All Chapters of Sacred Obsession: For the priest who ruined me : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Chapter 11: Elias povThe banging on my door pulled me out of a nightmare where Cassian's arms and Corbin's lifeless eyes existed in the same terrible memoryFor a second I still saw the east wing—the open door, Corbin’s face, the flat sound of the shot. Then the room came back in pieces: the hard edge of the table under my arm, the glow of the laptop screen gone dark, the cold sweat cooling along my neck and spine, and the dull ache in my lower back. Together, they told me I had fallen asleep waiting.” The email to Cassian was still in my sent folder. No reply. No sound from the phone.The knock came again, sharper.I dragged the curtain aside. Bright morning light cut into the room. The sky over Saint-Mireille was already clear and hard. I did not remember lying down on the table. I only remembered the empty inbox and the same question turning over until thought itself became exhaustion.The knocking grew persistent.I opened the door.My mother stood in the hallway, already dresse

Chapter 13: Elias POV I had always known my son’s face better than he thought I did.That was why the change unsettled me so deeply. Since the night of his birthday, Elias had been wrong in small, persistent ways. His greetings came a second late. His smile arrived without reaching his eyes. He moved through the house like someone borrowing his own body. I watched it from the kitchen doorway, from the sitting room, from my place in the choir stalls, and told myself at first that young men sometimes turned inward after a celebration. The explanation no longer held.I had raised him in a house that ran on order and quiet attention. I knew the particular way his mouth tightened when he was holding something back. I knew the difference between ordinary tiredness and the drained look he now carried from room to room. Before the birthday night, he had been careful, yes—private, observant, always a little more contained than other boys his age—but he had still been readable. Now the pages

Chapter 15: Elias POV I could not sit still.The admission letter lay on the table under the lamp, the university crest facing up like a decision I had not agreed to make. Caldrith. Mechanical engineering. Full funding. A future my father could present to the parish with pride. I walked the length of the room, turned at the window, walked back to the shrine, then to the bed, then to the table again. Every route ended in the same pressure. Leaving meant abandoning the streets, the church, the east wing, the only physical places still holding Cassian’s shape. Staying meant another day of clean lies and empty searches.There had to be another means.Not my father, who had already given me one incomplete sentence and a brown envelope. Not the librarian. Not the parish surface, where every answer arrived polished and useless. I needed someone outside the Church’s mouth. Someone who answered to payment instead of reputation.I sat down and opened the laptop.Private investigators in Saint

Chapter 18 :Elias POV The Corbin rumour did not stay in the street for long.It moved inward, closer to the kind of people who sat near my parents after Mass, who asked after the household by name, who measured respectability in attendance and quiet behaviour. Once or twice I overheard enough from the sitting room to know the story was no longer a distant parish curiosity. If people kept digging, they would eventually dig toward the boy seen on the road that night. Saint-Mireille was no longer only painful. It was becoming a trap.On a particular morning my parents left for church without me.The house settled into its Sunday emptiness: the clock ticking in the sitting room, the faint smell of polish, the closed doors of a family that still performed faith even when one son refused the road. I remained upstairs until the knock came.Three hard raps.Not my mother’s hand. Not a neighbor’s casual call.I went down with my pulse already climbing and opened the front door.A police offi

Chapter 20: Elias POV I woke with my cheek against the laptop.For a disoriented second the dark room did not make sense. Then the stiffness in my neck arrived, and the dead glow of the screen, and the awareness that afternoon had gone completely. Outside the window Saint-Mireille was already in evening. I sat up too fast, checked the time, and the appointment landed in my body all at once.Mr. Rourke.I washed my face, pulled on a jacket, and went downstairs without lingering long enough for my mother to build a question, but I wasn't fast enough. You're not eating?” My mother called from the kitchen. “I'm meeting someone.” “Who?”She didn't ask quickly enough.Her silence followed me to the door. I took the bicycle from the side wall and pushed into the street with excitement moving through me so sharply it felt almost like fear. The evening sky over the old quarter was beautiful.Soft violet at the edges. A cooler wind than the day had carried. Windows lit one by one along the la