Chapter 27 #2
“Hey! You should feel sorry for our rotted little brains. Gen Z didn’t ask to be mind-controlled by the reptilians who live in our smartphones.”
Wes snorted. “Aw, is that what I should feel for you?” A teasing darkness eclipsed his eyes, his tattooed hand back on my thigh. “Sorry?”
I didn’t think it was possible for him to turn me on during a mutual trauma dump, but alas, Wes was also a man who contained multitudes. He leaned back, reining in the electric current that had sparked back to life between us.
“What was your given name, Nova?” he asked me, and I was transported instantly back to my own beginning.
I turned to stare out the window, watching the slow turn of a tree’s bright green leaves in the wind. “Mary. My name was Mary.”
There was a reason I didn’t talk about the explicit details of my past. Once I started pulling at one thread, it was like the whole two decades unraveled in my palms, leaving only blood and Bible verses in their wake.
That was Lorelei’s first addiction. Making herself bleed. She cut herself before she found alcohol and men, and she disappeared into those vices like they were a second womb.
“I failed someone once too,” I said, already slipping, my body getting a strange numb sensation that dulled all my senses.
The only thing keeping me here was Wes’s firm grip on my hand.
“Lorelei and I had been inseparable since birth. Her father was the pastor of our church and the ruler of our town. He was wealthy and well-resourced in every way imaginable. The police department and local justice system were in his back pocket. It wasn’t a regular church, or even a typical conservative church.
Pastor Roy Carter spoke of the end days—a rapture that was always only a year away.
Year after year. And only the chosen would survive. ”
Wes released a breath, and I focused on the weight of his hands like they were my lifeline.
“We were tested every second of every day. We could never relax, never become too comfortable. The chosen were pure. Desireless. They accepted everything they were given with a smile. None more so than the women, of course, because the men in high control religious groups are always allowed to live by different rules. Pastor Carter encouraged corporal punishment, the withholding of meals, and solitary confinement to keep children in line at all times. Parents with disobedient children weren’t chosen. ”
Wes pulled me closer to him, and I shivered when he took off my ridiculous hat, released my hair from its tie, and raked his fingers through my wavy strands. I relaxed into his touch.
“Turns out, the whole time Lorelei, the rest of the young girls, and I were being taught that our worthiness was derived from our purity and subservience, Paster Carter was—” I shut my eyes, but I opened them quickly when an unwanted memory popped up against my will.
“He wasn’t just abusing Lorelei verbally and physically. ”
Wes cursed, his eyes fiery.
“I walked in on them once, and I…”
“Oh, Nova,” Wes whispered, pulling my head to his chest as I choked on a sob.
“I ran,” I finished. Kink was not my greatest shame. That day was, my biggest regret I could never atone for no matter how hard I tried. “I should’ve said something. Done something. But I didn’t. I ran.”
“How old were you?” Wes asked, stroking my hair.
“Nine,” I said. “We were both nine.”
“Jesus. Of course you ran. You were a child. There was nothing you could’ve done.”
I soothed myself with one long breath, the familiar numbness returning.
“I told my parents. I was terrified, but I needed to tell them. My older brother was there. He was sixteen and a carbon copy of my dad—narcissism and all. My mom just stood there and watched while they punished me with a belt. She didn’t say a word.
My dad and brother didn’t stop yelling at me the whole time, calling me names and accusing me of things I didn’t yet understand.
Impure things. They said, how dare you speak against the prophet, the man chosen by God to save our souls from the rapture.
I couldn’t eat dinner, and I was forbidden to leave my room for a week.
They threw away all my toys and left me only with a Bible. After, no one spoke of it ever again.”
My tears drenched Wes’s shirt as he held me.
“Everything carried on as usual. That was one of the community’s best methods of control: abuse and silencing, followed by an eerie normalcy that made you doubt if anything had ever happened at all.
But I never forgot, and I never forgave myself for knowing what was happening to Lorelei and not stopping it.
” A familiar fire lit up my veins. “I was the one who found ways around parental controls, getting Lorelei and myself access to all kinds of forbidden media and corners of the Internet. I was the one who crafted our escape plan, who convinced Lorelei over a long period of time that we needed to leave the minute we turned eighteen. In the end, she thought we’d come up with the scheme together, no idea that I’d been subtly pushing her toward it for years.
Mary and Esther became Nova and Lorelei. ”
Guilt plagued me, a shame I often avoided feeling at all costs.
“I thought I’d saved her and, by extension, saved myself.
But it was my dream to come to New York.
It was my dream to go to NYU and become a successful romance author under a name my family would never recognize.
I brought Lorelei with me, into my world; all the while, she had never left the one we escaped.
She was—is—still trapped in that house with her father.
I ruined her life,” I said, voice shaking now as I admitted to someone for the first time what I’d never said aloud.
“She started drinking the moment we landed in New York to cope with her night terrors, and she hasn’t stopped since.
She had no direction, no resources to get help for what had happened to her.
She didn’t want to go to school. She didn’t even want to live.
All she wanted was to escape with men who made her feel like shit and substances that made her feel nothing at all.
I’ve spent the last seven years trying to make her happy, keep her safe, because I was the one who dragged her up here in the first place, to a city where we had nothing and no one but each other. ”
My shoulders were heavy with the weight of my guilt. Hudson didn’t understand. No one had ever understood my devotion to Lorelei. But Wes—Wes might.
“That was why I entered The Circle,” I continued.
“Why I can’t just abandon her when I know something sinister is happening.
However her new boyfriend is abusing her is my fault.
” I completely slumped against Wes, exhausted by the burden I’d been dutifully carrying by myself for so many years.
“When I was nine, I ran. I can’t do that to her again. ”