He'd expected nerves — most virgins came withnerves. The uncertainty, the embarrassment, that all was a given. Granted, Judah couldn’t remember when he’d last been with a virgin — probably well before he’d taken up the Bible. There had been a girl back then, not Christian. Just a simple girl from a simple town over. He’d met her at a party — one of Billy’s. Judah must’ve been seventeen, the girl — around the same age, maybe a couple years younger. Neither had had any idea of what they were doing — as children do.
But he wasn’t a child anymore, and Mercy wasn’t a fifteen-year-old girl from a town over.
Shit, she had him all twisted.
She had touched his older tattoos without asking and it had feltright.He couldn’t explain it.
Mercy had walked into his church with one bag and three books and turned his entire life upside down.
When it came down to it, the decision cost him three hundred thousand dollars and whatever thin line he’d been pretending still existed between restraint and want.
Hargrove had marked her. That golden cherry glinted against her dress like a claim staked in plain sight. Judah had seen it and gone still — blood draining so fast it left him hollow for a second. Billy had noticed. A hand on Judah’s shoulder, low voice in his ear, reminding him to keep playing his part.
Judah had played it.
He’d paid.
Easy.
Too easy.
He hadn’t told her what that meant.
Hadn’t told her that by every rule that mattered — the old ones whispered in back rooms, the new ones dressed up as business — she was his now.
He would.
But not like this. Not when her breath was still soft against his skin.
Not tonight. Tonight wasn’t for truth. It wasn’t for anything clean enough to name.
She lay across him, her head rising and falling with his breath. His hand moved through her hair slowly, mindfully now, not the absent motion it pretended to be. The cross on the nightstand caught what little light there was, dull and watchful.
Outside, the night carried on — wet, alive, full of things that hid in plain sight.
He thought about the cellar.
About the ledger locked tight behind steel. Routes. Names. Debts that didn’t forgive themselves. The kind of life that didn’t stop existing because someone softer had wandered into it.
Celeste Taylor’s photograph.
Gerald Hall’s cigarettes.
Ghosts. Evidence. Warnings.
And Mercy, threaded through all of it now whether she understood it or not.
He exhaled slowly, staring at the ceiling, hoping it might answer something. It never did.
She was going to find out.
There was no version of this where she didn’t. He’d known that from the first moment — when she walked into his church and didn’t bow her head like the rest of them, when her eyes moved instead of lowering, when shesaw.
He’d recognized it.
And he’d chosen anyway.
Because you decided.
