4. Ronan
Ronan
I lead her to where I’m parked at the calm, leisurely pace of a man who has everything under control.
It’s all performance. Inside my skull, I’m screaming.
What the fuck did I just do?
I married a barefoot, traumatized nineteen-year-old cult member I’ve known for less than ten minutes, and I married her in a dirt yard next to a whipping post while a man with a leather whip stood three feet away waiting to flay her back open.
Behind us, one hundred-plus cult members watch as one of their own leaves with a stranger. Buford’s gaze is a drill bit between my shoulder blades. I don’t turn around.
I hit the key fob, and the locks of my Audi chirp. Prudence jolts at the sound.
“It’s the car. The lock.” I keep my voice even. Calm. The same tone I use with skittish investors and hostile politicians. “Here.”
I open the passenger door and step aside so she can get in.
She doesn’t move. She’s fixed on the interior—the leather seats, the dashboard, the digital display—as if I’ve opened a portal to another dimension. Her lips part, but no words come out.
Then I notice how she’s clutching both halves of her torn shift together with white-knuckled fists, one hand at the neckline, the other at the waist.
“Hold on.” I reach to undo my belt buckle and slide the leather free from the first loops.
She goes rigid.
Every muscle in her body locks. Her chin drops to her chest. Her shoulders curl inward, rounding her spine, and she turns her body a quarter-rotation—not to run, not to shield herself, but to present her back.
I stop with the belt half-drawn through the loops.
She’s positioning herself for a blow.
The practiced, automatic precision of her posture guts me. This isn’t panic. She’s done this before—turned her back, dropped her head, prepared herself for punishment. Her body performs it without consulting her brain. The way a soldier drops to the ground at a loud noise. Muscle memory.
For three seconds, I stand in the gravel holding a half-drawn belt, unable to breathe.
“Prudence.” Her name comes out rougher than I intend. I clear my throat and try again. “Prudence. Look at me.”
She doesn’t lift her head.
“I’m not going to hit you. Ever. Not with anything at all.
The belt is for your dress,” I say, pronouncing each word with care.
“To hold it together. So you don’t have to use your hands.
” I pull the leather free from the last loop and hold it out between us, flat across both palms, as non-threateningly as I know how. “That’s all it’s for. Nothing else.”
She lifts her head by degrees. Her eyes find the belt, then my hands, then my face. I watch her process.
“You can do it yourself. Or I can help—your call.”
She takes the belt from my hands. Her fingers brush mine, and the contact again sends a jolt through me. The same thing I feel every time we touch. It’s electric and unsettling.
She threads the leather around her waist. Her hands shake, but she manages the buckle on the third attempt, cinching the shift into something that will stay closed.
It looks absurd—a shapeless gray dress the texture of burlap held together by a two-hundred-dollar Italian leather belt—but it works. She can move her arms.
“Good,” I say. “Now get in.”
She climbs into the passenger seat with cautious, deliberate movements.
I close the door and round to the driver’s side.
As I turn the ignition and the engine purrs to life, she grabs the edge of her seat with both hands. Her eyes go round.
This situation is surreal. All of it.
“Have you ever been in a car before?” I ask as I ease the car into gear.
She shakes her head.
Christ. Again—what have I done?!
We crawl down the dirt road past the hand-split fences and The Enclave shrinks in the rearview mirror.
I wait until we hit a paved road before I speak again.
“What happened back there—the ceremony—I just wanted to get you away from that pack of crazies.” Oh, fuck, I probably shouldn’t have called them that, not to her. She’s one of them. Or, she was. “What I mean is, now that we’re out of there, we can ignore the marriage altogether.”
She watches the windshield. No reaction.
“In order for a marriage to be recognized by the state of Illinois, you need a license. Issued by the county clerk. Filed at the courthouse. None of that happened.” I glance at her. “There’s no paperwork. No government record. As far as the law is concerned, we’re not married.”
She turns her head. Her brown eyes search my face. I can’t read what’s behind them.
“That means you’re free,” I tell her. “You can go wherever you want. Live however you choose.”
Nothing. The silence stretches. I’m used to reading people—their tells, their micro-expressions, the subtle shifts in posture that reveal what their mouths won’t say. I can parse a boardroom full of liars in under five minutes.
Prudence gives me nothing. Not defiance, not relief, not anger. She’s sitting in a leather seat in a dress held together by my belt, her bare feet on the floor mat, and her face is a closed door.
“Do you understand what I’m telling you?” I press. “You’re free. That marriage doesn’t exist.”
“You said I do.” Her voice is quiet. Not accusatory, but factual.
“I said I do to get you out from in front of that whipping post.”
She considers this. Her hands knot together in her lap, and I notice the calluses—thick ridges across her palms, the kind that come from years of physical labor. Her nails are short and ragged, and there’s dirt ground into the creases.
“So…” I say after another five or so minutes of silence, “is there somewhere I can drop you off?”
She looks at her bare feet.
No answer.
“Where would you like to go?” I prod.
She lifts her gaze and holds mine for a count of three. “Where would I go?”
Four words. The quietness of them is worse than a scream. There’s no self-pity in her voice. No drama. She’s stating a fact the way you’d state the weather. The sky is gray. The road is wet. I have nowhere to go.
I tighten my grip on the wheel. “Family? A relative’s house?”
“I have no family.”
“Friends? Someone you trust?”
“The Flock is—” She stops. Reconsiders. “The Flock is my only family.”
“So, there’s no one?”
“No.”
The highway opens ahead of us. The city skyline materializes through the haze—glass towers and steel and a million lives stacked on top of one another. Her eyes widen in awe.
I run a hand through my hair and reach for a practical angle. That’s what I do. I’m a problem-solver. A fixer. Give me a crisis, and I’ll map you a dozen routes to the other side of it before you’ve finished describing the problem.
“Okay,” I say, “That’s no Problem. You just need a job and a place to stay. I can pull strings. My brother Lorcan manages O’Rourke’s—our family pub. It’s newly reopened after a renovation. He can probably use extra help.”
She turns toward me. The same guarded blankness. Not hostile, not confused exactly—more like a person hearing a language she doesn’t speak and trying to isolate a familiar sound.
“What is a pub?” she asks.
I open my mouth. Close it.
“You don’t know what a pub is?”
“No.”
Of course she doesn’t.
“It’s a…” I search for the simplest possible explanation. “A place where people go to eat food and drink alcohol and spend time together. A gathering hall, but with food and drink you pay for.”
Her brow furrows. “Why would they pay to eat? Don’t they grow their own food?”
“Not in the city. People buy food at stores, or they go to restaurants—eating places—and someone else cooks for them.”
She furrows her brow, and I can tell the concept hasn’t landed. Of course it hasn’t. The frame of reference doesn’t exist.
“Have you ever been outside The Enclave?” I ask, already knowing the answer.
“No. We are not permitted. The outside world is…” She hesitates, searching for the phrase. “A cesspool of sin that will lead the soul to eternal damnation.”
She recites it the way a kid recites a school pledge. The words don’t belong to her. They were installed.
I grip the wheel tighter as I’m slapped in the face with a dose of reality—meet the consequences of your actions, dipshit.
She doesn’t know what a pub is. I’d bet my financial portfolio she’s never had a cellphone, seen a television, used the internet, or held paper money.
She can’t navigate a city, drive a car, fill out a job application, or order food at a counter.
She has no identification, no social security card, no birth certificate that I’m aware of. And she has no shoes.
I pulled a nineteen-year-old woman out of the only world she’s ever known and put her in a car headed toward a city of three million people, and she has fewer tools for surviving in it than a small child.
If I drop her off somewhere—a shelter, a women’s center, a bus station—she’ll be eaten alive. Not in weeks. In hours.
I glance at her. She’s fixed on the skyline growing taller through the windshield, and her hands are folded so tightly in her lap that her tendons stand out.
She hasn’t said a thing about being afraid.
Not a word about not knowing what comes next.
She sits and watches and folds her hands and waits—clearly trained since birth to be still, silent, and accepting of whatever someone else decides.
My phone vibrates in the center console. The screen glows. Ma.
I send her to voicemail.
I don’t know what I’m going to do with this woman. I don’t know how to undo nineteen years of brainwashing, or how to explain to my family that I impulsively married a cult member I met less than an hour ago.
But I know one thing. One thing sits in me with the weight and certainty of an anchor dropped to the ocean floor.
I’m not sending her back.