[Just a taste of something I’ve been working on. I’m not really into aping other writers’ vibes, but hey, E.L. James is rich and I’m not.]
Giovanni was a humble man, made of humble stuff. Accidents of birth had left his form misshapen, his gait unsteady, and his mind disordered, but he persisted through these vicissitudes and more, with one bulging eye always trained upon tomorrow and its myriad opportunities.
Despite —or as a result of, who can say?— his taking of holy orders, the opportunities that beckoned him always seemed to be those soaked in gluttony and lechery. So great was his appetite for carnal indulgence —the likes of which would have blushed the cheeks of the most debauched heretic— that it left him jealous of every moment that might be otherwise dedicated to such pursuits. Giovanni therefore avoided the daily offices of the Order and the assigned duties of the cellarer with a certain focused, brutal efficiency, using his menacing size and countenance to intimidate the younger monks and more tractable peasants into looking away or even doing his bidding.
The abbot, of course, chose to know none of this. All he knew was that Giovanni kept the charity sluice in good repair, kept the dung sluice mucked out, and ensured that his monks seldom confused the two; from such an unfortunate servant of Christ, the benevolent Lord Abbot reasoned, little more could be asked. And as the abbot —like his abbey— was both busy and wealthy, it suited him to leave many things unseen.
This was equally pleasing to Giovanni, whose unfortunate estate had left him with a lifelong preference for practical invisibility. The world had never welcomed him —it was said that his mother, in her natal despair at the sight of her deformed child, cut her own throat before the midwife could cut the umbilicus— and he had thus found it best to operate at the periphery of the world’s attention. In such a place, a man could make his way. Or at least profitably stalk the ways of others.
He’d been a more literal sort of brigand once, long ago. As a child, he had of course been regularly beaten, to chase from his accursed body the sin it had so visibly inherited, and isolated, to ensure that whatever taint remained would not spread. He’d not been taught a trade —on the assumption that he was unfit for work and impervious to education— but his family’s violence and disdain were tutors of a sort. By the time he reached the full season of his manhood, he’d proven that his infirmities and limitations were no bar to the kind of trade one plies from ambush at the side of a road.
So it was that he reveled in his newfound freedoms: to bludgeon, to plunder, and to ravish. As one who had so often cowered beneath lashes of both tongue and leather, he took particular satisfaction in being a generator of fear. In the thrill of self-sufficiency, he found his life’s first hint of a purpose; in the blood of a fat merchant couple and the cunt of their shrill-shrieking daughter, Giovanni discovered his first passion.
And yet it never seemed enough. To murder and defile was bliss for a moment, but offered him no solace in the long, quiet hours after. When the hateful dreams returned each night to haunt him —the cruel phantoms of youth, arisen from the unholy sepulcher of memory— he wailed in helpless frustration.
Until he saw her.