Chapter 62 Chapter Nine of His Favorite Sin
Lucian’s POV
They didn’t call me Lucian in the cult. Just Vale.
A name given, not chosen. A brand, not a birthright.
I was thirteen when I was initiated. An orphan. Hungry. Small. I thought I was joining a brotherhood. Thought it’d be like the movies—some rebellious underground pack where I could matter. Where I could belong.
Instead, I was dragged into blood.
They didn’t worship Satan. Not in name. But everything we did… it reeked of him. Our rituals. Our punishments. Our sermons are made of horror and screams. We didn’t need horns and pitchforks—we had flesh and chains.
I was hit in the head during my initiation. Woke up drenched in someone else's blood. My classmate stood over me smiling like he’d just gifted me the world. But then I realized that the blood was mine.
We had a room. A secret one. Hidden behind a false wall in an abandoned cathedral. That’s where they broke people. That’s where they built me.
I was trained to seduce. To punish. To dominate. And I excelled. Pain was my second skin. I stopped sleeping. I stopped dreaming. I stopped asking questions.
By fifteen, I was an enforcer. By twenty, one of the Seven.
The Order of Seven. We weren’t just leaders. We were sins made flesh.
Lust. Wrath. Greed. Envy. Gluttony. Sloth. Pride.
Seven men. Seven monsters. Seven keys to hell on earth.
I was Lust. The Gatekeeper of Forbidden Desire. My sanctum was the chamber no woman left unchanged. I collared them. Branded them. Taught them that pleasure could be agony if delivered just right. They begged for it. They begged for me. I was the one who understood the body. Desire. Obsession. The power of touch, denial, and craving. I made virgins scream. I made wives crawl. I made daughters choose sin over salvation.
But I wasn’t the worst.
Wrath was Enoch. Unhinged. A sadist in love with sound. He’d carve people open just to hear what kind of scream lived inside them. He once nailed a man’s tongue to a table because he spoke against him in prayer.
Greed was Malachai. Our financier. A collector of things. Girls. Skulls. Eyeballs in jars. He wore a woman’s teeth around his wrist like a bracelet.
Envy was a twin. Yes—one of two. I still don’t know her real name. She stole identities. Personalities. Faces. She once killed a girl, carved off his features, and wore them to a funeral. She didn’t take them what wasn't hers—she made you give them willingly. She fed off inferiority, off the need to prove you were better than her. You never were.
Gluttony was called Reuben. Not because he was fat. He wasn’t. He was starved, always. Of touch. Of control. He took and took and took—food, life, pain—and never gave anything back. He’d eat during scenes. Chew while someone begged him to stop.
Sloth – Benedict. People underestimated him. Mistake. He was the most dangerous. Benedict’s power wasn’t in doing nothing. It was in making you do everything while he watched. He orchestrated bloodbaths without lifting a hand. He whispered once into a senator’s ear—and collapsed a country.
Pride, the oldest. I won’t say his name. It might summon him. He thought himself a god. And maybe he was. The way people bowed to him, slit their own wrists for a drop of his approval… he ruled them like kings under one throne. And they let him.
Together, we weren’t just symbols. We were gods in a world that had stopped believing in them.
We didn’t meet often. When we did, the air thickened with our hunger. The location didn’t matter. Sometimes it was an abandoned cathedral in Venice. Sometimes a penthouse in Shanghai. A forest cabin in the Alps. A Roman tomb. Always private. Always drenched in scent—wax, perfume, blood. And there were rules.
One: When the circle is called, all must attend. Even the dead must answer. The Order is eternal.
Two: Desire is law. What we want, we take. The only sin is hesitation.
Three: No recordings. No photos. No proof. Only memory. The mind is the only confessional, and it burns.
When we meet, we’d each bring something to offer. Not objects. People.
A man who stole from his family. A girl who confessed too much. A priest who broke vows. A lover who strayed. Sometimes they begged to be there. Sometimes they were silent. A few thought it was just a party.
It wasn’t.
We sat in a circle, no hierarchy.
The offering in the center.
Sometimes clothed. Sometimes not. Always stripped by the end.
We didn’t rush. That was the beauty of it. Each sin had its moment. Reuben would feed them something decadent and wrong. Malachai would tempt them with promises, money, and freedom. Envy would kiss their throat and whisper what they could have had. Enoch would ask them what made them angry. Benedict would do nothing—just watch, make them unravel. He would speak last. One sentence. Like God.
And I—
I’d make them want it. Even the shame.
I didn’t fuck them.
Not always.
Sometimes I just breathed beside them. Let them feel how close they were to being ruined.
And then I let them beg for it.
Some didn’t survive. Some did, but weren’t the same. We never touched them again. They were marked.
The world never knew our names.
But we shaped it.
The others were my brothers in pain. But I was closest to Enoch and Malachai. Wrath and Greed. They understood the hunger. The need to consume. We were the unholy trinity. The darkest of the seven.
But then something inside me... changed.
I don’t know when. Maybe it was after branding a girl who said she loved me. Or after watching a man scream until he couldn’t anymore, and realizing I felt nothing.
At 27, I walked away.
I disappeared when the others were scattered across the world—assigned to different sectors to expand the Order. They trusted me. I was one of them.
But I sealed that secret room. The sex chamber. The ritual pit. I locked it with steel and scripture.
I hid in a chapel. Took a vow. Tried to serve penance. For years, I wore black and carried a Bible I didn’t believe in. I washed sinners’ feet with hands that once made girls scream. I tried to become clean.
But sin doesn’t wash off. It bleeds through.
They called me Father Vale.
Until someone exposed me to the head priest. A past I thought buried came clawing out like a corpse with open eyes.
I lost everything again. Left the priesthood. Abandoned the chapel. Then I started a business and became one of the richest billionaires. I met her—Maria, Salem's mother. She was gorgeous, pure, sweet, and everything I've ever wished for.
I never hid from her. I laid my past bare, expecting her to recoil—just like the head priest did, like the nuns did, like everyone else I’d ever known outside the cult.
But she didn't.
She didn’t run.
She didn’t flinch.
Maria looked at me with tears in her eyes and called me forgiven. She touched my face like I wasn’t filth. Like I wasn’t Lust made flesh. Like I wasn’t the ruin of a hundred souls.
I didn’t know what to do with that. With kindness. With mercy. With a second chance that I hadn’t bled for.
So I stayed.
And for a while… I believed. Believed I could be normal. That love could make a man new. That I could have a life outside shadows, outside chains.
I bought that mansion for her. I rebuilt it with my own hands. Room by room, stone by stone—erasing the hidden walls, the cult designs, sealing every passage I’d once used to hide sin.
But sin doesn’t stay buried. The urges were coming every now and then. Constantly. Trying to remind me of my place in the order—as lust. Maria let me use her, in the same room she feared the most.
We were getting so close to becoming a real couple. The only obstacle was her husband. He wasn't a problem for me. A pathetic, abusive, drunkard fool, I could kill with just a snap of my fingers, but Maria didn't want that. Her plan was to divorce him and we could live together happily.
However, my sins were never completely forgiven as Maria had told me. It came in the form of a letter. A wax seal. A familiar scent. A call to return.
The Order hadn’t forgotten me. And they’d found out about Maria. They always did. Because you don’t leave the Seven. You rot in it. Or you die trying to escape.
So I did what they taught me to do. When she came to visit for the last time, I lied. I protected her the only way I knew how. I told her I didn’t love her. That she was a phase. That I was incapable of giving her what she wanted.
And then I turned.
She begged. Cried. Pleaded. But if she stayed with me, she’d be marked. An offering. And I couldn’t watch that happen again.
I went underground. Faked my death. Hid in Europe. Burned bridges, erased names, killed old contacts. I was no longer Lust. No longer Vale. I was nobody.
Years later, I heard she died. Car crash, they said. But I know better.
The Order doesn’t kill with cars. They kill with messages. And the message was clear:
You don’t run.
You don’t love.
You don’t get to pretend you’re clean.
Their location was hidden. I couldn't find them, so I came back, and the reason wasn’t for revenge. It was for the child.
Salem.
With her mother’s eyes. Her mother’s scent. Her mother’s sin. The girl Maria had died protecting. The only innocent left tethered to my name.
I hadn’t seen her since she was seven or was it nine?. I remember her fingers clutching her mother’s coat, her eyes big and too smart. Now she’s a woman. And she looks at me like I’m her salvation. But I know what I am.
A cage.
A curse.
A sin that learned how to speak sweet. And she’s growing into something dangerous.
Because Salem isn’t pure like Maria was. She’s fire. And I’ve tasted too much of hell to pretend I don’t crave the burn. Every time I see her...
I remember the collar. The whip. The sound of knees hitting marble.
I remember Lust.
And it remembers me.
I thought I’d buried that man in a tomb of scripture and regret. But she’s digging him up—one look, one word, one wicked smile at a time.
And if I fall again—
There’ll be no forgiveness. No chapel. No love soft enough to save me.
Only her.
Only Salem.
And this time... I won’t walk away.
I’ll drag her down with me.
Into the pit.
Into the sin.
Into me.