I huff. “I’m thankful Evelyn could arrange it. I like the slower pace and I pay next to nothing for rent. I think The Order is just happy to have it occupied—keeps the squatters away.”
“You explored the church or cloisters yet?”
I shake my head. “All the doors are locked. Hinges are rusted and crumbling though, probably wouldn’t take much to get inside.”
Silence stretches between us, thick with understanding. Then he says, “I’ve done bad things too.”
I arch a brow. “Like what?”
He looks away. “Things I don’t film. Maybe someday I’ll show you my skeletons.”
It’s the most honest thing anyone’s ever said to me.
Later, I make up the guest room. He drops his duffel without ceremony and kicks off his boots. He lingers in my doorway half a beat too long, then disappears into his.
I lie awake for an hour listening to old pipes knock and the wind worry at the windowpanes. The Santa Clarita Valley sleeps like it has nothing to hide.
I smile.
Blake is useful. Loyal. A fellow deviant with just enough self-loathing to keep him pliable. He doesn’t need to be seduced—just seen. Understood. I can do that in my sleep.
And Hearth & Hands? A buffet of broken women desperate for purpose. Desperate women make mistakes. Tell secrets. Attach too fast.
By the end of the month, they’ll be calling me family.
By the end of the year, I’ll own them.
People think power is loud—shouts, guns, elections. But real power is quiet. It slips in wearing a kind smile and a borrowed past. It listens. Nods. Bakes brownies.
Then it rewrites the rules.
I am the storm they invited in.
And I’ve never felt more at home.
Chapter Twelve
Evelyn
On my screen, Shae cradles a plastic tub of farm fresh roses like she’s Mother Teresa in a cardigan. The grade we’ve been using—soft lift, halated highs—wraps her in the glow of a hymn. She stands in the Hearth & Hands pantry, flanked by towers of boxed mac and cheese, and tells the camera, “You’d be amazed what a warm meal does for a life.”
It’s a line written by a producer and rehearsed by a felon.
It lands anyway.
“Too smooth,” I tell the timeline. “I don’t trust anything that doesn’t squeak.”
Blake is already in my doorway, hair damp from the night fog and the drive. He looks like trouble that learned manners—boots on my threshold, a grin that says he’s been waiting for me to slip. He drops his mask and hooks an elbow over the back of my chair like he owns it.
“More B-roll,” he says. “Volunteers crying. The director bit. And the carnations.”
“Carnations are for funerals,” I say, but I drag the files into the bin labeledH&H Day of Service — selectsanyway.
Thumbnails slide past: Shae kneeling to tie a kid’s shoelace. Shae signing a poster under a marker heart. Shae laughing with a widow whose name I’ve already forgotten.
“Watch this,” Blake says, leaning in to tap one. “Lila. New devotee. She does the tremble thing in her voice. It’s clean.”
He calls tremblingcleanthe way other men call scotchneat. I open the clip.
