Chapter 39
Sophie
The woman is barely more than a shadow when I find her behind the Hollar Dollar on the county line. At first, I think a stray dog got tangled in a garbage bag, something rustling, small, helpless.
I only stop because instinct screams at me. Women in this county disappear too damn often, and I’ve learned to listen to the quiet warnings.
What I find instead is human.
Barely.
She’s curled behind the dumpster, hoodie swallowing her frame, knees scraped raw. A half-empty water bottle clutched in white-knuckled hands like it’s the last thing keeping her upright. When she lifts her face, the streetlight catches the streaks, tears carved through dirt.
My heart cracks in half.
I holster my gun slowly, always on me, ever since Paradise Falls became a battlefield, and crouch so I don’t spook her.
“Hey,” I say softly. “You’re okay now. You’re safe.”
She flinches at the word safe, like it’s foreign. Like it’s a lie.
Her chin trembles. Her dark hair is matted with dirt and blood. She looks like she hasn’t slept in days.
“No one’s safe,” she whispers.
A chill washes over me.
Not from the night.
From the certainty in her voice.
She doesn’t mean the Reverend, not directly. Her eyes are too wild, too haunted. I’ve felt the same presence brushing the back of my neck lately, like a storm building where there’s no sky, like something watching through the cornrows along the county road.
I shrug off my jacket and wrap it around her small shoulders. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”
A long pause. Then, barely audible.
“Cider.”
“Alright, Cider. You’re doing real good. But I need you to tell me who’s coming.”
The wind rattles the metal siding of the dollar store. Cider’s shoulders hunch like the shadows have teeth.
“The winged man,” she whispers. “With red eyes. He screams without a mouth.”
My stomach drops clean out of my body.
The drawings in Becki’s notebook.
Legend’s sleepless nights.
It’s not coincidence anymore.
“Did he hurt you?” I ask, voice barely steady.
She shakes her head. Then nods. “Not him. Not yet. But the others. They wore masks. Animal masks. Leather ones. They said we were unclean and the Leaper only comes for the unclean. Said they were making us pure.”
Bile rises hot in my throat.
Crowley.
His sermons.
His obsession with purity.
His followers who don’t blink unless he tells them to.
“Did you escape from Pearly Gates?” I ask tightly.
Cider nods, chin wobbling. “During evening prayer. They think we’re too scared to run.” Her voice hardens. “But I watched. I waited. I found the back door key in the pulpit drawer and I ran.”
Brave girl.
Braver than most grown men I know.
“You did the right thing,” I tell her, heart shattering as I help her stand.
“But that was years ago,” she says.
Knocks the wind out of me.
“I’ve got a safe place for you.”
I guide her into my SUV, still dusty from driving back and forth to Paradise Falls and crank the heat. She curls into the passenger seat, my jacket engulfing her like a shield.
On the drive, I call a nurse I trust. She meets us in my guest house, turned safe house now, takes Cider gently, whispers that she’s safe now.
I almost believe it.
But not fully.
Not with the way Cider watched the tree line like something waited there.
Once she’s settled, I get back in my car. My pulse hammers. The wheel creaks beneath my grip. I gun the engine and fly down the back roads toward Hell, Kentucky. Gravel spits behind me. My headlights carve through the dark like knife blades.
Legend needs to know. The club needs to know. And I need to look him in the eye while I say it.
I find him outside The Fire Pit, stepping out with Oaks and Rye. They’re mid-laugh until they see my face. Legend stiffens. His hand drops instinctively to the gun he keeps tucked behind his belt.
“Sophie?” he asks, stepping toward me.
“Now.” I grab his arm, dragging him away.
Oaks whistles. Rye mutters, “She got the fire in her again.”
Legend follows without a fight. We round the side of the bar, moonlight glinting off broken beer bottles and gravel.
When I spin to face him, my breath fogs between us.
“A girl escaped Pearly Gates,” I say, words sharp as glass. “She’s alive. Barely. And she says your preacher daddy has been running rituals.”
Legend’s whole body goes stone-still.
“What rituals?”
“Masks. Threats. Purification,” I spit. “She said they were preparing them for something.”
Legend’s jaw clenches so hard I hear something crack. “Did she name him?”
“He didn’t need naming. She described him.” I swallow. “And she mentioned the Demon Leaper. Said they’ve seen him. Heard him.”
Legend closes his eyes for one beat too long.
Then.
“I saw something too.”
My stomach twists. “When?”
“Week ago, or more,” he mutters. “Behind the chapel. At first I thought it was a man. Vanished when I shot at it.”
Ice slides down my spine.
“You didn’t tell me that.”
He lifts an eyebrow. “You didn’t tell me you found a traumatized girl behind a dollar store alone, until midnight.”
“But I did.”
“After you took care of it, I’m assuming. All alone. Ain’t smart.”
Fair enough.
I take a breath, steadying myself.
“We’re out of time,” I say. “Crowley ain’t just manipulating girls. He’s preparing them to be taken. Somewhere.”
Legend scrubs a hand over his face. He looks tired. Haunted. Older than he should.
“I didn’t think it was this deep,” he murmurs.
“It is.” I step closer, boots crunching in gravel. “And we need Becki back. If for anything, leverage.”
Legend snaps his gaze to mine, fury sparking. “No. Becki is done. She’s poison. She almost ruined us already. Royal, too.”
“She also survived whatever those monsters were planning,” I argue. “And she knows the Reverend’s twisted theology better than any of us. She sees the pieces we’re missing.”
“She’s still a threat.”
“She’s also your sister,” I remind him quietly.
Legend flinches. “The fuck she is. That’s sick, Sophie. A sick thought.”
Biting my lip, I know I said it to dig. He hates when people point out, he’s adopted and tied to them. “Okay, then. She’s family.”
The wind kicks up, cold enough to sting. The hollow behind the bar feels too empty. Too exposed.
“Sophie,” he says finally, voice low. “What if this thing is real?”
I swallow hard. “Then we hunt it. Or we hunt the man pretending to be it.”
He huffs a breath, half a laugh, half despair. “You always did hate false choices.”
I touch his arm gently. “We need a plan. A real one. And Royal needs to know about the girl we found, hear her story himself. He must be on to something.”
“I know that. Why do you think we haven’t hunted him down, yet?”
“He trusts Becki in ways we don’t understand yet.”
Legend’s expression darkens. “You think he cares?”
“I think he’s in love. They both are,” I say simply. “And that’s leverage.”
A long silence stretches.
Finally, he nods. “Full church meeting tomorrow. Every brother present.”
“And Becki?” I ask. “What’s her fate?”
He doesn’t answer for a moment.
“I’ll call them home. Royal will come.”
A shiver ripples through me.
Not fear.
A sense that something ancient has started moving, and we are already too deep to turn back.
“Alright,” I say. “Then you’d better pray we’re not already too late.”
Legend looks toward the rolling hills, his silhouette carved sharp against the Kentucky moonlight.
He looks like a man preparing for war.
Because we are.
Legend doesn’t move when I step closer. Doesn’t breathe. His eyes track me the same way they track danger, slow, deliberate, hungry. I feel the shift in the air before it happens, that familiar pull in my belly, dark and hot as good bourbon.
“We’re really doing this?” he asks quietly. “Bringing the devil’s daughter back into this club?”
“That’s not what I’m thinking about right now,” I murmur. The truth, but I also don’t need him questioning my motives. Legend’s big and gratingly sexy. But not an ounce of him is dumb.
He lifts one eyebrow. “No?”
“No.” I take one more step until my breasts brush his cut. “Right now, I’m thinking about how you didn’t deny caring about her. And how you didn’t deny being scared.”
Legend huffs a laugh, rough and humorless. “I don’t get scared.”
“Liar.”
“What are you saying? Are you saying that’s what you need to forgive me?”
“Yeah, some honesty would be nice.” I laugh.
“Soph… Princess. There’ll always be shit I can’t share… the club…”
“Shut up, already,” I say, grinding against him.
That’s when he grabs my hips, hard enough to bruise, gentle enough to ask permission, and shoves me back against the wall of the Fire Pit. My breath leaves my body on a gasp.
“Soph…” His forehead presses to mine. “You’re playing with a loaded gun.”
“I carry one,” I whisper. “Yours ain’t the one I’m afraid of. It’s the one I miss.”
He drags a thumb along my bottom lip, slow, the way a man studies the fuse on a stick of dynamite.
“You shouldn’t look at me like that,” he says.
“How?” I challenge.
“Like you dare me.”
I smile up at him, heat curling through my spine. “Maybe I do.”
That’s all it takes.
He kisses me. Like he’s been dying to get his hands on me all month.
Not a polite kiss. Not a careful one.
It’s desperate and rough and full of everything I’ve been denying myself, since the moment he put that ring on my finger but brought the other woman home.
My fingers fist in his cut and yank him closer, and he makes a sound in the back of his throat like I just snapped the last thread of his restraint. He lifts me off the gravel without breaking the kiss, my legs locking around his hips on instinct, like my body can’t deny who it belongs to.
His hands grip my thighs hard enough to bruise, hauling me flush against him.
“Jesus Christ, Sophie,” he rasps into my mouth. “You’ve been holding out on me.”
“Maybe,” I breathe. “Maybe I wanted to see how long you’d last.”
That does it.
He groans, deep and ugly and feral, and presses his forehead to my throat like he’s fighting the urge to drag me somewhere private and fuck me properly.