Chapter Ten #2
“I thought I could bottle it up,” she finally confessed. Another tear rolled from her eye, and she wiped it away. “That if I ignored it, it would eventually go away. For a time, I thought that was working, but I guess I was fooling myself.”
“I promise it does get better,” Kira told her.
“One day, you’ll wake up and not think about what happened.
A week will go by. Then a month. And when it does float through your mind, the barbed wire won’t be attached.
This family I found, the Sons of Sin, we protect each other, and if you let us, we will always be there to help you. ”
“Remember, you are zero percent at fault,” Sinn added. “You are not guilty for that prick’s actions. And there is no right or wrong way to be or feel. I have some great books if you want to read them. They helped me.”
This was more than Shiloh could have ever thought dreamed of having.
Sure, she had Vette, and she’d always be grateful to her friend for throwing her a life preserver, but Kira and Sinn understood.
They walked in her shoes. Confronted the same nightmare.
Taking a deep breath, she turned toward Jade.
“Do you want to be here for my story?”
“Absolutely,” he assured.
“I think Saint needs to be here, too,” Kira told her.
For a moment, panic knocked on her door, but Shiloh pushed it down. Of course, the leader of the MC had to be there. He was Kira’s partner, too. She nodded, and Sinn sent a text.
While they waited for him, Sinn took her through a few breathing techniques. Something she could practice whenever she felt overwhelmed. When Saint walked in, he studied the situation, then shut the door behind him.
Kira nodded encouragingly at her.
Now, it was her turn. “I guess I should start with asking if you’ve ever heard of the Sect of Purgatory?”
Just saying the name made her want to throw up.
Jade, Sinn, Kira, and Saint all shook their heads. Shiloh wondered where she should start, and decided that the beginning would be best.
“My father died when I was young. Car accident.” She swallowed down the thick bitterness that rose in her throat.
“I’d been begging him to take me to the Strawberry Festival, which was in the next county.
He eventually agreed, and we had a blast. It was ...
I was ... I hadn’t been since I was a real small girl and I rode every ride and ate so much cotton candy I had a stomachache at the end of the night.
My dad, he uh, won me a little stuffed animal. ”
She sniffed. This was the part she hated. “On the way home, a deer jumped in front of us, and he veered off the road. They said he died on impact. We weren’t found until a day later, but all I had sustained were a few scrapes and a concussion.”
She still couldn’t understand that. That deer fucked up her entire life.
“My mom, she, um, started drinking. Started hitting. About a year later she met...” It was so hard to say his name. “Lawrence. He was a preacher, and he came to town to give the Gospel, and that’s where they met. My mom said he came to save her from her demons, which included me.”
She shook her head. “My own mother called me one of her demons because she blamed me for my dad’s death. If I hadn’t begged to go to the festival, we wouldn’t have been in that accident. He wouldn’t have died. And she wouldn’t have turned to the bottle to cope.”
“That wasn’t your fault!” Kira cried.
“To her, it was. Her and Lawrence married, and suddenly, I was going to church three times a week. I was punished in front of the entire congregation for any type of behavior they considered morally wrong. If I talked back. If I didn’t do all my chores.
If I got a bad grade in school. There was a sliding scale of how bad my behavior was, and the correlating number was how many times I’d be punished. ”
Jade let out a sharp, surprised hiss. “Punished? How?”
“That’s where the Sect of Purgatory comes into play.
Lawrence said I was so full of evil that God told him to create a cult to punish those who had black souls.
Like mine. He preached that to be accepted into the Kingdom of Heaven, one must go through the Penance.
Which was created by him, of course.” She glanced at Jade.
“He created a whole ritual to cleanse my soul. Told me I had the Devil in me, and I had to pay the price.”
Jade’s jaw flexed as fear and anger flashed over his face. “What happened?”
“They took off my clothes. Tied me to a post that left my back exposed. And he whipped me.”
Kira gasped, her hands going to her mouth as horror filled her face. Jade’s grip on her hand tightened. Sinn and Saint glanced at each other. She knew what they were thinking. Pitying her. She understood their horror and revulsion. That was two things she’d been running from, but it wasn’t all.
“What else?” Jade asked, his voice low and filled with contained rage. “Because I know there’s more. It’s written on your face.”
“You know what else,” she said softly, unblinking as she stared back. “He used force to take that dignity from me.”
“Remember what I told you long ago.” Rage simmered in every word. “Say the word, and I’ll go kill him.”
“He’s not worth your time.”
“He may not be, but you are.”
At those impassioned words, the ice around her heart melted just a little bit more.
“The day he, uh, violated me was the day I knew I had to leave.” She lowered her face.
“I was at the health clinic, making sure I was clean, when my friend, Vette, called me out of the blue and she invited me to come to Cheyenne. The rest you know.”
Saint settled his hand on Kira’s shoulder. “You have a place with us, Shiloh,” he said. “You’re Jade’s woman, so you’re one of us.”
Shiloh’s eyes widened, and they darted quickly over to Jade. “Um, I don’t think Jade—”
“He’s right,” Jade interrupted, bringing their joined hands up to kiss her knuckles. “You’re mine, and I’m yours.”
Tears filled her eyes. “Are you sure?”
Kira rose. “I think it’s time for us to leave you two to talk.”
Saint, Kira, and Sinn left, closing the door behind them.
“To answer your question, yes, I’m sure,” he told her firmly.
“I’m an emotional mess.”
He shrugged. “Who isn’t?”
She smiled faintly at that. “We could do a test run. Date and see how you feel about me six months. If we want to continue being with one another.”
“I don’t need six months.”
“You don’t know all my flaws.”
“I hate to break it to you, but I have flaws as well.”
She gasped over-dramatically. “Say it ain’t so.”
He grinned. “In six months, you’ll see just how serious about us I am.”
“Well, then, this conversation will become moot.”
He leaned in and placed a quick kiss on her lips. “You don’t trust me yet. At least, not with your heart, and I understand. But I will prove to you that your faith in me won’t be misguided.”
“Okay,” she said, taking the leap. “Prove me wrong.”