Torn from the pages of the Whiskey Woven Dreams Journal.

James Wheeler had seen men lie before they even opened their mouths. The twitch of an eye, a half-second of hesitation, a knuckle cracking at the wrong time—all confessions without words. He could read them like scripture. This rehab center—this Christian cage—was full of ghosts trying to convince the living they had changed. Ex-cons, failed gangsters, and desperate junkies walked the halls, counting days like they counted sins. Faith and education were the tools of salvation here, they said. But James knew better. Salvation was for those who hadn’t already drowned.

She walked in on a Tuesday, tall and flame-haired, a rare intrusion in their all-male purgatory. A substitute teacher for Faith and History 101. Sister Marianne. She had the look of a woman who’d known violence and found it intoxicating. Her blue eyes cut through James like a thief’s knife—sharp, deliberate. She smelled of smoke and whiskey, sins she tried to bury under layers of lipstick and quiet regret. When no one was watching, she’d slip out back, pulling long drags from stolen cigarettes, the burn of cheap bourbon warming her throat. A guilty pleasure. A slow self-destruction.

During class, she spoke of David and Bathsheba, and how a king's lust led to blood and betrayal. “Temptation,” she said, her voice a quiet prayer laced with sin, “is the devil’s fingerprint on the soul.” James watched her lips, the smudged red paint barely hiding the tremble underneath.

James struggled with prayer. His hands shook when he tried to clasp them. The words of scripture tangled in his throat, foreign, like a language his soul refused to learn. The others recited verses with ease, their faith rolling off their tongues like old hymns, while James felt like a fraud.

She shook his hand at the end of class. Her fingers lingered. A flick against his palm.

Message received.

That night, in the alley behind the chapel, he traced his calloused fingers up the inside of her thigh, under her skirt, where there was nothing but heat and hunger. They stole moments between curfews and chapel bells, lust hidden in scripture and secrecy. They were almost caught more than once—by staff, by the dead-eyed men who watched the world with suspicion.

“Song of Solomon,” she whispered once, pressed against the janitor’s closet door. “‘I am my beloved’s, and his desire is for me.’”

Their secret meetings turned darker. The whiskey burned hotter. The scripture felt more like a mockery than salvation. One night, she pressed a bag of white powder into his palm. “Just once,” she whispered. “Even Christ had his moments of weakness.” He knew better, but he let the cocaine cut through him like a blade.

She led him deeper into darkness. A few lines of coke on a dust-covered shelf late one night turned into something bigger. “Come with me,” she whispered. “Let’s get out of here. Just one job, then we disappear.”

A bank. A simple robbery. He knew better, but her lips pressed against his, the coke burning in his blood, made reason a distant thing.

And so they ran.

The plan unraveled like a poorly stitched wound in the cold fluorescence of a failing bank. She held the gun like it was an extension of herself, a natural-born sinner in silk and steel. The sirens came too fast. The bullets rained down, a biblical flood of gunfire.

“Like Judas in the garden,” James muttered, gripping her hand as the blood poured from his stomach, “betrayed by a kiss and sold for silver.”

In that final moment, as blood pooled around them, she clutched his hand. Her red hair was matted, and her breath was shallow. She smiled, that same dangerous grin from the first night in the alley.

“Samson and Delilah,” she choked out. “Love was never meant to save us.”

James laughed, coughing up his death. He thought of scripture, of the words carved into his mind long before he ever believed them.

“For the wages of sin is death…”

The light faded. The book closed.

And yet, in that crimson-soaked floor, something remained—faith, not in words, not in prayers, but in the sharp edge of fate. Blood and bullets had blazed a narrow path from hell to heaven. Perhaps, in the fire of their destruction, redemption flickered like a dying candle. Perhaps the gates of heaven cracked open for those who had sinned the hardest, loved the deepest, and died without repentance on their lips but truth in their hearts.