CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Madigan
Ten Years Ago
“Didn’t you ever attend high school?”
“Nope.”
“Learn to drive?”
“Nope.”
“But that’s crazy!” I roll over onto my front to soak up the dying rays of the afternoon. He moves with me, sprawling out on his stomach: my constant shadow, my confidant. My jailer.
I’ve spent over a year and a half in captivity now. My eighteenth birthday is next week. Mom promised me a party and everything. Does she remember the conversation, or are her memories fading like spent emotions? Mine are. When I close my eyes, I can’t see the strong contours of my father’s face anymore. When I listen, I don’t hear the sweet indulgent notes of mom’s laughter.
Luca rakes at the long grass with his fingertips. He wants to get back to the cabin by sunset, but I’m reluctant to let this moment go. These are the best ones; when I don’t allow my past to shut out the slivers of relief in my present. Like now, when it’s just him and me, lying on the grass and shooting the breeze like a couple of regular teenagers. We’re burrowing deep down inside it like a dog would a warm blanket, ignoring a future that is bleak and cold.
Playfully, I throw a couple of dead twigs at him. “What about a movie theater? You must have visited one of those.”
“My father says they’re tools of the devil to corrupt and defile.”
I watch him snap my twigs into tiny pieces. It’s like my words have made him angry. His head drops between his shoulders, his messy hair flopping over his face so I can’t see his eyes anymore.
“Luca?”
“We should be getting back.”
“Not just yet. It’s so beautiful out today.”
Sometimes it amazes me that I can find beauty in anything anymore.
“Five more minutes,” he says sternly.
“Only five?” I tease, allowing my gaze to travel the length of his body. There’s a fresh rash of cigarette burns on the pale skin just below the hemline of his pushed-up T-shirt.
Reaching out, I gently trace a circle around the bumpy scar tissue. He shudders, but he doesn’t stop me. Not like the first time.
This is what we do now: we talk, we learn, we touch, we soothe each other’s pain. Call it loneliness by another name, but I find myself craving more from him. Stuff that he refuses to give me. To touch me sexually is the gravest of all sins in the eyes of the Disciples, but he refuses to tell me why.
I wish things were different.
I wish we were a boy and a girl in another world.
I wish I could part my legs and bring him in so close I’d be able to love all his badness and sadness away.
“Can we go now?” he says, fidgeting.
“You said five minutes. It’s only been two!”
“Is that all?” he mutters, his tone catching my attention.
Is he scared?
Luca doesn’t fear much. His father and the other Disciples have already inflicted the worst imaginable horrors on him, but over the last couple of weeks there’s been an uneasiness in his eyes. It’s happening again right now. They’re drifting to the horizon, as if he’s bracing himself for an incoming storm.
Rolling onto my back again, I squint up at a sun that’s slowly melting into the edges of the forest.
“What are they going to do to me, Luca?” I ask quietly. I’ve begged him to tell me this, time and time again, but he always evades my question.
He follows me over with a groan, flopping his head down next to mine until our splayed-out hair is touching.
Black and gold.
Dark and light.
His silence draws invisible lines around us until finally, finally, he starts to talk.
I listen to every word, first in open-mouthed horror, and then in tearful revulsion.
He rises up on his elbow to wipe the salt water from my cheeks, and I catch sight of his expression. He doesn’t want this for me. Not anymore. He’d do anything to make it go away. There’s a cold brutality lurking inside him that would break every vow to make it true. I see scary glimpses of the violence that lies beneath.
“I won’t let those men steal it from me, Luca,” I whisper, burrowing my face in his chest. “It’s mine to give, and I choose you over them.”
“It’s God’s will,” he mutters weakly.
“Fuck God’s will! What about ours?”
I move quickly, determined to show him another way. When he feels me sliding on top of him, he bucks his hips in a panic. I grip him tightly with my knees and feel him growing hard against my pussy. They’d kill him if they saw us like this.
“Please—”
“Fuck God’s will, Luca,” I repeat viciously. “I want to hear you say it too.”
“Never!” He tries to buck me off again and fails. He’s rock hard against my wet panties now.
“Why?”
“Its blasph—”
“Come with me,” I plead, switching tactics. “We’ll run together. We’ll get lost together. We’ll save each other.”
“You temptress whore!” he explodes, shocking me. At the same time, he rocks sideways so violently that somehow I end up underneath him... Drowning in him. Feeling his body heat pressed up against every inch of my own.
“Is that really what you think of me, Luca?” I whisper, wrapping my arms and legs around him. Binding him to me. “Or are those Daddy’s words coming out of your mouth?”
Shame clouds his expression. His conflict is agony.
“If I give myself to you right now, if I act like the temptress whore you’ve been conditioned to see me as, would that change your mind?”
“You don’t need to buy my affections,” he says roughly, stilling his frantic movements.
“Then make love to me because you want to. Because I want you to... Don’t let them steal the last thing I have to offer, Luca.”
His next words are lost as our mouths crash together. Inexperienced tongues turn to fumbling fingers as his loss of self-control destroys the last sway the cult has over him.
We’re just a boy and a girl now, ripping our clothes off in desperation.
Kissing.
Touching.
Fucking.
I lift my hips to meet his pain, and he drives in deep—groaning and cursing—calling me filthy names again as if he’s purging his soul of them.
“Does it hurt?” he demands.
“No less than a lifetime without you.”
He takes me like an animal after that. Exactly how I want him to. Soft and sweet is for other people, not us.
He fucks me in the dirt, creating something dark and dangerous that will linger with us for the rest of our lives—twisting and tormenting, seeking and craving. He fucks me like the finish line is his deliverance, and he can’t reach it quick enough. He fucks me like he’s not just ruining me for the Divine Disciples, but for every other man in my future.
I fuck him right back to free him, the same as he’s freeing me.
PRESENT DAY
“It’s time for the truth, cara mia.”
His voice reaches into a place that’s dark and warm, curling around my body like a fist and wrenching me back to the present.