Sacred Obsession: For the priest who ruined me のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 51 - チャプター 60

Chapter 52: Elias pov Caldrith in late term carried a different kind of tension. The restless, ambitious energy of the campus had narrowed into something tighter and more brittle. Students moved between buildings with the focused urgency of people counting days. Library lights stayed on later. Conversations in corridors dropped into half-whispers about past papers and weighting. Even the air seemed thinner, edged with the metallic scent of the river and the dry cold that settled after sunset. Exam season had begun to press its shape onto everything.I had spent the day inside that pressure. Morning tutorials for revision—dense, repetitive, the kind of sessions where the same networking concepts were turned over until they lost meaning. Afternoon in the laboratory for my own work, screens glowing in

Chapter 54: Elias pov Seraphine’s birthday fell on the same day I sat my last paper of the semester.The exams themselves had been almost gentle. I had already worked through the material on long nights with YouTube open beside tutorial notes—subnetting, routing logic, the same structures turned over until they stopped feeling like obstacles. When the questions appeared on the screen they felt familiar rather than new. Still, the days around them blurred. Nothing interesting happened beyond the narrow routine of revision and silence. On nights before a paper I did not sleep. I prepared until the text swam, then lay down for a few thin hours that never counted as rest. Cassian’s number still received the daily updates. Sometimes, after the call ended and the dead line returned to quiet, I stayed in the dark with my hand on myself and let the memory of him take over—his weight, his mouth, the exact way he had held me that night—until release left me emptier than before. Corbin’s death

Chapter 56: Elias pov At the gate of the Calder compound I pulled my phone from my pocket and called an Uber.Crickets sang from the dark hedges as if they had witnessed a crime. I had not committed one. Not legally. But Seraphine Calder was rumoured to be some students’ nightmare, and I had put her on the floor in front of her own guests. The asphalt under my shoes still held the day’s heat. I walked until headlights cut the road and the car slowed beside me. I opened the back door and got in without greeting the driver or confirming the destination. The door shut. The city began to move past the windows in broken lines of light.For a stretch of minutes I forgot Theo existed. There was only the interior of the car—the faint smell of air freshener and upholstery—and the noise inside my own head. I loosened the tie until it hung open, then clutched the front of the white shirt as if the fabric itself were an accusation against my skin. Misery settled in heavy and familiar. Why could

Chapter 58: Elias pov For the first time since the night Cassian disappeared, I felt heard.The relief arrived slowly, like weight leaving the body in stages. A huge rock I had been carrying across my shoulders simply set itself down. Theo had not looked at me with judgement. What I saw in his face when the words finished was concern, and a pity that did not feel like disgust. Genuine. Quiet. The kind that sat with you instead of stepping back. I was not sure yet whether I should be glad the secret had left my mouth or afraid of what it meant now that it no longer belonged only to me. My father used to say a secret shared was no longer a secret. The line returned with his voice attached, stern and certain, the way he delivered most truths that were meant to keep me careful. I pushed it aside for the nigh

Chapter 60: Cassian povSpring in Ashara did not arrive with colour so much as with a change in the weight of the air.The mist that clung to the mountains most mornings thinned earlier now, lifting in slow layers until the ridges showed their dark green shoulders. Pine and wet stone still dominated the scent of the paths, but underneath them something greener had begun to breathe—new growth along the lower slopes, the faint sweetness of soil no longer locked by cold, the occasional sharp green of crushed needles underfoot. Water moved faster in the channels cut beside the chapel, a continuous low rush that filled the pauses between the hours of the office. Birds I still could not name called from the treeline in short, sharp phrases. When the light finally cleared the eastern ridges it fell cleaner across the small residence, across the narrow bed where I slept in fragments, across the plain wooden shrine and the candle that burned itself down each night without ceremony.I kept to