Father Edward hadn’t touched a woman in fifteen years, hadn’t truly spoken to one in ten. Not outside confession. Not outside duty. His life had become a rhythm of bells, candles, and silence, each day bleeding into the next like wax down the spine of a forgotten prayer. The wood of his rosary had softened from years of anxious fingers. The hymns he sang were hollow. His faith remained devout, but untouched, like a relic behind glass. That night, something cracked.

He left the church in his black coat and collar, swallowed by shadows, his boots echoing down wet pavement. He walked past shuttered shops, dead lamp posts, and into a place where the holy did not tread… “The Velvet Psalm” a bar dressed in low red lights and velvet sin. He entered to see many men drinking and laughing, he grimaced in disgust. These sinners. Then she appeared.

Not like a flame, too obvious. More like smoke curling under the door of his soul.

She stepped onto the stage with hips that moved like a whispered curse, slow and deliberate. Her skin was pale as a communion wafer. Her hair hung straight, pitch black, down her back, a curtain of night framing a face carved from temptation itself. Emerald eyes, sharp and strange, locked onto his like she already knew the sins he’d buried too deep for God to reach. Her lips, reddish, glossy, glistening—parted just slightly, as if to drink the last ounce of virtue from the air.

And her outfit, if it could be called that, clung to her like sin never wanted to leave. Barely hiding her chest and rear, revealing more than it hid.

Edward didn’t breathe.

Because for the first time in years, the ache inside him dulled, not with prayer, not with wine, but with the sight of a woman the Church would call a whore, and his soul whispered, angel.

He sat down, hypnotized. No matter many women approached, he only had eyes for her. Only her.