The Church (The Cloister Trilogy 3)

He yanks her from the bed. Rage pools inside me like molten steel, and I squeeze the remote in my aching palm.

When he drags her from the room, I can’t hear her scream, but I can feel it in my bones.

Chapter 22

Delilah

The Prophet drags me from my room, his grip painful and his gait fast yet unsteady. Chastity plasters her back to the wall as we pass, her eyes questioning but her mouth silent. I keep up, my bare feet slapping the wood floor.

“The Father of Fire tried to speak to me this morning.” His words are half-mumbled, and I can barely make them out. “He told me that you are my downfall. You.” He stops so quickly I almost bump into him. Turning his dark eyes on me, he glares. “But if I kill you, my downfall will be even swifter. Why is that? Why you?” He shoves me against the wall, his usual calm façade gone and the astounded face of a madman in its place. “Why? Who are you?”

I shake my head. How can I respond? There’s nothing to say.

“You.” He jabs a finger into my chest. “You are nothing.” Spittle flies from his lips. “No one. Just another whore. That’s all.”

Did he talk this way to Georgia before he had her killed? The thought erupts and burns. He can threaten and blame me all he wants, but his downfall—whatever that means—is all of his own making. His sins will come back to him tenfold, and I will be the one watching him as he’s crushed under their weight.

“Come with me.” He yanks my arm again.

Grace stands at the back door, holding it open as we barrel past and into the sunny, cold morning. I can’t read anything other than her usual smugness as we pass.

He shoves me into a waiting car. I scramble away as he sits next to me and slams the door.

“Go!” He slaps the headrest of his driver, and the car rockets up the hill from the Cloister, then turns right. Away from the Prophet’s house and deeper into the compound.

The Prophet grabs my throat. I press my back to the door, but there’s no escape from him. A thin coating of white powder outlines his nostrils, and there’s whiskey on his breath.

“You know where he is, don’t you?” He squeezes, but not hard enough to stop my breath.

“I don’t know—”

“Adam!” he yells in my face. “You took him. It had to be you. You spirited him away somewhere. Witch!”

I shake my head. “No.”

“‘I will destroy your witchcraft, and you will no longer cast spells.’” He shakes me, the back of my head beating against the glass. “‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’”

My heart spasms in my chest, and I can’t catch my breath. He’s lost what little bit of self-control he had. If it weren’t for his pronouncements about his swifter downfall, I have no doubt he would kill me.

“I’m not.” I can barely get the words out. “Not a witch.”

He grimaces. “You are what I say you are, what the Father of Fire tells me you are. You disobey your Prophet with your heathen ways. I will make you suffer.” His voice lowers, all the softness from his usual tone gone. “Tell me what you’ve done with my son.”

“I didn’t—”

“Tell me, you whore of Babylon!” My ears ring as he screams in my face.

I close my eyes, trying to hide from him, to disappear into myself where he can’t follow.

“Sir.” Another voice invades my self-imposed darkness. “We’re here.”

The Prophet’s hand disappears, and a waft of cold air enters the car as the driver steps out.

I open my eyes and scrabble at my door handle. It doesn’t catch. My need to escape is primal, beating in my soul like a drum. Out, out, out. When my door opens, I heave myself from the car and stumble on the gravel path leading into the short, dark building—squat and silent like a tomb. The place where I broke. The place where my mother suffers.

The Prophet is on me, his rough grip on my arm dragging me forward.

A scream rips from me, my cowardice given sound. But he doesn’t stop, even as my feet skitter along the rocks and I try to yank free of his grip. There is no ‘free’. Not from him. Not from this place.

The guard at the door abandons his post and grabs my other arm, the two of them dragging me into the gloom and turning down the long, narrow hallway. I know this place too well, and a single phantom drop of water trickles onto my forehead.

“Which one?” The Prophet asks.

“Here.” The guard stops at a door in the middle of the hall and swings it open.

Inside is nothing. The black hole at the center of the galaxy, the inky water of a fetid well that has no bottom.