Ivan confers with his men over the phone.
“No one’s hit,” they tell him. “Except Luca.”
My eyes shut tight against what I saw in that house, what I learned. I curl into a ball.
Only Ivan’s touch can calm me now. He’s the eye of this storm, the only thing that isn’t spinning and destructive in this whole mad place. We drive out of Harmony Hills much quicker than we came, while I shiver uncontrollably, held tight in Ivan’s lap.
Chapter Twenty-Six
I’m lying in the bedroom of a penthouse suite in the closest city to Harmony Hills, the same city where the social worker once took me, the same city where I first caught a bus. Large enough that we can be anonymous, though I didn’t ask how they managed to bring Sarah Elizabeth here. She’s currently tied up in the bed in the other room, a gag around her mouth.
It’s hard to imagine how this day could have gone worse. A man is dead. A girl is kidnapped. And I’ve learned something horrible, something that explains everything about me.
I did come from evil, and I do have a demon inside me—but not because I’m a woman. Not because I have breasts and a vagina. Not even because I like to get spanked by a man I call Daddy. No, I’m evil because of what’s running through my veins.
His blood.
His genes.
His teachings.
I’m a product of my nature and some very controlling, depraved nurture. It’s not something I can ever escape. It’s inside. Leader Allen is inside me.
Ivan comes in and washes his hands at the bathroom sink, his back to me.
“What are you going to do with her?”
He turns slightly. “You’re awake. How are you feeling?”
“I don’t understand why you took her. Won’t that only link us to Leader Allen’s murder even more?”
“I had room service deliver some fruit and pastries. It’s outside on a tray. Let me bring it inside.”
“No. Stop. I’m not a child. I’m not a little girl you need to feed and spank and put to bed on time. I’m asking you questions, and I deserve answers.”
His eyes grow cold. “Fine, you want answers? We took her because she’d have been dead by now if we’d left her. The people there are going to go on a witch hunt when they find him—and she was standing there, holding a shotgun, in shock, wanting to put more bullet holes into a dead man.”
I swallow hard because he’s right. He may have never met the other men and women in Harmony Hills, but he understands how they work. Just like he understands how I work. We’re followers. Sheep. “Is Luca okay?”
“He’ll live.”
“Why did he take Sarah Elizabeth?”
“We’re going to question her. She was close to Leader Allen. She might have heard something.”
“I want to be there when you talk to her,” I say quickly. I know how intimidating Ivan can be. And I don’t think he’d hurt her. He knows that she’s innocent even if she knows something. But he can get feral when it comes to the Grand.
I expect him to fight me, but he simply nods. “Come then.”
I follow him into the other room.
Sarah Elizabeth’s eyes are cloudy as she watches us come in. There’s a small dark vial on her nightstand, and I realize that’s how they kept her asleep through all this. Did he use it on me too? Or is this sluggishness just part of the shock from this morning?
Ivan settles into a chair in the corner, and I stand awkwardly in the center of the room, trying to figure out where to go. It feels like choosing sides. How they’re treating her isn’t right. But the Grand needs to be safe again.
Then Luca comes in, and I realize why Ivan is sitting. Luca has a bandage across his stomach and no shirt on. He looks angry. He looks terrifying as he pulls a folding knife from his pocket, and I gasp. Sarah Elizabeth gasps too, and squirms away on the bed. With her hands bound behind her back and her ankles tied together, she doesn’t get far.
Her gaze is wide now, all sleep drained from them, and so are mine.
Luca grasps her hip, and she goes very still.
I can see her chest rising and falling from beneath the shift. I can see more of her body than I expected to, the shadowed outline of her breasts, the dark circles of her nipples. I never realized how revealing the shifts were. Or maybe it just seemed normal to me back then.
With a rough jerk, Luca slices through the gag around Sarah Elizabeth’s mouth. She coughs the fabric onto the bed and then spits into his face, making him laugh. It’s a cruel sound, and I realize I’ve never seen Luca perform his job—as a bodyguard, as an enforcer. He’s occasionally been stern with me, but in the end, no matter how much I protested and pretended, I was too obedient to need anything worse. There’s blood seeping through the white gauze, making him look savage. He’s a wounded animal, and wounded animals lash out.
Sarah Elizabeth has no intention of being obedient. She’s glaring at Luca like she’d shoot him again if she were still holding that shotgun. “Let me go.”
“Not until you tell me who he sent to fuck with Candy.”
Her gaze snaps to mine. “I don’t know anything about that. He never told me.”
I can see plain as day that she knows the truth. Whatever happened to toughen her up, to make her sad, to make her wield that gun, it didn’t manage to make her a better liar. Ivan watches the proceedings from the corner, expression intent but remote.
Luca studies the tip of his knife. “I’m sure he didn’t tell you.” Then he turns to her, using the knife to wave in her direction, as casually as if he held nothing at all. The metal catches the reflection from the lamp. “But you would have heard something. You lived in the same house as him.”
Her eyes are on the knife. “I don’t—”
“It’s okay,” Luca says softly, even more sinister for how reassuring he sounds. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
He doesn’t want to hurt her, but he will.
“I—” Her voice breaks, and fear has replaced the defiance in her eyes. This is the expression Leader Allen would have seen when he taught her how to pray.
It makes me angry. “She said she doesn’t know. Leave her alone.”
Ivan stands, drawing all our attention. He has a way of commanding a room with just a look. The look he gives me now tells me to shut the hell up. He sits on the edge of the bed, resting a hand on her shoulder.
She freezes, and I can see her pulse jump in her throat.
“Sarah Elizabeth,” Ivan says softly, testing out her name. Then he focuses on her. “You have to understand, the Grand is my business. The people who work there, I’m responsible for them. And I should watch over them, shouldn’t I?”
Her head nods slowly, eyes never leaving his.
“Someone broke in and left threatening messages. I can’t let that go on. I can’t let anyone get hurt. Can I?”
She shakes her head no, just as slow. Her eyes are wide. There’s still fear, but it’s tempered with something else. Understanding. Because Ivan protects me the way Leader Allen never would have protected her.
He leans down and whispers something in her ear. I can’t make it out, and I glance at Luca. I expect him to be annoyed that his interrogation was interrupted or maybe just in pure business mode, but he’s watching them both with a brooding expression. No, he’s watching her with a brooding expression.
She swallows hard, looking up at the ceiling. Then at me. “He would talk about you sometimes. He didn’t like how…devout I was.”
The way she says the words leaves a chill in the air. Every one of us here knows what she means. It has nothing to do with faith.
“He said that you would be better, that he was going to find you, bring you back.”
I shiver at the thought of being in that room again. The truth is, I don’t believe he could have contained me. I would have gotten out or died trying. I’m different than I was before. Different than Sarah Elizabeth, because she’s never been outside. She’s never tasted freedom. We were born in captivity, bred and raised to be what he wanted.