Judah let the echo die.
The second caught lower. Curtis's head dropped, his chest heaving as he fought the air. A thin line of blood appeared where the leather had bitten through the shirt, tracking slow and dark through the fabric.
Judah pretended he wasn’t counting — that men like he didn’t need the numbers. That this was a ritual. This was the work. But deep at heart, Judah was a bookkeeper. Numbers were what made sense to him.
Not religion.
Not faith.
Numbers.
By the fourth strike, the heat in the cellar felt like a solid thing. Sweat ran freely down Judah's face, stinging his eyes, his forearms wet and gleaming under the bulb. He could feel his own heart hammering in his palms, the rhythm running up his arms and pulling at his shoulders with every swing. He thought about the wages of sin. It wasn't a Sunday morning abstraction. It was a physical price, paid in skin and salt.
Accounted for.
A number.
The sixth.
Curtis finally broke. He screamed — a full, jagged sound that filled the room and couldn’t find a way to leave. His body shook with a fine, tremor that didn't stop even when the whip stilled.
Judah paused.
He was breathing hard. There were dark spots of blood on the leather and on the floor. The air smelled of copper, bourbon, and the ancient smell of dying faith. He looked at the ruin of Curtis’s back — saw the red lines there, and thought:I will answer for this.
He believed in the accounting. He believed in a God who didn't want prayers, but blood. A God who had watched a father lift a knife over a son and waited to see if the steel would flash.
He and the Lord agreed on a lot of things… if Judah twisted them enough.
He walked up to Curtis. The man couldn't lift his head, it hung loosely, swaying from side to side. Judah reached out, his hand steady, and caught Curtis’s jaw, tipping his face up into the light. The man’s eyes were bloodshot — unseeing.
“The cousin in Lafayette,” Judah said. “Name.”
Curtis told him.
Judah let go of his jaw. He stood, the sweat cooling on his skin, and made a single call. One sentence. No more.
Then he picked up his shirt from a rickety chair, put it on and went to the stairs. His hand lingering on the damp stone wall.
“Someone will come,” he said, his voice flat and even. “Don't pull on the rope. You'll make it worse.”
He didn't look back.
Upstairs, the vestibule was an ice bath. The relief of the AC air was so sharp it felt almost sinful. The stained glass threw pools of sapphire and blood across the floor, the same as it did every Sunday when the congregation looked to him for the truth, and didn’t even notice it washistruth he was preaching.
He went to the prayer rail and knelt.
He didn't use a cushion. He wanted the hard wood to bite into his knees. He wanted the discomfort to remind him that he was still a man, still tethered to the dirt, still a monster reaching for something he didn't have a name for.
He prayed to a God whose religion he had abandoned.
He prayed because hebelieved,as contrary as it may’ve sounded. But belief and religion aren’t one and the same — not to Judah.
One was a brick taken from the foundation of a hive mind and the other was born out of desperation.
He stayed there eleven minutes. He had been counting since he was a boy. Minutes were honest. Minutes were a debt paid in time.
He stood. He straightened his cuffs, hiding the ink on his forearms.
