Chapter 39
Savage’s phone buzzed.
I kept my face buried in the pillow but opened one eye.
He reached for his cell which rested on the nightstand. He sighed. “I gotta go.”
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Eight. Prez is calling Church. To discuss the Raze thing.” He peered down at me. “You need to throw up before I hop in the shower?”
“Savage,” I moaned.
“What? Don’t you usually puke your guts up in the morning?”
“Yes,” I agreed. I sat up for a moment and then I ran to the bathroom.
When I was done with the morning sickness, I went back to the bedroom. Savage had gone to the kitchen to grab me a glass of orange juice. Thankfully, he’d put on a pair of sweats first.
He handed the glass to me, and I drank three gulps.
He kissed the end of my nose. “Better?”
“Better,” I agreed. “Why does the suffering of pregnancy start with morning sickness and end with painful messy childbirth?”
“Couldn’t tell ya. But, at least at the end of it, we’ll have two beautiful babies.”
“Nature’s cruel joke of how they come out,” I grumbled.
He kissed my forehead and then went to the bathroom. He shut the door and then I heard the sound of the shower going.
I finished my juice and thought about a naked Savage in the shower. I knocked on the door of the bathroom and then opened it.
“If I promise to keep my hands to myself, can I get in there with you?”
“It’s not your hands I’m worried about, but my own. I’m done though. You climb in and when I get out, I’ll get you a fresh towel.”
I got into the steaming water and glided past Savage. He was beautiful. All rippling muscles and ink. It was a wonder we ever got out of bed.
Oh, right, we barely ever do.
I slid the shower curtain closed and shampooed my hair.
“A fresh towel is on the rack for you,” he said a few moments later. “Get dressed and head to the kitchen for breakfast. I’ll meet you there after Church.”
“Okay.”
“I grabbed some clean clothes for you from the apartment. They’re in the top drawer.”
“When did you do that?” I asked.
“When you weren’t looking. Come out here and let me kiss you goodbye.”
“I’ve got shampoo in my hair.” I poked my head out and met his lips. “You might be thoughtful packing clothes for me, but we need to do something about your shampoo, conditioner, and soap situation.”
“What? You don’t like drugstore generic?” he quipped.
“I can smell the chemicals. I’m going to get us something natural.”
“Whatever makes you happy, babe.” He kissed me one more time for final measure and then he was gone.
I finished up in the shower and after towel drying my hair as best I could, I padded naked into the bedroom. I opened the top drawer and pulled out a pair of underwear and immediately grimaced. They were so unattractive. I made a mental note to ask the Old Ladies a good place to get lingerie. I needed to spice things up.
With a sigh, I got into my jeans and sweater. Savage hadn’t brought me socks, so I borrowed a pair of his.
The kitchen was a zoo, and the Old Ladies were bustling around the room trying to feed the kids and keep them satisfied, all the while making enough for the army that was currently having Church.
“Good morning,” Mia chirped. “Coffee?”
“Half a cup please,” I replied. “Can’t have too much with the babies.”
Mia poured me a half cup and offered me cream, which I took. “What can I do to help?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Mia said. “Brooklyn, Sutton and I’ve got it.”
I smiled at the baby on Mia’s back that was in a carrier. “Looks like you’ve got a helper.”
Mia turned her head and grinned over her shoulder at her daughter. “She loves it up there. I get so much done with her on my back, it’s amazing. She’s like a little possum.”
I laughed and took my coffee to the living room. Joni moved over on the couch, and I smiled my thanks as I sat down beside her.
I looked around the room at the Old Ladies. So many of them had babies or were pregnant. It felt like I’d walked into a tribe, a group of women who understood one another and were at the same place in life.
“First batch is ready,” Brooklyn called out.
The baby Doc was holding began to cry.
“Your daughter needs a change or a breast,” Doc said to Brooklyn.
Brooklyn sighed and took her daughter. “I swear I just fed her.”
“I’ll take over your cooking spot,” Willa offered, moving to get up from the chair.
“No, you rest,” Rach interjected, handing her son to Doc. “You’re about ready to burst. Relax. I’ve got this.”
I was just about to get myself a helping, when Savage appeared from the hallway.
“Hey,” I said to him with a smile. “Can I make you a plate?”
He didn’t reply and his jaw clenched.
My smile slipped off my face.
“I need you to come with me,” he commanded.
I swallowed. “Okay.”
My eyes darted around the room. Everyone was slowly stopping what they were doing and staring at us. I set my mug down and ducked my head and then followed him out into the backyard.
Bikers stood in a cluster, and I was pleased to note that Raze and Smoke didn’t look hell-bent on killing each other.
But when they saw me, all conversation ceased. We passed by them, and I caught Duke’s eye. His jaw clenched too, and he turned away.
My heart began to beat in fear.
Savage led me to a building that was bigger than a shed but smaller than the clubhouse. He held the door open and gestured for me to go inside. He followed and then closed the door.
Colt and Zip were sitting at the head of the table.
“Have a seat, Evie,” Colt said.
His tone didn’t brook for an argument. I sat, and Savage took the chair next to me. I set my hands in my lap, fisting them tight.
Colt set his linked hands on the table and stared at me. “Duke reached out to a friend of the club who runs private security and has access to police records and shit like that. He ran your name when Savage told him he made you his Old Lady. We run everyone, so don’t take it personally. Except unlike everyone else, you popped up as a missing person out of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. The missing person report was filed by Randall Carson, Sr.”
Blood rushed to my head as it pumped furiously through my veins. It was a roar in my eardrums, silencing everything else around me.
“ Evie ,” Savage prodded. “Why is there a missing person report filed on you?”
The coffee in my belly churned. “I’m going to be sick.”
I shoved back from the table, somehow got the door open in time, and retched onto the grass. When my stomach was empty, I wiped my mouth. Trembling, I went back inside and took my chair. There was a bottle of water waiting for me, the lid already unscrewed. Savage nudged it toward me. I picked it up and took a long drink.
My insides were shaky.
“It’s time to tell us the truth, Evie. We need to have all the facts,” Colt commanded. “And don’t leave anything out.”
“It’s ugly,” I murmured. “And I haven’t been honest with you. With any of you.”
I looked at Savage when I made the pronouncement.
He took my hand in a show of support. Even though what I was about to tell them was horrible, it was time for honesty.
“I should start at the beginning, then. And tell you the full story.” I took a deep breath and looked at Savage. “I’m originally from Texas. Northern Texas. But when I was fourteen, my parents moved us to a place called The Farm in Oklahoma. The closest city is Broken Arrow.”
Savage frowned, but he remained silent, nodding at me to continue.
“It’s five hundred acres of private farmland. My parents and nineteen other families lived on the land. We’re called . . . the Seed Reapers.”
“Seed Reapers?” Savage repeated.
I swallowed. “It’s a cult. I was raised in a cult, Savage.”
No one said anything, so I blazed on.
“When I was sixteen, I got engaged to the Grand Patriarch’s son. When I was seventeen, I was bound to Randall, Jr. and married,” I clarified.
“The Grand Patriarch . . . That’s the leader?” Colt asked.
I nodded.
“You were married at seventeen?” Savage croaked. “You never told me that.”
“If I told you the truth, it would’ve raised a red flag.”
Savage clenched his jaw. “Babe, you being evasive about your past was the biggest red flag of all. I knew something was up, I just didn’t know what. Go on. We have to hear it all now.”
My shoulders slumped. “Randall was two years older than me. After we were married, we moved in together on the other side of The Farm. Far from everyone. He was the Grand Patriarch’s son, so we had a private spot just outside the community. The beatings started a few months after we were married—because I kept getting my period . . .”
I took another sip of water.
“Sow, grow, harvest, rest,” I murmured, almost to myself.
“What?” Savage asked.
“We had four seasons. Sow, grow, harvest, rest. Not only did they correspond with the planting of crops, but our relationships mirrored them too. The name. The Seed Reapers, that’s where it came from.”
“I don’t understand,” Colt said.
“We . . . all of us—the girls . . . we were bred for sowing. In the sowing season, we got married. The growing season, we were pregnant. The harvest season, we gave birth. The rest season was for recovery, so we could have more babies the next year. The whole purpose of the cult is to grow in size. That’s how they found me and my parents. When I was fourteen, we were visiting Broken Arrow, and my dad met the Grand Patriarch . . . The cult looks for people they can convert, and the women who join become the breeders . . . it’s usually their daughters. My parents were already hyper-religious. It was easy for the Grand Patriarch to convince them to move to The Farm.”
Savage frowned. “But you told me?—”
“Let her talk, Savage,” Colt commanded.
Savage nodded and clamped his mouth shut.
“After a year together,” I said quietly. “I still wasn’t pregnant. He blamed me for his family not growing. A week after my eighteenth birthday, my parents committed joint suicide in a grand sacrifice to God in the hopes it would make me fertile. I didn’t find that out until months later—that the Grand Patriarch had convinced them that if they sacrificed themselves that my womb would finally take seed.”
My stomach turned when I thought about it. “Ironic, isn’t it? Both my parents died so I could have children, and now I’m pregnant with twins.”
Savage’s hand tightened on mine and the room was silent.
I forced myself to keep talking. “Another year went by and still nothing had happened. I was nineteen and just coming out of the fog the loss of my parents caused. Grief is strange, you know? They were fanatics, and they abandoned me, but they were still my parents. I was completely lost without them.”
I shook my head. “One night the Grand Patriarch came over for dinner. He watched me all night long—calculating. I pretended to go up to bed, but I hid in the hallway upstairs so I could listen to his conversation with my hus—Randall. The Seed Reapers don’t believe in divorce. You have to understand, they’re literal in their belief system. There are no exceptions, not for anyone. In our— their world, the only way out of a marriage is death. And that night I heard them plotting ways to get rid of me so Randall could take a new wife—a more fruitful wife.”
It sickened me to recount my past.
“Every winter, there was a festival, I guess you could call it. To say goodbye to winter and to usher in the spring. I was supposed to have an accident .”
I rubbed the back of my neck.
“I struggled with what to do. I didn’t know how I was going to escape. It’s not like I had any money. The cult had been my life since I was fourteen. But I remembered the outside world even though I was sheltered. I remembered a sense of normalcy . I was so scared, but I knew I had to escape.”
I took a deep breath. “A few days before the festival, Randall was very high up on a ladder on the second story of our home removing a dead wasp’s nest. I was holding the ladder steady on the concrete. I didn’t even—there was this moment, and I just yanked it as hard as I could out from under him. He grabbed onto the rain gutter in a panic, but it wasn’t strong enough to hold him. He went down and hit his head on the concrete. It knocked him unconscious. His breathing was . . . it was really loud and steady, and he was almost gurgling like he wasn’t going to wake up.”
“Agonal breathing,” Savage explained. “It happens when someone has a traumatic brain injury . . .”
“Then what happened?” Colt prodded.
“I tried to see if I could wake him up . . . but when I couldn’t, I went to get the tractor . . .”
“What did you do with the tractor? Did you bury him—alive?” Colt asked.
I fell silent and clamped my mouth shut.
“The rest of it,” Colt commanded. “You can tell us, Evie.”
I forced myself to look Savage in the eye. I forced myself to be brave. I forced myself to look at the man I loved when I told him something that might make him stop loving me.
“I got the tractor,” I said, my voice sounding very far away in my head. “And used the loader bucket to pick him up and dump him in the pig pen behind the barn. The pigs . . . after a few days, if you don’t feed them, they’ll eat anything—and I mean anything . We’d stopped feeding them a few days before, to get them ready to sacrifice for our winter festival, and when I dropped him in . . .”
Silence reigned for several beats.
“Wow,” Zip said. “You’re so perfect for Savage.”
“ Zip ,” Colt warned.
“What?” he demanded.
“This isn’t a joking matter. This is some serious shit,” Colt said.
Savage hadn’t reacted to anything I’d said. His expression was clear of emotion and for the first time in a long time, I couldn’t get a read on him.
I bowed my head. “After that, I—went on the run. Grabbed some things of value and some money Randall had stashed away. I took my papers from before we came to The Farm, and I bought a bus ticket. I didn’t think about there being a missing person’s report. That doesn’t make sense to me.”
“Why not?” Colt asked.
“Local law enforcement doesn’t have any jurisdiction on The Farm. I don’t know why, but it’s the way of it. We—they deal with everything internally, even punishment. The Grand Patriarch must be using the police to find me, that’s all. He’d never tell the authorities what I did, even if he knew the truth—which he doesn’t.”
“So, he’s trying to get you back,” Colt said. “It’s what I’d do if someone crossed the club, and we needed to deal with it on our own.”
“So, what happens now that you know the truth?” I asked, fear creeping into my voice.
Colt and Savage exchanged a look and then Colt said, “I’ll look into it, and the club will handle it.”
“You’re not going to toss me out? I’m a stranger who lied to?—”
“You’re not a stranger,” Colt stated. “You’re Savage’s Old Lady, which makes you family now. Your problems become our problems. And the club will protect you.”
My throat thickened. “Thank you.”
He inclined his head. “You haven’t told anyone else about any of this have you? Not your new friend, what’s her name? Cozy?”
I shook my head. “She doesn’t know anything. I haven’t . . . I’d never planned on telling anyone anything about this. I’d hoped . . . I don’t know, maybe they would’ve let me go. Forgotten about me eventually.”
“From what you’ve told us these aren’t the type of people to ever stop looking for you,” Zip said.
“I planned to keep moving, never staying in one place for long.” I looked at Savage. “I didn’t expect you to change everything for me.”
“I’ve got to tell the rest of the brothers,” Colt said. “Bring them in on what’s going on.”
I nodded.
“I’m gonna walk Evie to our room, then I’ll be back,” Savage said.
“Ten minutes,” Colt said.
Savage tugged my hand and we both stood. He held the door open for me and I walked through the doorway, out into the winter sunshine. Knots of fear coiled through my belly. The truth was out there. Ugly, horrible. Irreversible.
We strode across the backyard to the clubhouse. I opened the screen door and went inside. I could hear conversations coming from the kitchen, but Savage took my hand again and led me to his room. We didn’t say anything until the door closed behind us.
I collapsed onto the bed, exhaustion I didn’t know I was carrying dropping from my shoulders.
“Are you mad at me?” I asked tentatively.
“Yes.”
I looked up at Savage and frowned in confusion. His face wasn’t pinched, and his eyes didn’t glitter with rage.
“I’m madder at myself than I am at you, though. I knew you were hiding things about your past. I just didn’t know how deep it went. And by the time you started telling me shit, I was too damn in love with you to insist you tell me everything.”
I swallowed. “I’m sorry, Savage.”
“How the hell am I supposed to protect you if I don’t have all the facts?”
“I never wanted you to know,” I murmured. “I never wanted you to . . . to look at me differently.”
He crouched down in front of me and placed his hands on my thighs. He stared into my eyes. “After I talk to the boys, I’m coming back up here and we’re going to have a long talk, so you understand.”
“Understand what?”
“That there’s nothing you could do that would stop me from loving you.”