The air in Hell shifts. One more girl disappears. Then another. The whispers stop sounding like gossip and start sounding like warning bells.
We call church on a Sunday afternoon.
The back room of the Lockup is thick with smoke and tension. Cuts hang heavy on shoulders. Boots scrape concrete. Nobody jokes. Legend takes the head of the table. Royal stands off to the side instead of sitting, and that’s how I know it’s bad. He looks like a man holding himself together with wire, dark circles under his eyes, jaw locked tight enough to crack teeth.
“Talk,” Legend says.
Royal don’t hesitate. “My sister didn’t just reappear.”
The room goes dead quiet.
“Cider was at Pearly Gates with us,” he continues, talking about him and Legend who were adopted by the community there. “She’s been gone for years. Not missing. But out of reach, we thought. Now that we’re onto the Reverend. She’s back.”
Every muscle in my body tightens.
“She says Reverend Crowley’s been moving girls through safe houses,” Royal says. “Not all at once. One at a time.”
The word don’t need said. It’s in the air, anyway.
Derby swears under his breath. Whiskey slams his palm against the table hard enough to rattle the ashtray. Legend’s face goes stone.
“You sure?” Legend asks.
Royal nods once. “She named names.”
My mind flashes to Brittany in a basement bedroom with a space heater humming. To Elijah’s clean hands and careful eyes. To a church full of people who talk about salvation while girls vanish.
The room feels wired tight enough to explode.
Legend’s gaze sweeps across us. “This ain’t rumor anymore,” he says. “This is war.”
Royal’s hands are fists at his sides.
And all I can think is, if Pearly Gates is taking girls and Brittany’s standing at the center of their attention, then this just stopped being about temptation.
It just became about survival.
Chapter 17
Brittany
If Hell, Kentucky wanted to break me, it didn’t need thunder or fire.
It just needed a Tuesday.
The diner starts loud and ends louder, and somewhere in the middle I lose the thin thread of patience I’ve been clinging to for weeks. I picked up extra shifts when I became homeless. By six in the morning I’m already sweating through my uniform, coffee pot in one hand, order pad in the other, pretending I don’t hear the whispers when someone says my name too softly.
“More sweet tea, hon?” I ask a table of truckers who don’t bother looking at my face.
One of them finally does, slow and smug. Winking. “You working weekdays now, or you just keeping busy so you don’t gotta think?”
I keep smiling because that’s what girls like me do. We keep the smile even when it costs. We pour refills, call grown men “sir,” and act like we don’t feel the way the room leans in when it wants a story.
By noon I’ve been called sweetheart, darlin’, and something worse muttered under somebody’s breath when they thought I wasn’t listening. I move between booths on autopilot, balancing plates, counting tips, telling myself Elijah’s silence is probably just work.
Probably just church.
Probably not something else.
