Page 36

I was as certain as Hart was that my father was in contact with the other Community Elders, that they knew where he was—or at least how to reach him. Which meant that if he didn’t already know I was also a shifter, he would soon.

What remained to be determined was whether that would cause him to reach out to see if I could be convinced to rejoin the Community, or whether it would just make him furious that someone so unworthy would be granted the power of transformation.

My money was on the latter. So was my life.

If I knew my father—something that was now very much in question—he was likely to get angrier the longer he went without dealing with the problem. I couldn’t say that I was looking forward to the eventual confrontation, either, given that I was the problem in question.

I’d been the problem before.

It had led to hours spent on my knees in the basement, the door tucked on the far side of the stairs I now sat on.

If I opened it—which I hadn’t been able to force myself to do yet—a set of open wood-plank stairs would lead me down to a bare cement floor, the walls cinder-blocks pressed into the earth.

There was a single exterior door—a wood-plank root cellar door leading outside that had always been kept padlocked shut.

Not that I could have gotten to the doors most of the time.

In the center of the room was a heavy wooden timber pushing up against the crossbeams that formed the support for the floor planks above.

Around the base of that timber, my father had a heavy iron chain.

More than once, that chain had been padlocked tightly around one ankle, keeping me close enough to the post that I couldn’t reach the doors or the stairs.

There were still scars on my right ankle.

Not particularly prominent ones—if you didn’t know you were looking for them, you might assume they were from any number of other things.

It wasn’t a rope-burn scar, like the one that was gradually fading into the copper skin of Elliot’s throat, or a manacle scar, because it had just been the links of a chain.

And I hadn’t bothered struggling because I knew better.

The scars hadn’t been caused by trying to free myself.

They’d been caused by the repeated pinching of flesh between links, tiny little things, almost like feather-touches, that not even Elliot had noticed or commented on.

I had other scars, from other things. A few faint lines on one hip that blended in with the stretch marks I’d gotten from shooting up in hight too fast for my own skin at age seventeen.

Those were from a belt buckle when I’d been small—the only time Momma had stood up to my father.

After that, he didn’t used the buckle side, although he didn’t stop using the belt.

There were the usual kid-scars, too—tiny light spots on my hands from falling on the sharp gravel of the driveway tripping over my own too-big-for-me feet.

A faint line on one shin from doing pretty much exactly what I’d done with Hart when I was a kid—except as a kid, I managed to not sprain my knee, just scrape myself up.

I’m sure there were a dozen more, faded into the pale pink of my skin.

You couldn’t see the worst of them, though.

Those were the scars pressed into my psyche—the way I hated my own hunger and the body it produced, the way I thought less of myself for wanting expensive things, the way I second-guessed my own judgment of other people, the way I seemed to always choose romantic partners who tried to control me—until Elliot, anyway.

It was maybe weird that the one thing my father and the other Community Elders had worked the hardest to eradicate was the thing I never once questioned.

Or maybe I did, given the fact that I found it hard to believe that anyone I loved could ever actually love me back.

Not as much as I loved them, anyway. Or not in the same way I loved them.

It haunted me—I knew Elliot loved me, but I also knew that I’d loved him first. That I’d had to convince him to love me.

And that meant that whatever he felt, while it might be real, it wasn’t the same as what I felt.

Wasn’t as strong as what I felt. It couldn’t be.

“Seth?”

I looked up, the movement suddenly making me aware of the fact that there were tears running down my cheeks.

The man in question crouched down in front of me, his hazel eyes concerned, and I slid sideways to give him room to sit. He climbed up and settled on the steps above me, running one hand through my hair as he gently guided my head to rest on his thigh.

I let out a heavy sigh and let Elliot stroke my head, drawing strength from the sturdy muscle of his quad, the gentle motion of his fingers, the warmth of his body.

“You want to tell me what’s going on?” he asked, softly, and while most people would have said it sarcastically, he meant it as a genuine question. Did I want to tell him what was going on?

I didn’t.

But I probably should.

“It’s my father,” I said softly, speaking into the dark brown fabric of Elliot’s cargo shorts.

“We figured that,” he replied.

“Not just… Not just for killing Momma,” I said, the words more difficult than I expected. “I think he’s behind all of it. He and the Community Elders.”

“Did they threaten you?” I could hear the edge in his voice. “Val said it went fine, that he got what he was looking for, but that everybody was polite…”

“Everybody was polite. In that vicious Southern way.”

“What does that mean?”

I sighed again, feeling my own breath push back to me as it reflected off his thigh.

“It means everybody was polite-but-hostile. They didn’t like us being there, and that was abundantly clear, even though they seemed cooperative.

” I swallowed. “Also, my father is an Elder now,” I said.

“He’s one of them—he wasn’t at the meeting,” I clarified when I heard Elliot suck in a sharp lungful of air.

“But they know where he is.” I sighed. “Not that they’re talking. ”

“Okay, so, what? He’s responsible for the direction of the Community, then? The isolation?”

“That’s always been the way the Community works,” I replied. “Long before Father became an Elder.” I sighed. “But that’s not what I meant.”

“What, then?”

“The Elders, maybe even Father, probably placed Mosby in the Sheriff’s Department to have control over it,” I said softly. “And Father is probably why Mosby ran you—because he thought it was me—off the road.”

Elliot drew in a long, slow breath. Thinking, clearly. Considering. Worrying.

“You think he’s going to try again?” His voice was low. Serious.

“I know he is,” I replied, just as serious.

“Even though the FBI is involved?”

I couldn’t help the slight laugh that slipped out. “The FBI doesn’t matter to him,” I replied. “He believes he has the authorization of God.”

“To kill people?” Elliot sounded incredulous.

“Absolutely.” I sat up and looked at him. “El, the Community believes they were chosen by God to live a life apart. That only those who are most worthy will find the way to salvation through purging sin from their bodies and minds in order to purify their souls.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Elliot muttered, his hazel eyes wide. “So all that shit you told me about—that was to purify your soul ?”

“What did you think it was for?” I asked, just as incredulous.

“Because your father’s an abusive fuck,” he retorted. “I don’t know why abusers do the shit they do.”

I couldn’t help rolling my eyes, even though it felt a bit flippant. “There is always a reason,” I told him. “Always. It might not be justifiable to the rest of us, but there’s always a why . Sometimes it’s alcohol or drugs or addiction, sometimes it’s greed, panic, PTSD, rage, fear?—”

“Religious nutjobbery?”

I shifted a bit, my butt starting to fall asleep on the worn wood of the stairs. “If you believed—really, truly believed that sin could be beaten out of someone, and if you believed it was your sacred duty to do it, wouldn’t you?”

Elliot’s expression now was horrified, and that hurt. “Are you seriously justifying what that fuckhead did to you?”

“No!” Was I? I swallowed. “That’s not… not what I meant,” I mumbled, feeling heat rush up my throat and into my cheeks.

Elliot bent down, taking my face in both of his calloused hands. “Seth, baby, look at me.”

I obeyed, aware that there were tears running into his fingers.

“Nothing, I repeat, nothing can justify what was done to you and Noah. I don’t fucking care if the God your fuckhead of a father believes in is real, you don’t fucking do that to your kids . You don’t do it to anyone, much less people you care about. People you’re supposed to love. You got me?”

I nodded, gulping air. Elliot slid down a step, one leg on either side of my torso, pulling me against his chest. I listened to his heart beat, the pulse faster than usual, but slowing the longer we sat there. After a few minutes, he stirred.

“So what’s he going to do?” Elliot asked softly, sliding one hand to cradle my skull, letting the other rest on the back of my neck. He held me there, fingers gently stroking the hair at the nape of my neck.

“Who?”

“Your father.”

“I—I don’t know, exactly.” I swallowed. Tried to focus my brain.

“I—I think now that he knows what I am, he might… want to do it himself.” That seemed right.

Well, accurate . The only time my father had withdrawn from punishment or purification had been the one time he’d felt that it would be more inappropriate for him to be involved than not.

When what needed to be done involved assaulting his sons.

Not at the same time or in the same way, but with the same intent.

To force us to become something we weren’t by showing us that what we thought we wanted was an abomination.

I couldn’t exactly argue that what Jeremiah Porter had done to me wasn’t an abomination. Or what he’d done to Noah, although the logic there had been different—that Noah needed to experience his purpose as a wife and mother.

The end result had been the same.

We were still who we were, but we’d almost given up on ourselves. We’d tried.

I’d wondered, sometimes, if there was a God or Creator or Fate or whatever, and if that was the reason that the drowning had failed and all the times I’d prayed desperately as a kid for the cruel God I’d still believed in to just take my soul hadn’t been answered because there was more to our lives than the hell that had been our childhood.

Because there was. So much more.

“Do what himself?” Elliot asked, when I’d been silent for too long.

I sat back and looked up at him, at the planes of his face, the concern in his fractured-brown-green-crystal eyes, the way the copper skin on the long column of his throat rippled as he swallowed, the lines of scar around his jaw slowly fading as time passed.

Even though his features were familiar, I still always wanted to study them, to find new things I somehow hadn’t noticed.

To see each additional line and wrinkle as they formed, showing where he smiled or arched his eyebrow. God, how I loved him.

“Kill me,” I replied softly. “Because I refused to be purified. So I have to be purged, because I am unworthy of the transformation.”

“Seth—” He was clearly upset.

“That’s what he believes,” I said softly. “That because I’m unworthy, he has to kill me to protect the Community.”

“Is that what you believe?” I could taste his fear, bitter and sour on the back of my tongue.

“No,” I answered him honestly, hurt that he thought I might. I pulled away from him, the back of my neck feeling cold and exposed without his hands resting on it. “I—” I blew out a heavy breath. “I might not be perfect, but I am who, and what , I am. Regardless of what he has to say about it.”

Elliot studied me, and I couldn’t read the expression on his face. Or maybe I was just afraid to.

“Then why don’t you believe me ?” He sounded heartbroken.

And I had no idea why. “Believe you about what ?” I hissed.

I wondered if I sounded as panicked as I felt.

It felt like I was losing him, and I didn’t understand why.

Five minutes ago it had felt like he was the stable rock holding together my admittedly very shaky foundation.

And now… I’d done something—I didn’t know what, but something —wrong and hurt him. Badly.

Perhaps too badly.

I felt sick, the food I’d just eaten heavy like sludge in my stomach.

It felt a little like thinking he was dead all over again.

“That I love you.”

“I know?—”

“You say that, Seth, but you don’t really believe it.

You think… I don’t fucking know what you think, but you somehow think that I love you less because I was afraid to let you in.

” He gripped my face in his hands again.

“I was afraid because I knew I could love you. Did love you. And I knew that if if I did, and I fucked it up like I always do, that my heart would shatter.”

I swallowed back a sob.

“I would literally—and I mean literally —die rather than let anyone do anything like that to you. Do you understand me?”

“El, no?—”

“You don’t get to tell me no on this one, baby.

” His words were harsh, but his fingers where they traced my features were so gentle.

“I get to decide how much I love you, and it’s infinitely more than that fuckhead ever did or could.

More than I’ve ever loved anyone. Because I will put you first, always . Got me?”

I closed my eyes, unable to withstand the intensity of his gaze. I felt the press of his lips against my forehead.

“I love you,” he whispered into my skin. “And I will absolutely die for you if I have to, but I promise you I would much rather both of us live to be wrinkled, grey-muzzled old men. So that’s the goal, okay? For both of us.”

I nodded. “O-okay,” I agreed meekly, stuttering around a sniffle.