Below 15
The cellar beneath Grace Eternal was a stone lung, breathing in the damp rot of southern Louisiana and converting it back into something vile. The silent whimpers of the sinful.
The pleas of the damned.
Or, like today — the hard footsteps of a singular judgment day.
The place had been a root cellar once, then a hiding place during some war — which war depended on who you asked — and now, it was a sanctuary for a different kind of silence.
Twelve feet down, and the Louisiana summer still managed to crawl through the mortar with feverish vigor.
The air was a thick, wet weight, tasting of lime-wash, copper, and the salt of human terror.
Judah had stripped off his jacket and shirt, his back slick with a fine sheen of grease and sweat that made the ink look like it was crawling across his skin.
The tan expanse of his shoulders was a map of contradictions: the suffering Christ, the jagged psalm fragments, and the older, blurred marks of a life spent in the dirt.
Curtis Fontenot had been skimming. Fucking rat.
It wasn’t a bold theft. It was the insult of a small-minded man — four hundred here, seven hundred there. A petty rerouting through a cousin in Lafayette who thought distance was the same thing as safety.
Under the watchful eye of the Lord, distance was a myth.
Judah poured two fingers of whiskey, the amber liquid catching the glow of the single overhead bulb. He stood with his back to Curtis, thinking about the divine punishment the rat would soon bask in, and he drank.
Curtis was suspended with his arms in the air, bound by thick, prior-judgment roughened rope.
He’d been here a day and had started talking only after the sixteenth hour.
At first, he’d told Judah to go fuck himself, and Judah had.
Leaving him for ten hours. When he came back, he’d been covered in all sorts of fun things — from piss to vomit.
Yet he still wouldn’t talk. So Judah had fucked off again, came back, and suddenly Curtis was a lot more talkative.
Could do with the heat. Could do with the fact that Curtis realized Judah meant what he said — he wouldn’t get out of here alive.
“Tell me about Lafayette,” Judah said.
It took a second for Curtis to find his voice, then the words started tumbling out in a rush of a bayou-thick accent.
“It’s nothing. Ain’t but a bait shop my cousin runs.
I swear it ain’t no serious thing. I sent him the cash thinkin’ it’d wash clean through his books. Thought… thought ye’ wouldn’t notice.”
Judah turned slowly, the whiskey glass loose in his grip, his grey eyes narrowing.
The tattoos on his chest seemed to shift in the dim light — a serpent coiled around a cross, its fangs bared in eternal warning.
He stepped closer, the heat from his body mingling with the cellar’s fetid breath, and Curtis flinched against the ropes, his wrists raw and weeping.
“Wouldn’t notice,” Judah echoed. He set the glass down on a scarred wooden crate, the clink echoing off the stone walls.
“Your greed is one thing, Fontenot — your lack of common sense something else entirely.” He reached out, but Curtis flinched away.
Judah smirked. “I won’t punish you for your greed, Curtis. ”
Curtis lifted his head — face sweat-drenched and pale. “You ain’t?”
“No.” Judah moved to the far wall.
“Oh, praise the—” Curtis couldn’t finish because he saw what Judah reached for. And it was no small thing.
The whip was coiled beneath the hook like a sleeping snake. It was heavy leather, gone dark with age and saturated with oil until it had become as supple as skin. His grandfather's. His father's. A legacy of iron and wood.
He picked it up. The leather felt warm.
“Preacher, please!” Curtis begged when Judah walked back. “God was merciful, God was good!” he blurted. “God forgave! Please.”
Judah tested the whip — it snapped the air in half.
Curtis flinched, his eyes filling with tears.
“Your fault is thinking the Lord and I are one and the same,” Judah said. “I preach the Lord’s word but I follow no religion.”
The first strike was a crack of thunder in the small space. It opened a welt across Curtis's shoulders that went a sudden, violent red. The man’s body lurched against the ropes, a raw, animal sound tearing out of his lungs — the sound of a body realizing it no longer belonged to itself.
Judah let the echo die.
The second caught lower. Curtis's head dropped, his chest heaving as he fought the air. A thin line of blood appeared where the leather had bitten through the shirt, tracking slow and dark through the fabric.
Judah pretended he wasn’t counting — that men like he didn’t need the numbers. That this was a ritual. This was the work. But deep at heart, Judah was a bookkeeper. Numbers were what made sense to him.
Not religion.
Not faith.
Numbers.
By the fourth strike, the heat in the cellar felt like a solid thing.
Sweat ran freely down Judah's face, stinging his eyes, his forearms wet and gleaming under the bulb.
He could feel his own heart hammering in his palms, the rhythm running up his arms and pulling at his shoulders with every swing.
He thought about the wages of sin. It wasn't a Sunday morning abstraction.
It was a physical price, paid in skin and salt.
Accounted for.
A number.
The sixth.
Curtis finally broke. He screamed — a full, jagged sound that filled the room and couldn’t find a way to leave. His body shook with a fine, tremor that didn't stop even when the whip stilled.
Judah paused.
He was breathing hard. There were dark spots of blood on the leather and on the floor. The air smelled of copper, bourbon, and the ancient smell of dying faith. He looked at the ruin of Curtis’s back — saw the red lines there, and thought: I will answer for this.
He believed in the accounting. He believed in a God who didn't want prayers, but blood. A God who had watched a father lift a knife over a son and waited to see if the steel would flash.
He and the Lord agreed on a lot of things… if Judah twisted them enough.
He walked up to Curtis. The man couldn't lift his head, it hung loosely, swaying from side to side. Judah reached out, his hand steady, and caught Curtis’s jaw, tipping his face up into the light. The man’s eyes were bloodshot — unseeing.
“The cousin in Lafayette,” Judah said. “Name.”
Curtis told him.
Judah let go of his jaw. He stood, the sweat cooling on his skin, and made a single call. One sentence. No more.
Then he picked up his shirt from a rickety chair, put it on and went to the stairs. His hand lingering on the damp stone wall.
“Someone will come,” he said, his voice flat and even. “Don't pull on the rope. You'll make it worse.”
He didn't look back.
Upstairs, the vestibule was an ice bath.
The relief of the AC air was so sharp it felt almost sinful.
The stained glass threw pools of sapphire and blood across the floor, the same as it did every Sunday when the congregation looked to him for the truth, and didn’t even notice it was his truth he was preaching.
He went to the prayer rail and knelt.
He didn't use a cushion. He wanted the hard wood to bite into his knees. He wanted the discomfort to remind him that he was still a man, still tethered to the dirt, still a monster reaching for something he didn't have a name for.
He prayed to a God whose religion he had abandoned.
He prayed because he believed, as contrary as it may’ve sounded. But belief and religion aren’t one and the same — not to Judah.
One was a brick taken from the foundation of a hive mind and the other was born out of desperation.
He stayed there eleven minutes. He had been counting since he was a boy. Minutes were honest. Minutes were a debt paid in time.
He stood. He straightened his cuffs, hiding the ink on his forearms.
He went to his office and returned his calls.
Downstairs, Curtis Fontenot waited in the dark. He would stay there until the men Judah had sent arrived. It was a mercy, of sorts. The only kind Judah knew how to give.
Or maybe Curtis was already dead.