“You’ll think of something.”
Her nostrils flare as she slams her palms onto the table, my chains rattling with the impact. “You’re not listening to me!”
“No, cara mia, you’re not listening to me,” I growl. She’s so close, my breath blows the piece of red hair that falls from behind her ear. “If I go to jail, so do you. I’m not fucking around when I say both of our lives are on the line, so I have complete faith you’ll come through for us.”
She lets out a brittle laugh. “Faith? Isn’t that that what started all this?”
“Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”
She freezes, so stunned that her mouth falls open, a short burst of air expelling from her lungs. The verse is sacred between us, a steel-tipped blade slashing deep horizontal and vertical lines across her chest. Bleed for me. Wear the mark you gave me. “When this is over, you have to leave me alone,” she says, closing her eyes. “Leave the state, whatever. Just get out of my life. Go away.”
“Is that what you really want?”
Madi’s eyes slowly flutter open. She doesn’t move—doesn’t attempt to pull away. A thick current of tension sizzles between us, coating the walls of the small room with dark promises of the past. Memories of forbidden flesh and sinful screams.
She remembers.
I can’t forget.
They compel her hand to move from the table and cup my face. Her touch burns my skin. Just like the unholy baptism between my palms, and the one flowing between us
“He that is without sin among you,” I recite, holding her eye as I breathe her in, “let him first cast a stone at her.”
Her eyes darken to an even deeper shade. “Are you going to make them pay?”
The corner of my mouth curls up in a conspiratorial smirk. “What do you think?”
“I can’t be responsible for that, Luca.”
My beautiful, wilted rose. Soon, I’ll touch you again. “Oh, cara mia. You already are.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Madigan
I see a girl.
She’s pretty. At least that’s what all her mom’s friends say. On weekdays, she wears her blonde hair in a long braid that falls between her slim shoulder blades. On the weekend, she wears it loose like a shiny curtain, or something else to hide behind. She dreams of owning a cell phone, and she has a crush on at least two members of The Backstreet Boys. There’s a guy in her class named Evan who looks a bit like Nick Carter. He’s going to be at the party next Saturday night at her friend Jenna’s house—a date when she’s not still grounded for her shitty math grade anymore.
She and Jenna have been exchanging two-hour phone calls every night in preparation, and it’s finally been decided: no skirt, just blue jeans and a white cropped top, loose hair, and tight make-up. She’s going over to Jenna’s house a couple of hours before the party to fit all the pieces of this intricately-designed puzzle together.
Maybe this is the night she’ll allow herself to shine.
Possibilities fill her mind as she crosses the street, and then she spots a ribbon.
I see a boy too.
No one admires him.
No one cares for him.
Parties mean rituals, and rituals mean pain.
He was born into a circle of abuse, which has made his soul ache as much as his body.
He thinks of escape as a foreign country—one with closed borders and high walls, fitted with broken glass. It comes with a strict border control, but there’s no army of trigger-happy fingers blocking the exit. This one is guarded by old men with bad desires, who come for him in the dead of night. They chant as they rape in the name of their God—their grunted incantations carving themselves into all the empty chambers of his heart.
One morning, they promised him a key to another kingdom.
Find a girl, they said. Entice her, prepare her, and teach her our ways. For on the night of her eighteenth birthday, the Twelve would take her for the good of this forsaken world. With each vicious thrust, they’d cleanse sin from mankind. Her virgin blood would be her sacrifice...
I’m trapped in a nightmare and I can’t wake up from it.
The colors are vivid, the details real and familiar. I see the tiny cabin in the woods where he kept me, with the broken front porch that splintered my bare feet the day I tried to run. I can feel the hollow tightness in my chest as I cried myself to sleep that first night. I remember how his black eyes followed me everywhere like I was a prize to be savored and lost.
When Saturday came and went, I became obsessed with a party I’d never attended. I punished myself by imagining Jenna and Evan kissing against the side of his dad’s borrowed Mustang, yet when one of the cult’s Twelve visited to test my purity, in my head it was Evan who was putting his fingers inside me.
The perspiration beading on his forehead gives a luster of evil to his pale, gray skin. I can tell he’s enjoying himself as he throws me down on the narrow, single bed that’s been the dirty heart of my prison these past ten days. It’s not a fun kind of enjoyment though, not like the one you get from a smile or a joke. Instead, it derives from the pain and shame of another.
There’s something else, as well... Something that cuts my teenage naivete in two, revealing a core that’s red and wicked.
He wants me.
Sexually.
“Let me see you,” he commands.
He must be in his late sixties, but there’s a fever in his grip that turns his muscles to iron.
“No! I won’t let you!”
“This will happen, my child. My Mary.”
Mary?
“Never!” I try to scramble away, but he grabs me by my hair and throws me down again.
“Spread your legs, you wicked whore of Eve... You filthy Mary!” he spits again, losing his temper. “We must know if you’re still pure.”
“Please! I’m begging you!” But fear and hunger have weakened me. His cold hands are everywhere. I can’t push him away. I don’t want him to see me, to lift my skirt...to violate me.
“I want my mom!” I scream at him, as if she’s a sacred talisman that’s going to ward off this evil. “Please take me home, she’s missing me!”
“No one misses you anymore, Mary. You belong to the Divine Disciples now. This is the will of God.”
“But he’s not my God! He will never be my God!”
“Blasphemer!” he shrieks, his vicious slap blooming fire and flame across my cheek.
“Luca, help me!” I groan as the old man hooks an icy finger into the crotch of my panties and drags them down my legs. The boy has hardly spoken to me since he stole me away, but he watches me all the time.
Maybe if I can catch his attention... Maybe if he sees what this perverted bastard is doing to me...
In desperation, I scour the room with my eyes, but when I find him, he’s standing motionless in the doorway—eyes cast to the floor like an animal in disgrace. There hasn’t been a flicker of a reaction from him since the old man invaded the cabin, but his fingers grip the doorframe tightly, and his knuckles are a ghostly white.
My thoughts stutter wildly as my legs are forced apart. I’m remembering a talk on cults at my high school last year. There was a woman: a pretty woman with long brown hair. She’d escaped from the Children of God at nineteen, and now she was dedicating her life to helping others to learn how to avoid cult indoctrinations. I bet she never met a beautiful boy with black eyes, though.