by Shayla Black
“I’ll need to start at the beginning for the rest of this shit to make sense.” Swallowing down the fear and guilt lodged in his throat, Beck drew in a deep breath, then started exhuming the past he’d buried two decades ago. “I was born in a little nowhere town in Arizona, just over the Nevada state line. Maybe you’ve heard of Messiah City?”
“Oh, fuck,” Hammer murmured under his breath.
Buddy groaned in dismay.
Dean shook his head. “You were one of those religious freaks? I can’t picture that.”
“So some of you are familiar with them. For those who aren’t, Messiah City is a group of polygamists who call themselves The Chosen. They follow the religious teachings and strictures of their chosen Messiah. He dictates everything—what you wear, what you’re taught, what you eat, what you think, and especially who you marry.
“My mother had grown up in a similar religious community up north. Her father arranged a marriage between her and their version of royalty. A parcel of land and some cash in exchange for his fourteen-year-old daughter.”
Sounds of shock echoed around the room.
Beck shook his head. “Don’t feel too sorry for her. Esther wanted that marriage. She refused to be anyone’s second wife, but she hit the jackpot when she married the Messiah-in-waiting. So when her father-in-law died a few months later, she became top bitch—just like she wanted. Esther was the perfect mate for my father—ruthless, manipulative, sure of her moral superiority over others. And she wielded faith like a baseball bat.
“Nine months after their wedding, I came into the world, first son of the exalted new Messiah. They named me Gideon. While my father built his mecca, my mother gave birth to two more boys, Jedediah and Zacharias—in that order. More disciples started settling in Messiah City, and my father took on more wives to grow his flock and consolidate his power.”
“How many?” Heavenly asked, her voice shaking.
“Eventually about thirty. My mother accepted them, but she viewed those girls—I can’t even call them women—and the children they bore my father—over two hundred of them—as both less worthy and totally inconsequential in the eyes of God. She used them ruthlessly against each other and the other residents of Messiah City to retain power. It sickened me. Not even I was spared. Early on, I started questioning her. Where was the tolerance and benevolence we heard about on Sundays? That insolence earned me fifty lashes with the strap. She swore all the while she’d beat the stubbornness and headstrong will out of me.”
“Lucky for us she failed miserably,” Gloria cut in as she gave his hand a squeeze.
Beck couldn’t resist a smile. “She did, and I got used to her beatings. When I was ten, I stepped up my defiance. Every morning, she insisted my brothers and I say a prayer to denounce Satan. One day, I turned to her and asked why she wanted me to denounce her.”
The room erupted in shocked laughter.
“There’s the smart-ass we know and love.” Hammer clapped his shoulder.
Beck shrugged wryly. “I think I got a special beating with the cane that day. Whatever. It was hardly the first time. But after that, she turned her back on me and poured her attention onto my younger brothers. They weren’t quite old enough to question her, but they weren’t too young to corrupt.”
The room fell quiet as Beck reached for the glass of water on the coffee table in front of him. He hoped no one noticed how badly his hands were shaking.
“What happened next?” Seth asked quietly.
Beck was grateful for his presence and drew from his strength. The explanation was only going to get harder from here… “As the Messiah-in-waiting, everyone expected me to take my father’s place and guide his flock once the Heavenly Father called him to his glorious afterlife. So from the time I was born, people deferred to me, even bowed to me. I was our people’s savior, the next omnipotent leader of The Chosen.” Beck rolled his eyes. “Jedediah resented the fuck out of me. Not only was I heir apparent, but I didn’t embrace my father’s teaching with the proper zeal. Like our mother, my middle brother found me too lacking to deserve my ‘throne.’”
“And you didn’t want to follow in Daddy’s footsteps because he was butt-fuck crazy?” Hammer asked.
“Actually, I didn’t realize that until later. You have to understand, with that many wives and children, I actually didn’t see my father much. But I knew from a very early age that something in Messiah City was twisted. Eventually, I’d figure out just how sick and wrong, but…when I was a kid, my mom’s beatings and Jedediah’s jealousy were pretty much my whole world.”
“So is it your mom or Jedediah coming for you now?” Seth asked.
“Probably Jed, but I guarantee Esther is in on it, too. River said the man who came to your office to warn me had blond hair—a genetic gift from our mother. That had to be Zacharias, because when we were kids, Jed and I could almost pass for twins. Anyway, I’m sure Zach is the one who saw me in Vegas when I felt like I was being watched. It sure as fuck wasn’t Jed or I wouldn’t be here. He’s dangerous.”
“What does he want?” Sadness and worry lined Heavenly’s soft face.
“He wants me dead, little girl. As long as I’m alive, I’m a threat to his power.”
She covered her trembling mouth with a pale hand, eyes wide. Beck hated scaring her.
He took another sip of water. “The rules of Messiah City were strict. Punishment for even the tiniest infraction was swift and harsh. Males, other than family, weren’t allowed to even speak to an unmarried girl. They could talk to a married one, but only if her husband was present. And if you touched a girl who wasn’t your wife, you’d definitely be beaten and banished. Some were killed and dumped in the desert. Of course, when most boys were old enough to marry—or big enough to fight back—they were exiled. Less competition for the elders,” he drawled. “Those perverts kissed my father’s ass—and were given their pick of child brides.”
“How old?” Heavenly asked, looking stunned.
“Any girl who’d had her period was considered a ‘woman.’”
Raine looked horrified. “I got mine at ten.”
“And you would have had a baby by eleven.”
Heavenly’s soft gasp blended with the collective grumbles of revulsion coiling through the room. They barely registered. All Beck could focus on was the worst of the confession yet to come.
He darted a quick glance at Gloria, who had tears in her eyes. Though he’d given her the condensed version of his life in Messiah City, she was about to learn all the most damning details.
Gripping his mental scalpel, Beck closed his eyes and sliced deep, carving open his wounded soul. “When I turned sixteen, I was considered old enough to marry in the eyes of God, so I asked my father’s permission for Blessing’s hand, who was thirteen at the time. We’d secretly been talking. I’d even boldly kissed her one day while she hung her family’s laundry out to dry. She was special, kind. I can’t say I loved her, but I couldn’t stomach the thought of her being married off to one the elders—most four times her age—so they could rut all over her and breed her every ten months. I wanted to spare her that fate.
“When my father refused, I was crushed and angry. But like always, the Messiah turned on the charm. He said God had bigger plans for me, and Blessing wasn’t a proper match for a man of my status.
“When I wouldn’t accept that she was unworthy, my father tore off his ecclesiastic mask and preached at me. ‘No Messiah should be so blinded by temptation that he falls prey to the sins of the flesh,’” Beck mimicked. “He meant I should want to please him more than I wanted pussy. To him, women were merely God’s vessels for sexual ease and reproduction, the garden in which man planted his seed. They definitely weren’t worthy of emotional investment or fidelity. A man’s duty was to spread his mighty sperm with multiple wives so the word of God could spread throughout the land.”
“I have clients who have more respect for women than that.” Gloria shuddered.
“The next day, under the guise of saving my fragile soul and removing temptation from my path so I could become the next true Messiah, my father announced that he would take Blessing as his new spiritual wife. She was number thirty-one.”
The debilitating betrayal, rage, and impotence he’d felt that day slammed Beck again. Body trembling, bile rising in the back of his throat, he clenched his fist and struggled to keep his shit together.
“Two days later, my father married Blessing. That next afternoon, I found her crying behind the barn. Going against every rule I’d been taught since birth, I hugged her and kissed her and told her everything would be all right. That was the first lie I’d ever told.”
“You tried to comfort her.” Heavenly looked up at him from her place on the cozy rug between his feet, curling a gentle hand over his knee.
“It didn’t do any good. Six weeks later, my father called me to his office to tell me I might be getting another brother from Blessing. I wanted to puke. But when he told me he’d never lain with a less enthusiastic bride and that removing her from my path had hardly been worth his trouble, I wanted to kill him.”
“What a cocksucking bastard,” Seth growled.
“Oh, it gets better.” Beck scrubbed a hand over his face. “After I listened to a sermon about Messiah-worthiness for two hours, he finally promised that he and the Lord would find me an appropriate wife to deflower and breed soon. He hoped she’d be far more committed to continuing our illustrious bloodline than Blessing. After all, I would need sons to secure my future.”
Raine made gagging noises.
River just shook his head. “What a tool.”
“And not a very sharp one,” Beck shot back. “When he dismissed me, I was livid. He’d blatantly manipulated me—and I hadn’t seen it coming. For months, I festered. I tried to burn off my rage with manual labor. That didn’t help. All I realized was that if what he’d done to Blessing—and all the other little girls he fucked—was religion, I wanted no part of it. But watching my father’s child grow in Blessing’s belly and the life slowly dim in her eyes…” He breathed out a heavy sigh. “I knew something had to give.”
“The following summer, Blessing and I were talking in the barn when her water broke. Her labor was premature. We both panicked. I picked her up and carried her to my father’s house. Reluctantly, he called the midwife. I waited in the family room for hours, listening as Blessing’s screams grew weaker. She was too young, her hips too narrow… There wasn’t anything the midwife could do.” Beck tried to shove down the fresh rage and regret so he could go on. “After twelve hours of excruciating hell, Blessing and my baby brother died.”
When his voice cracked, Heavenly was there again with a consoling touch. Seth was beside him, too, squeezing his shoulder. But the tears in Gloria’s eyes nearly spawned his own.
“Ken…” She gripped his hand. “I didn’t know.”
There were a few things he hadn’t confessed. It had all been too raw. He’d been too ashamed that he hadn’t been able to protect Blessing. “I couldn’t find the words.”
“Oh, sugar…”
“I need to go on. You know there’s more.” He kissed her hand and set it aside. “Their deaths didn’t faze my father. He simply spouted some crap about it being God’s will. But I was annihilated. And I couldn’t stomach his hypocrisy and unfeeling bullshit anymore.”
Beck launched from his chair and trekked past his friends to pace the large room. His skin felt tight. His stomach knotted.
Now he had to tell the worst of the story, the part that might have some condemning him.
“At the funeral, my father stood at the open grave, spewing platitudes about them being at peace in the house of God. I couldn’t tear my eyes off Blessing and the baby—each wrapped in a white sheet and tossed into the ground. She was a wife of the Messiah, yet my father didn’t even bother to have a proper coffin built. I silently screamed out my apology to her, but the guilt and fury ate me alive as I watched two elders shovel dirt over their cold, dead bodies. I couldn’t speak as we left, especially when another of his flock came forward to offer his condolences—and his daughter—to help him through his grief. She’d just gotten her first period the week before.”
“Was he crazy?” Seth asked.
Beck shook his head. “Ambitious. Anyone connected to the Messiah in any way, especially through marriage, was automatically more important.”
“That’s horrible,” Heavenly breathed.
“It’s why I couldn’t stay. My father said he’d stop by the man’s house that night to inspect his daughter—he had no idea who she was—then led me to his truck. By then, I was so grief-stricken that I didn’t argue when he peeled off his suit coat, tossed it onto the seat, and told me to get in. He said something about picking up grain for the livestock. All I could think about was stealing his truck and leaving that fucking place.
“A couple miles down the road, he turned into the town’s lone gas station and parked beside the building. I was confused because we weren’t anywhere near the feed store. Then he turned his crazy black eyes on me, and I swear I could see the maniac inside him—the one who delighted in every unconscionable act he performed. I knew I was only seeing this face because he didn’t intend for me to talk to anyone again. A cold chill raced up my spine. I was terrified. When I looked around for someone to save me, I realized we were alone.”
“What did you do?” Dean asked.
He’d been so silent, Beck had almost forgotten his presence. “At first, nothing except listen to him curse me and demand I change my attitude, embrace my destiny, and purge the weakness from my soul. If I didn’t, he’d do it for me. It wasn’t an idle threat. Six weeks earlier, one of the men dared to refuse the great Messiah when an elder insisted on marrying his twelve-year-old daughter. A week later, the man’s body was found a mile down the road. He’d been beaten to death.”
Around the room, everyone gasped. He was surprised they had the capacity to be shocked anymore. Or maybe that was just him. He knew his “family” too well.
“As my father condemned me, I stared out the windshield at the public restrooms. That’s when it dawned on me. They had identical doors, both with signs that were the exact same size and color. Both allowed their respective genders privacy and dignity. In fact, nothing about those restrooms indicated any supremacy of men over women. Here, they were equal.
“I really looked at my father then. And I realized the great Messiah who lured little girls to his bed under the guise of everlasting life was nothing but a sociopathic pedophile who’d stolen and killed the only person I’d ever cared about simply to hurt me.”
Suddenly, he was sixteen again, sitting in a pickup truck on a lonely strip of desert highway, hot wind blowing through the open windows.
“Beck…” Heavenly looked over at him, her eyes a blue comfort he was desperate to lose himself in. They told him without a word that she was here for him.
He couldn’t wonder now if his next words would change her opinion of him…
“In that moment, it wasn’t my father sitting beside me, but Satan himself. The devil. The trickster who’d wielded God’s word like a sword to maintain his perverted grip on the weak and timid, paralyzing them through fear, intimidation, and abuse. I knew that if I didn’t cut the head off the beast, I’d be the next dead body found a mile down the road. So I reached down and pulled a sharp knife I’d stashed in my boot. I didn’t know until that moment why I’d stolen it from the kitchen the night Blessing died. Maybe I’d had a premonition. Or maybe I’d known subconsciously this day was coming.
“My father gripped my hand and laughed, squeezing. But I didn’t drop the knife, not even when he belittled me by saying I was too weak, too pathetic, and too scared to hurt him. You see, my attempt was futile because he was the Messiah, almost God himself. That’s when I knew for sure he was butt-fuck crazy, Macen.” He shot Hammer a wry stare. “When he snarled that he could have saved himself so much trouble if he’d
simply fucked Blessing to the death on their wedding night, like he had the child bride before her, I went butt-fuck crazy, too.”
Horrified murmurs hummed around the room. He ignored them to get the rest of this fucking confession over with. “The next thing I knew, I shoved one fist in his gut and knocked the wind out of him. He doubled over and struggled for breath. So I reached up and gripped the great Messiah by his fucking hair, yanked back, and slashed his throat.”
For once, the room was dead silent.
Beck didn’t wait for their reactions. After all, what was the Emily Post reply to meeting someone who’d committed patricide? “Blood splattered the windshield and dash. He clutched his severed neck as blood gushed between his fingers to stain his white shirt.” Beck could smell the coppery stench all over again. “I’ll never forget the instant he turned to me, eyes wide with shock and fear, because he realized the ‘great Messiah’ was going to die by his worthless son’s hand. Then with a last gurgle, his body went slack, his eyes vacant… He was dead. I killed the son of a bitch.”
River was first to clap. Dean and Seth quickly joined in. Within seconds, everyone was standing, applauding, and praising him with hugs and hearty kisses.
He shook them off. “I killed a man.”
Gloria frowned. “And how many little girls did you save from him?”
Some, he hoped. “I didn’t stick around to find out. I wiped the blood from the blade on his jacket, snagged the cash from his wallet, and nearly tripped in my haste to flee the truck. I ran into the desert. It took me six days on foot to make it to Vegas. But I broke free from those cocksuckers and I never looked back.”
Beck paused when two strong hands clutched his biceps. Blinking, he found Hammer and Seth flanking him, holding him upright.
“It’s all right. We’ve got you,” Seth assured in a low, calm whisper.