“How long were you in this cult?”
“For as long as I can remember. I left when I was sixteen, maybe seventeen.”
I hadn’t known my real age. Still didn’t know it now.
According to paperwork made after my father had been incarcerated, I was twenty-two. But since I had been born at home and no records had been kept, there was a chance we were off a year.
He scooted nearer, and that closeness eased me. “What did they do to you in that cult?”
While he tried to remain calm for me, I didn’t miss how his nostrils had flared. He knew what happened in these kinds of cults.
His hand returned to my chin, fingers lightly brushing over my skin. “How bad did they hurt you, Blair?” And I swore I heard him say, “So I can hurt them ten times worse,” under his breath.
Not wanting to sink deeper into my trauma, I shook my head. “They didn’t … it wasn’t?—”
He held my face still. “It was.”
My shoulders relaxed, his touch working through me like my own personal Xanax.
“Those sins you wrote about atoning for. What were they? Why does that lullaby scare you?”
I let out a slow breath and squeezed my eyes shut. They opened again the moment I lost his touch.
He rose from the bed, crossed the room, opened the fridge in the corner, and came back with a bottle of water.
When he handed it to me, I drank half in one go.
I knew I had to tell him.
There was no way out of it.
He’d keep finding new ways to torture answers out of me until he learned everything about my past. And what he chose to do with that information was beyond my control.
Sooner or later, he’d probably get into the sealed records anyway. He had too many resources for me to believe otherwise.
Unless he wanted the truth to come from me.
I wasn’t even sure if the truth was in those records. I’d never seen them myself. Nor did I ever want to.
I had no choice whether to share my past with Enzo. Just like becoming a Fawn, it wasn’t my decision.
I decided to just let it all out.
Maybe I’d feel better after.
I told him the same thing I’d told the FBI when they’d locked me in a room for hours and asked the same questions again and again.
“My father started the cult before I was born. We lived on a compound with other families in the Arizona desert. In the middle of nowhere. We had no running water or electricity.” I twisted the cap back on the water. “He built everything around religion. If he didn’t like something, he said it’d been sent by the Devil.”
I placed a hand against my chest. “Everything I did was proof I’d been sent by the Devil.”
He flexed his shoulders forward as his jaw tightened.
I held up the bottle in my hand. “Being left-handed meant I was a witch, which made me evil.”
Later, after my own research, I’d learned he’d pulled that from something he’d read about the Salem witch trials. They’d used left-handedness against the accused there too.
A sigh left me. “If a man on the compound looked at me too long, it was because I was evil and tempting him. He claimed I wanted people to sin.” My throat tightened. “After giving birth to me, my mother struggled to carry a baby to full term. He said that was my fault. That in the womb, I’d filled her with darkness and stopped her from bringing more life into the world.”
