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Walking into the kitchen, I saw that he had left five hard-boiled eggs, a crusty loaf of bread with butter, and a pitcher of cool water on the counter.

Fiveboiled eggs?

Apparently this was what my colossal brother ate for breakfast.

I took one singular egg and a slice of bread and butter and moved around the kitchen.

It was so familiar. In fact, it looked like barely anything had been changed.

There was something covered on the counter and I twitched the cloth off to see. . .a loaf of bread.

And not just any loaf. A loaf made in the cast-iron that had been my mother’s. The same loaf that had been cooling on the rack when I had run outside to see what that noise was. Six years ago.

Rhyder hadn’t moved it.

I looked closer, startled to see what looked like dark, deep-red smears all over the bread.

Fuck, was that blood?

My hands suddenly began trembling uncontrollably, and I covered the bread up and began to back away, but my eyes couldn’t help noticing things.

In fact, there were little smears of blood alloverthe house, streaks on the edge of the table, high on the fridge, even on the door handle.

What thefuckhad Rhyder been doing?

I stumbled to the door, and suddenly my brother was there, his big frame filling the entrance.

"Did you get enough to eat?” he asked, his eyes warm.

No one who knew my brother only as a religious zealot and inflexible Holy Warrior would ever guess that his eyes could look so warm, that a smile could curve up on the harsh handsome planes of his face.

When I said I had, he bent down to kiss me.

“Let me take you around,” he said. “Show you the new boundaries of our lands. We’ve expanded.”

I felt eyes on me as Rhyder guided me through the camp, his hand tight and affectionate.

But the preparations for Holy War only filled me with uncertainty and fear.

After my brother had shown me around the camp, now over two or three times as big it had been, with two or three smaller Congregations conquered and absorbed, the Enforcer came up to him.

“Rhyder, you are needed to go over strategy,” Eli said. “As for you,” and he looked like he didn’t even want to say my name. “Go find Generosity. No idle hands.”

I nodded, and turned to go, but Rhyder’s warm palm was on my neck, turning me around to touch both my shoulders, touch his forehead to mine.

“Blessed be,” he said. “Blessed be the tie that binds our hearts together.”

“B-blessed be,” I stammered in response, feeling conspicuous and afraid.

And I felt Eli’s eyes on me as I left, cold angry disapproval scraping down my spine.

As I walked over to where a group of women stood preparing root vegetables, my insides twisted with nerves. I wasn’t used to the contemptuous glances, the loathing.

Growing up, our Congregation had not been strong enough to do regular runs into the cities to get concubines.

But as a whore, I had the lowest status in the camp.

There were only two other women who had made it through the Reaping and the other Congregation’s attack, and they would stay in a smaller house at the edge of the ring of wooden houses, watched over by an older widow named Aunt Piety, who monitored them.