The Gift

The young woman in the dark wooden confessional held a perfumed square of cloth to her upturned nose, incredulous at the ‘common’ scent wafting through the woven lattice divider. At least she didn’t have to fully view the hunched over form in the other compartment; she could only imagine what vile filth had stained the elderly man’s ragged clothes to make him smell so potently.

“Once you go down this road, things will forever change,” the gravelly voice whispered to her, his hissing tone barely audible through the lattice. But she dared not lean in to hear better for fear of having to take in more of his offending smell. Could he really be who she had paid so much to visit?

“I leave the art of killing to you, or whoever it is that works for you,” she offered, trying not to openly gag. Surely this man couldn’t be the famed killer recommended to her by people who ought to know the craft well? “Yours is the gift. My conscience remains clear. I only…I wish to see him beg before the end. ‘Tis my only request.”

The hunched man in the other compartment nodded, his movement causing the lady to catch a pungent whiff of some fecal matter at the same time she heard a shuffling of heavy clothes moving to vacate a bench or pew within the compartment’s other half.

Then the booth through the lattice was suddenly empty. The young woman quickly exited from her side, looking in through the open door of the other half. No one was there, of course. Even the smell had dissipated, as if it had never clogged her delicate nostrils and stung her eyes. There was nary a scent left in the air, making even the perfume of her handkerchief seem too strong.

Gaping openly in disbelief, she glanced with big blue eyes towards the wide-open doors of the Pauper Church, thrown open to the streets beyond as they always were at the beginning of each day to invite peasants and commoners to come pray for what they could never have. But though she looked long and hard, there was no one to see, nothing amiss. No one else waited for the confessional in the available wooden pews that lined the small hall. No one lingered near the doors, and no one was kneeling in prayer at the candles lining the large stone altar of the Saint. She was alone.

“Mine is the gift,” came a sudden soft whisper in her delicate ear. And as a thin scalpel-sharp blade slid through the silk fabric of her dress and between her slender ribs to tickle at the bottom chamber of the young woman’s dark heart, her eyes fluttered before closing forever. “He paid first.”

((Word count: 462 - A story based on a universe I've been working on for over two decades, a quick chirrup about rogues, loosely inspired by a song by Slipknot with a lyric about 'brother backstab'))