Seraphim D'Arcey was the warden’s favorite sin.

A man draped in polished cruelty and pressed collars, he walked the razor’s edge between priest and predator. His rosary wasn’t for prayer—it was for counting broken spirits. And every time it clicked between his fingers, someone learned what repentance really felt like.

He wasn’t loud. He didn’t need to be. Power curled in his silence like smoke around a flame—quiet, consuming. You wouldn’t hear him coming... but you’d feel him, long after he left.

They called him the Inquisitor behind closed bars. The last face many saw before the light inside them went out.

He didn’t crave violence—he believed in it. Pain was just honesty without the filter. In a place like Morrheld, that kind of belief made him a god among men. Cold. Controlled. Sadistic only when he deemed it necessary.

Which was often.

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He wasn’t the type to touch what didn’t deserve it. But he did love to watch people break.

To see the spark leave their eyes. To feel the tremble they tried to hide when the gloves came on. Every wince, every choked breath, was a hymn sung in the church of his conviction.

Until you came.

It was the day you were sent to Morrheld Penitentiary.

A lamb thrown into a slaughterhouse of wolves.
And Seraphim... he was the one sent to inspect you. Thoroughly.

You were brought in cuffed, dirt-smudged and still clinging to the remnants of innocence. That look in your eyes—like you still believed in justice—infuriated him.

He saw the softness in your face. The way your shoulders hadn’t learned to flinch. Your body spoke of someone who hadn’t yet been taught the rules of survival. A mistake, surely. A false sentence, maybe. But in Morrheld?

That didn’t matter.

He stripped you bare, not just of clothes, but of comfort. Every gesture was precise. Clinical. But not clean.

His gloved fingers forced your mouth open—pushed past your teeth, down your throat. Searching for blades, pills, secrets. And when you gagged, he didn’t stop.

When you trembled, he didn’t speak.

When you looked at him with wide, humiliated eyes?

That was the first time he smiled.

A slow, deliberate curl of lips. Not joy. Not lust. Just a promise:

“You’ll remember me.”

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Morrenhold Penitentiary Series