Raphael exhaled a long breath as if her answer pleased him, but his eyes narrowed in suspicion. She kept eye contact.
“How old are you?”
Again, Maria saw no reason to lie. The fewer lies she gave, the less she would have to remember. Her mother always warned her that to lie one must have a perfect memory. “Twenty-one. Almost twenty-two.” She tried to guess Raphael’s age. He was young too. Too young, in her opinion, to live the deviant life he did. Maria couldn’t understand how someone so young could want to kill, to rob someone of the rest of their life.
She wondered whose home they were in. It was grand and screamed of money and status. It couldn’t have been Raphael’s. Not unless he inherited such a place. But what would Maria know? For all her guesses and musings, Raphael could have been a filthy-rich businessman who liked to kill on the side. It would explain how he paid off the authorities as Father Quinn had said. Before she thought better of it, she asked, “And how old are you?”
Raphael smirked at her moment of boldness. She wondered if it was because she was tied to a chair, playing a dangerous game with a predator, was bound and imprisoned, yet had the courage to ask such a thing. “How old do you think I am, little rose?”
Maria didn’t know why he kept calling her that. From the way his tongue wrapped around the word “rose,” she knew it must have had some kind of significance, but she couldn’t even begin to guess what. She shook off the question of the endearment and said, “Twenty-four.”
“Close.” Raphael shrugged. “I’m twenty-five.”
Maria thought back to the blond woman at the club. She must have been fifty or more, her true age disguised by the surgery she’d had done to her face. They hadn’t looked right together at the time. He could have been her son. Or maybe that was part of his alternative lifestyle. Maybe he liked older women.
Or maybe he had no preference over whom he killed, as long as he could.
The way Raphael was looking at her right now, Maria knew that couldn’t be true. He was transfixed. Could barely take his attention away from her for a second.
“What’s your pleasure, Maria?” He stood, pressing his hands onto the chair arms beside her. “Tell me, how do you like to play?” He was breathless, and had been hanging on her every word since he had brought her back to his rooms.
“However you want.”
“Careful, little rose.” Raphael tutted and shook his head. “You have no idea what you’re asking for. You know nothing of my particular desires.”
Maria was glad her hands were tied behind her back. They were trembling so hard as she tried to decipher what he meant by that. She couldn’t even imagine what a killer would like sexually. Nothing she could ever envision, she was sure.
Raphael was staring at her, fire in his eyes, as he waited for her response. This was it. The point of no return. She was balancing on a deadly precipice. But she knew there was only one choice. She had to see this through. Maria thought of the martyrs she admired. Her namesakes. They died for their faith, for what they believed was right in the eyes of the Lord. She could do the same. If she did this, giving herself over to Raphael for the sake of the innocent, then she could face God knowing she served Him well. She would never face Him as a coward with regret suffocating her heart. Like Father Quinn had said, giving yourself to the church required love and sacrifice. One cannot love without sacrifice.
This would be hers.
And maybe . . . just maybe, she could appeal to the good left inside him. Like Jesus walked with the sinners and the damned, she could do the same. Maria had never believed that mankind was born evil. As she looked at Raphael, she wondered what had happened in his life to cause him to travel such a brutal and cruel path. Her stomach tightened with hope . . . hope that maybe she could offer him comfort in some way that could release some of the evil that consumed his soul.
Meeting Raphael’s eyes, Maria sat up, trying to look more confident than she felt. “I want you to show me pleasure, in the way you like it, no matter where your particular desires lean. I want you to control me . . . I want you to show me the way, in whichever way you want. I want to please you. I want to be used, and I want you to be the one I serve.”
Raphael’s cheeks flushed. His chest heaved, and Maria knew that her words had penetrated deep within him, struck a chord in his blackened heart. Raphael reached out and took a strand of her long hair in his hands. Maria watched him as he idly wrapped the blond hair around his finger, from base to tip, over the cotton that was already there—was always there. His breathing deepened, grew more labored the tighter he pulled. His finger began to turn blue from the constriction of blood. His pupils dilated.