Page 12

Rhyder wasn’t going to kill me, but there were no guarantees about the other men.

“I’m getting out of here,” one brunette wailed.

I turned back to look at her. “Do not! They are cruel men and you will get beat or worse.”

She didn’t look convinced, crowding closer to me, and I didn’t know if I could blame her. There were so many wild stories about what happened to the women kidnapped to serve as settlement whores. But the reality was far worse. Only a small percentage of them ever lived through the year.

I waited tensely for the truck to stop, then I squeezed myself desperately through the tiny gap, falling painfully to my knees as I tumbled off the side. Then I lurched to my feet and took off.

The brunette was heading after me, but she was bigger and it took her longer to squeeze through the gap.

I bolted as fast as I could down a side street, and I heard my brother get off his bike, that earsplitting crash that meant he had leapt off it without even stopping.

I had heard it once before, when we were riding bikes and I had slid off the road and into a ditch that was a little too close to a steep drop into a river for Rhyder. He had jumped, completely heedless of his bike as it smashed loudly into a guardrail, snatching me up before I had barely started to slide down the hill.

There was someone else back there, too, grabbing the brunette woman, and I heard the sound of a blow, and then a whimper.

“Get your skirt up if you want to get out of the cart,” someone else ordered.

I breathed a sigh of relief to hear her apparently obey.

Then I heard the sound of slick cocks on skin, but I wasn’t stopping to see any more.

There were heavy footfalls behind me.

I desperately searched each bike rack I passed see if any bikes were unsecured, but without luck until the fourth or fifth one.

“Temperance, stop!” I heard Rhyder roar.

In the cult disobeying the direct order of any adult male was a mortal sin.

That went double for any Deacon or Elder.

Disobeying a direct order could carry a sentence of death

In practice, it usually meant a beating, but you took your life in your hands every time you disobeyed a man.

But my brother had never raised a hand in anger to me in his entire life.

I kept running, and the next bike rack miraculously had an unsecured bike.

“Stop!” Rhyder ordered again.

But I grabbed the bike, jamming my pussy painfully against the seat, and began to peddle away.

I biked as fast as I could. After a few years in the city it was either a bike or the bus, and I was pretty fast. I pedaled until I felt like my lungs would burst, breaking for the main road I knew would take me to my apartment.

Oh, Allfather if I could only not make a stupid mistake in my panic!

I was lucky that I didn’t have a car, so I knew this part of the city very well.

Rhyder was still calling behind me, his feet pounding harder on the pavement.

“Temperance!Godsdamnit,Temperance! Come back!”

I couldn’t risk looking back, not even when I heard the note of raw pain and anguish in his voice.

Please