The Sect

by Lane, Courtney

  “I wandered around the world for a while,” he told me, his words bleeding with a soft latent pain. “I fought against the same things you were—and some that you weren’t. I didn’t know how much you got inside me until I returned the money through anonymous donations to the families of the dead.”

  “I’m sure you kept some of the money.” I gazed over the way he was dressed.

  “I didn’t, actually. With Shiloh dead, I got the inheritance by default.”

  I looked down at my lap, remembering the story Shiloh told me compared to the one Noah retold. Nadine said they told parts of the truth and when they came together, they made up the whole. At the moment, I was completely sure of what the truth was. It made the ache worsen, because it permitted me to feel a small sliver of empathy for him. “I can’t eat chocolate without thinking about you, but I keep ordering every chocolate dessert I can think of. How strange is that?” I looked at my barely touched beignet. “There are a lot of strange things you left me with. You left me…empty.”

  “Keaton,” he sighed, leaning forward. “I came here for you because I want to fill you up again.”

  “It’s unhealthy to want it. You’ve…debased me.”

  He reached underneath the table and grabbed my hand, placing it on a part that was aroused. “I freed you. I made you better. Welcome back to my world, princess.”

  I slipped my hand back to my lap, clearing my throat.

  Amorousness filled his eyes as his attention was split between the whip on the table to me, he rubbed his bottom lip as his gaze continued to lock on my face. “Are we doing this, Keaton? If you keep up your hesitation and talking yourself out of what you want, I will take your choice away. I’ll make a scene to get you out of this place and into my bed.”

  “I’m not ready to be alone with you yet,” I responded, my words pained and quiet. “I can’t be alone with you yet. I think if we…we should start over. Like we never really knew each other. Maybe I won’t feel so sickened with myself if we do.”

  “You want to feel that way but you don’t. Right now, I’m pretty sure you feel what I do. Home is with me.”

  I clutched my chest as it began to ache. My mind, heart, and body were all askew, because they all wanted him.

  I knew deep down, despite how much I wanted to fight it, he was correct. He was an illusion of beauty. I knew what was underneath it all. It was twisted, tattered, and demented. Sadly, I couldn’t sate my need for him, unless I was with him.

  “We need to start over,” I reiterated, thinking that if we did, our history would somehow be erased and I wouldn’t feel so guilty. I began to appeal to the piece that bound us, our bond. “I know who you were, but I think that place still got to you like it did everyone else. I don’t think it was the power trip for you like it was with Shiloh. It was being surrounded by the same type of evil that killed who you were. It made you feel something you were made to feel ashamed about.

  “We met at a place that made a mess of our heads and made us the worst examples of who we really were. At least that’s what I keep telling myself to explain why I can sit at this table across from you and want to be with you after everything you did to me.” In saying the words, I remembered the night he took my virginity. The night he hadn’t lied to me or put on a mask to hide what was beneath. He wasn’t a monster that night, or the night I was blindfolded. I felt the real person behind it all and denied that it was him. I disavowed the idea of it, despite feeling him with me that night, showing me how he felt through everything he did to my body.

  He was the man who began to make me think differently about everything I held on to, the things that tainted my soul. “Can we start over and try to be normal? I don’t want to have to hide you from my parents. It would be impossible with the way they almost never leave my side.”

  “I don’t think meeting your parents right now with our history would go over well,” he surmised with difficulty. “‘Yeah, hey, Mom. This is the guy who drugged me, kidnapped me, and tortured me for seven months while being the mastermind behind a fucked up cult, that really wasn’t, but he’s a really great guy, pass the dessert.’ I’m not a good guy, and I never will be. If you want to feel guilty about feeling for someone like me, fine. But I’m not letting it get in the way of what I want. I want you and you’re not going to stop me from having what I want.”

  I smirked, purposely ignoring his last few sentences. “I didn’t know you had a sense of humor that was actually funny. You’re a very esoteric man, Noah.”

  His eyes darkened. “There are a lot of things you don’t know about me, only because you’re not ready to see them.”

  “Thank you,” I whispered my gratitude for the most selfless act he committed, ridding me of the man that plagued too many years of my life, Gregory Mitchum.

  “I know you might’ve thought you were there because of him or what happened to your fiancé and his sister, but you weren’t. It probably makes you want to hate me more, but I’m not in the business of lying to you anymore. It’s pointless and I want you to learn to trust me.” He squeezed my hand and a shadow took over his face. “We’ll never talk about him again.”

  Nodding, I ran my thumb against the back of his hand.

  He released me to stand. “Now that the bullshit is out of the way…”

  Gazing up at his broad body as it neared my side of the table, I began to protest, “Noah, what are you—”

  Crouching over, he pulled my chair out from the table. He rounded my position and placed a finger to his lips, shaking his head. “Noah Oliver. This is going to sound very fucking contrived, but I had to tell you, from the first moment I saw you, I knew you would upend my world. Are you going to give me a chance to find out if I was right?”

  I held out my hand, shaking his. “Keaton Mara and from the moment I saw you, I knew you would fuck me up.”

  “So,” he drawled, his eyes slanting as he looked down at me, “my hotel’s across the street.”

  “I don’t go to bed with men I’ve just met,” I stated with a plastic attempt at being demure. It used to be so natural. Now, there was very little demureness about me anymore.

  He grabbed my hand, pulling me up to stand. “Are you sure? Because I have a whip with your name on it.”

  My eyes widened as I pressed my hands against his chest. “What happened to starting over?”

  He shrugged, holding me close. “We’re two people who rearranged ourselves to be more screwed up than we already were, there is no such thing as starting over.”

  My concerns about how we would survive in the real world began to fade. All I knew was in the months without him, I wasn’t living. He had twisted me and remade me into a woman very different from the one who was taken, much less the woman I was before Gregory Mitchum took hold of me.

  We had to survive in the real world because only he would’ve understood me. Only he could’ve comprehended why I was the way I was and how to deal with it.

  I could live in the world without him, but I couldn’t persevere in the world without him.

  Every second we spent together in the next six hours proved that fact. The moments he wielded the whip, leaving his marks on my flesh and pulling me to beg for more. The other moments when he touched me tenderly. The many hours in which he fucked me so hard I couldn’t feel my legs. Or the moments he held me as I drifted between sleep and wakefulness and told me about how torturous it was to be without me. That he thought he could do it, but realized he couldn’t fully function in a world—outside of the one he created—without me at his side.

  “From what I’ve told you, tell me what you think is true and what’s a lie?” Noah asked, his voice just as hoarse and taxed as mine.

  I sucked my teeth as he pressed a little too hard on the welt located on the curve of my ass. It was two hours until morning as we remained in bed, inside my hotel suite. We were both naked, sated, and a little exhausted, but too stubborn to go to sleep. I rested on my stomach while holding tightly to a down pil
low. Straddling the back of my thighs, he applied the salve to my marks, making them sting a little less.

  I looked over my shoulder at him and shook my head at him. “I don’t know.”

  He leaned forward, grabbing my hair and manipulated it to fall over my opposite shoulder. “You do. You knew me, and I made you doubt that you did. You always knew me, Keaton.” His lips grazed against my exposed shoulder, reminding me in seconds how deeply I was in entwined with him; I would never unknot myself from his binding and skewed control.

  “I believe all of your story,” I began, “you didn’t really lie, you just let me assume that Shiloh was the revenant. All along, you told me the real story, you just changed the characters around. At the same time, I believed Shiloh’s story was true, too. I think you never had a real relationship with him and that you were really just strangers who lived in the same house for a while.

  “I think the only way you recruited him to be what he was at Rebirth was by appealing to what you knew about him. He could become a God amongst devils and that’s what drew him.”

  “Very, very good, princess. And?” He quirked a brow, urging me to continue. His face disappeared from my view as he began to place kisses down my spine.

  I clutched my pillow tighter, responding to the fire he ignited and fought against the weight of my suddenly heavy lids. “I-I don’t know.”

  He grabbed my waist and turned me around, none too carefully. I winced and bit my lip to stifle the whimpers. “I wanted to leave, Keaton. I wanted to just go and leave it all up to Shiloh and Nadine. You made me stay. I promised to save your soul and that’s what I did. In my own particular way, I saved you.”

  Perplexed, I searched his face. “Debatable.”

  “Is it?” He gave me a crooked smile, bringing back the boyish charm. “I’m sure you think about the what ifs and what nots. Had you not been taken, where would you be right now?”

  “I thanked you for Gregory. That is all I can thank you for.”

  “For now,” he said matter-of-factly. “I killed the men who raped you, just like I promised you I would. You owe me, Keaton. I want you to tell me the truth you forgot to mention.”

  I carefully leaned up my elbows, placing my face just inches from his. “Who was Mrs. Sherman?”

  He smirked, reaching up to finger my lips. “Not Mrs. Sherman, and if I told you, you would find it hard to believe.”

  I gave him a look that made his smile deepen.

  “An ex-nun with an alcohol dependency problem who I met in rehab. She…helped me. She wants to keep her anonymity and I owe to her to keep her that way.” He slipped his hands down to grasp my neck. “You have something to do, princess, and you know how I hate it when you disobey me. Tell me the truth you conveniently want to avoid.”

  “You loved someone who didn’t love you back,” I stated quietly. “The story about jealousy and killing because of that jealousy, it was all predictive of what was going to happen. Looking back at it now, you were telling me your plan in a cryptic way and I never caught on.” I thought about the newspaper and many of the things he said that hadn’t made sense to me then. “You were constantly giving me bits and pieces of who you really were…but then you denied it with your cruelty.”

  His hold on my neck firmed as he sloped forward and kissed me gently. His thumb traced my lips as he left very little space between him and me. His eyes turned softer; his expression sullen. “Good, princess. You finally understand.”

  “What if I never love you, Noah? It’s going to bother you eventually. It would have to.” My eyes drifted down to trace a path between his sternum to the perfectly cut lines forming his firm six-pack stomach. “A part of me wishes I could tell you that something has changed—or will change—and it was returned. A larger part is glad it hasn’t.”

  “It’s better that you don’t,” he remarked solemnly. “I wouldn’t know how to accept it. Someday, if I want you to and you don’t…maybe it will be a problem. I just want this right now. As long as you need me…you’ll keep me from being the guy I don’t want to be. The guy who needed a place like Rebirth to feel normal.” He slanted forward, kissing me gentler than he had before.

  A knock on the door pulled us both out of our little world. “It’s my parents—more than likely my mother,” I grumbled.

  His eyes lifted, studying my face with questions he wouldn’t ask. When my mother’s frantic voice was heard on the other side, I was proven right.

  He looked at the door and his posture became tense.

  “Are you sure we can do this?” I asked him. “It’s not too late to hide in the bathroom. You can keep being my sick little secret.”

  His eyes darted to mine as he gave me a gentle smile. He kissed my forehead and ejected off the bed, grabbing the terry cloth robe from the floor. I carefully slipped off the bed, allowing him to help me into it. I slowly paced toward the door, waiting for him to dress appropriately before I felt comfortable answering. When he was redressed, I hesitated with my hand on the knob. I searched his eyes, not exactly looking for his answer, but attempting to find certainty in my own answer. I had to make sure I could go through with it.

  He gave me a reassuring smile and a nod. “We’re going to make this real, princess. I am where I’m meant to be and so are you.”

  In the morning, we had breakfast with my parents. My mother insisted that we join her and my father after her short introduction to Noah inside my suite. I had my doubts in the beginning but was quickly convinced. We lied about how he met, partially. I told my parents that he was a prisoner, too, and that he saved me from the various times I could’ve died, or worse yet, been completely broken to the point I wouldn’t have wanted to live.

  It was the truth. As warped and nonsensical as it sounded, if Noah hadn’t been the way he was with me at Rebirth, I never would’ve lived through it.

  He charmed his harshest critics, my parents. His background—though he was cryptic and evasive about it—appealed to my father, who, like Noah, fought and climbed his way to the top. My mother was happy with the surface things that mattered to her. Noah’s looks, his income bracket, and his plans for the future; to, if he could help it, take care of me in the same manner he did when I needed him.

  She later told me during our bathroom chat break that she liked him, but it wasn’t because of the reasons I thought they were. She said the look in my eyes when I looked at Noah was all she’d been waiting to see before she approved of any man I dated.

  She was grateful that he was responsible for bringing her daughter back and keeping her safe.

  It was ironic when he was the reason I couldn’t come back into her life on my terms in the first place.

  Because of him, I could make my way in a world that had become foreign to me. Because of me, he could navigate a world he abandoned because he thought he had no place in it.

  We could survive in the real world because there was no other option. We needed each other, and in a sense, we experienced a transformation through each other. It didn’t matter what label he had for the place where I was a prisoner. Noah Oliver killed me, slowly and meticulously.

  He promised me freedom when my prison sentence was up, but I didn’t so easily believe I’d ever feel it again. Any place with him was a prison. But I’d grown to like the way the walls confined me and kept me safe. They made me feel when I had numbed myself from everything. Noah’s prison was hell, but it was where a woman like me—who sold her soul to a devil proclaiming to be my dark savior, delivering me from the sins of my past—belonged.

 

 

 
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