The Church (The Cloister Trilogy 3)

My eyebrows hit my hairline. “What?”

“Yeah. Apparently, Emily wasn’t playing along like Dad wanted, so he whipped her at the Cathedral and kidnapped her mom for insurance.”

I swallow everything he’s said, but it’ll take a while to digest. I’ll have to circle back around. But for now, I need to ask about the one topic that he’s avoided. “So, she’s your Maiden now?”

He hesitates, then resumes wrapping my other hand. “Yeah.”

“What have you done with her?” The words fucking burn on the way out, but I have to know.

He shrugs. “I threaten her super loud so Dad can hear. Then I lay next to her on her bed—”

My fingers close, but the pain forces me to open my palms again. “What else?”

“Hey, I haven’t fucked her in any form or fashion. I would never get my dick wet in your girl, okay?” He still doesn’t meet my eyes.

“Tell me all of it. Come on, Noah.”

“Why?” He finishes the bandages then moves back to my foot. “Why does it matter?”

“Please.” I clench my eyes shut as he dabs the ointment onto my ghost toes.

“I made her…” He takes a deep breath and spits out the rest of the words in a tumble. “Dry hump me a little for the camera.”

My heart wrenches in my chest, and a blinding rage threatens. I want to throttle him, to fucking beat him into a puddle for touching her. Not his fault, I tell myself. Even though I know he’s blameless, the feeling remains, the need to protect what’s mine at all costs.

“She doesn’t like me, if that makes you feel any better.”

It does. I hitch up a shoulder noncommittally.

He hurries on, “She asks about you constantly. And when I touch her, she doesn’t—like, I don’t know—she doesn’t respond like chicks usually do to me. There’s nothing there. Not really. She doesn’t want me.”

“Do you want her?”

His split-second pause is a knife to my gut, but then he says, “I like her. I used to think she was weird-looking, but now I see her better. She’s beautiful. Strong. I can see why you’re into her.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

He wraps my toes, his head down so I can’t see his eyes. “I don’t want her, not the way you do.”

I let my breath out slowly, trying to put his last words on repeat and burying the earlier ones. If I don’t push the thoughts of them together down, down, down, it’ll tear me apart. And I can’t let anything come between any of us ever again. We have to stick together to make it through this.

“There’s more,” he says quietly.

“More?” I brace myself. “Tell me.”

“She isn’t who you think she is. Well—” He shrugs. “I mean she is, but not all the way.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Remember the Maiden that Mom—” He audibly swallows. “The one she killed?”

“Yeah, Georgia.” Something starts to fire in my mind, a memory that I can’t quite put my finger on. “What about her?”

He wraps gauze around my foot, and I can tell he’s wrestling with the rest. He thinks I don’t know how Georgia’s death affected him. But I do. I can’t say if he loved her, but he cared for her deeply. When she was found, he changed. Grew darker. And I suspect that’s when the drinking started.

“Noah, go on.”

He clears his throat. “Emily is her sister. Well, half-sister. Different moms. Georgia would talk about her sometimes. Her Firefly—that was the nickname Georgia gave her. I didn’t put it together when I should have. But Emily told me. That day she tried to kill me? She thought I was the one who hurt Georgia.” He shakes his head. “I never would have hurt her. I was even thinking about… Well, it doesn’t matter now.”

My memory comes back full force. A gut punch would have been less of a blindside. I blink when I see the clue that should have led me to the real Emily. When I spoke to her mother, paid her off to stop asking questions about her daughter, she’d said, “Please don’t kill her. Like you did Georgia.” At the time, I’d just assumed she’d read about the murder when it happened. But now I think about it, that doesn’t make sense. She was an addict in Louisiana at that time, and Heavenly did its best to keep the story off the front pages. There’s no way she would have known about it. Not unless she had a connection. Emily was it.

I dig the heels of my palms into my eyelids. “Fuck.”

“I take it you didn’t know.”

“No.” I can’t fathom the dedication it took for Emily to follow her sister down the twisted path to Heavenly. She’s been here trying to find Georgia’s killer all this time. “She never told me.” Why didn’t she tell me? I try to switch places, put myself in her shoes. She’s in a strange place and doesn’t know who to trust. Not even me. The thought stings, but I understand. And once she believed it was Noah? Fuck. I run my fingers through my hair and pull. Of course she couldn’t tell me if she thought my brother did it. And the truth is somehow worse. Not Noah, but my mother. My mother took her sister’s life. There’s nothing to solve this, no way out of it.