“My mother. She was—” This will be the hardest part. I can already feel my throat closing up. I clench my hands together. Lola puts her hand on top, warm reassurance. “She was his whore. She had been a prostitute on the outside. When she got pregnant with me, she went to Harmony Hills so that Leader Allen could…could save her soul.”
“Why did she send you away?” Blue asks. “Did she grow disillusioned with the teachings?”
“No. I don’t think so.” I shiver against the ancient shame. Thousands of men have seen my naked body, have lusted after me, but all of that can’t erase the filth of Leader Allen’s dark lusts. “I think she saw the way he was looking at me.”
Lola makes a strangled sound of outrage.
“She didn’t even try to go with me. Maybe she believed what Leader Allen said about women being…evil. About leading men to temptation.” My laugh is hollow. “Maybe she wanted to save Leader Allen’s soul.”
Blue’s eyes are shrewd. “Why do you think they’re responsible for the messages?”
I meet Ivan’s gaze from across the room, and the fury there lends me strength. “That’s the stuff he’d always talk about in his sermons, how God had sent down shepherds to guide us. How he had to handle the stray sheep so they wouldn’t lead the rest of us to sin. I know it’s a common enough theme in religion. It might not be connected to them, but…”
This is where my voice cracks, and I stare at my lap, unable to go on. I’ve already told them more than I’ve told anyone. This last part, it will break me.
The sofa cushions shift, and Lola moves away from me. They’re leaving, I realize distantly. But then Ivan’s hands are lifting me, his arms around me. He pulls me onto his lap, the way I was the night in the dining room. Except I had crawled into his lap that time. This time he put me here—and in front of Lola and Blue too.
I look up at him, and I know the questions are plain in my eyes. His expression is severe but not unkind. “Finish it,” he says softly.
He might only be giving me this comfort to get the information out of me. A man like him could be that ruthless. I don’t care. I soak up his warmth and his strength, curling myself into a tight ball and pressing harder into him.
“A week before my mother sent me away, Leader Allen called me into his room for private prayers. He had done that before. Usually he talked about my mother, told me she was a sinner, that there was a demon inside her, that we should both pray for her soul so she didn’t wind up burning for eternity.”
Ivan strokes my hair, almost absently. I’m not sure he knows he’s doing it.
“This time…this time was different. He asked me if I was serious about shaking off the shackles of sin, if I was willing to do what it took to fight evil. He said it would be hard and scary, that only a true disciple could survive it.”
He did more than just talk to me that day. He touched me, only outside my robes. It was enough. Enough to change the look in his eyes from a suggestion to a promise. And it would have escalated quickly if my mother hadn’t sent me away. I always wondered how she knew that it had gotten worse, if somehow she saw him with me that day. That she might have seen us is more shameful to me than the act itself—and for that reason I don’t tell Blue and Lola. I don’t tell Ivan. They don’t need to know about that detail. It would only enrage them, and it wouldn’t bring us any closer to finding the culprit.
I open my eyes, startled to meet Blue’s gaze. Of the three people in this room, I’m the least close to him. Lola is my best friend, and Ivan is my lover. Even Luca, standing outside the door, is like a brother to me. Though Blue worked at the Grand, we were never close.
I still see murder in his eyes as I describe something I now understand to be a form of grooming. It sickens me, because back then I hadn’t seen anything wrong.
All I had wanted to do was please Leader Allen.
The very worst thing is that even though part of me understood the look in his eyes, part of me knew what he would ask of me, I had been willing to give that too. Anything to please him.
Just like my mother had been.
“He said that other people wouldn’t understand, that they were not adhering to the word of God. So we could…we could never tell them what we did. I hadn’t talked much during these sessions, but I had asked him then, why didn’t the sinners outside Harmony Hills read the Bible. He told me that some of them didn’t care, that they were disciples of the devil. But he said that some of them, they did care, but they were following false prophets, misinterpreting the scriptures.”
My hands curl into the soft fabric of Ivan’s shirt, needing that anchor. He tightens his hold around me.
“He told me that one day, with my help, the people would find their path to God. He said that’s why he needed me so much. He said…he said, ‘So there will be one flock, one shepherd.’”
Lola sucks in a breath. “John 10:16.”
“And the other one, he didn’t quote it exactly, but it would be hard to think of a member of his flock who went more astray than I have.” I manage a wry smile. “I kind of made it my life’s mission for a while there.”
“Find out everything you can,” Ivan says to Blue. “I want any information the police have on disappearances or criminal activity. I want financial records. Everything.”
Blue nods. “I’ll find out if any of his flock have been taking trips recently.”
“They won’t leave a paper trail. If they’ve evaded the cops this long, they know how to be careful. Besides, we already know that whoever’s fucking with the Grand is good. That’s why we haven’t found any trace of him.”
“What should we do?” Luca asks. “A preemptive strike? Hit them and then they’ll know not to fuck with us.”
/> “I have no desire to harm innocent people. And I have no desire to hit a hornet’s nest when I have my own snake to deal with at home. No, we find out if they are involved before we move on them.”