He led her to a private chapel, long unused, its air thick with the dust of forgotten prayers. The silence here was profound, almost suffocating. He whispered things to her, his voice a dark liturgy, twisting sacred words into profane truths. "Salvation is just another form of submission," he murmured, his breath warm against her ear. She dropped to her knees then, not to pray, but to surrender. Their encounter was blasphemous, deliberate, orchestrated like a ceremony, a dark communion. She climaxed against the cold marble of the altar, a silent, guttural cry swallowed by the ancient stones.
Afterward, she handed him a tiny silver crucifix, cool against his palm. Micro-inscribed within its intricate design were codes, a string of numbers and letters that linked to dormant Vatican accounts, long forgotten, no longer monitored after her husband's death. Her voice was flat, devoid of emotion, yet laced with a chilling resolve. "The Church buried its gold under its guilt," she said. "You can do what they never dared."
Lucien vanished from Vatican City before dawn, leaving no trace, no whisper of his presence. Véronique retired early from public life, citing "spiritual fatigue," her public facade perfectly intact. The Church never detected the missing funds, for no one, not even the most diligent archivists, remembered the accounts existed.