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“Yes.”

  “Good. Joseph will stay here with you while you prepare. We had a bit of a chat after he brought you to me this morning, didn’t we, son?” Elijah turned to Joseph, who nodded. “I’m quite sure he no longer needs to be reminded of his duties within the community.”

  I looked at Joseph, wondering what Elijah was talking about, why his use of the word “chat” made me nauseated.

  “And welcome home, Rebekah.”

  Eighteen

  I crept over to the door and listened, holding my tongue until his footsteps faded away. Then I let loose on Joseph

  I wanted answers. I wouldn’t let up until I knew where he was holding Luke and Mike. I wanted to know when Elijah ate. When he slept. When he went to the bathroom. I needed to know every last detail of his schedule so I could sneak away without him noticing.

  “Where are they?” I hissed, my body vibrating with a lethal mix of fear and rage. “Tell me right now where Luke and Mike are or so help me God I’ll—”

  I went to smack Joseph, to punch him, to do whatever it would take to drag the truth out of him, but he caught me, trapping my wrists against his chest with his hands. “Dee, don’t,” he whispered softly. “You can get angry with me all you want, but I’d lose that tone before you speak to my father again.”

  Joseph was in no position to give me advice; it was his fault I was here in the first place. And I’d speak to his father any way I pleased. “Are you out of your mind?” I screamed. “Who gave you the—”

  He held up a hand for me to stop. Instinctively, I shut up and looked at the door. It was closed; no jingling knob, no footsteps, and no muffled voices on the other side.

  I slowed my breathing and refocused on my goal rather than my building rage. “Where is Luke? What did you do to him?” I asked again.

  “Why can’t you trust me on this? I told you, they’re fine.”

  “Trust you? Are you kidding me?”

  I picked up the pile of clothes his father had left for me and threw them at Joseph. “You kidnapped me, drained half my blood, and then bartered me away as your father’s bride in some sick attempt to save your sister. I don’t know about you, but where I come from, that doesn’t breed trust. Now where are Luke and Mike?”

  “They’re locked in the shed,” he quickly said, his mind obviously on something else. “And what do you mean, ‘bartered you away’ to my father?”

  “In the shed. The one we were hiding out in? The Livor?” I asked, running through the layout of that dark, ten-by-ten-foot structure in my head. I looked up at the clock on the wall. It was one in the afternoon. If I was calculating right, then they’d been there five, maybe six hours tops. Not enough time to starve or become dehydrated, but plenty of time to lose their minds. I hadn’t thought to check the thickness of the walls, but Luke was strong, and Mike had one set of lungs and a nasty temper to go with it.

  What little hope I’d managed to hang onto faded the instant Joseph started talking. “I turned the irrigation pump on before I left. Nobody will hear them over that noise. And believe me, that’s a good thing. You don’t want them found by anyone around here anyway.”

  I shrugged off his words. Luke was used to tackling two-hundred-pound kids on the football field. Mike too. That old shed with its scratched-up walls was no match for them.

  “And where did you get the idea that I’d give you to my father in exchange for my sister?” Joseph asked, repeating his original question. He looked confused, maybe even a bit offended.

  I turned away from him, annoyed. If he was too stupid to figure that one out, then I wasn’t going to help. “Nothing. Forget it.”

  “I meant what I said earlier, Dee.”

  “Isn’t it Rebekah now? And you said a lot of things, most of them lies,” I fired back.

  “I never lied to you,” he yelled.

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it—his profession of innocence was so damn absurd it was funny.

  “I. Didn’t.” He took a step closer and stared down at me. I swallowed hard and stepped back, kept right on going until my knees hit the mattress, forcing me to sit down.

  Joseph saw the flicker of panic cross my face and backed up. “I promise I won’t hurt you, Dee,” he said placing extra emphasis on my name. “But please, slow down and listen to me for a minute.”

  He unbuttoned his shirt, deliberately keeping his attention on me as the white of his undershirt came into view. There was a slowness to his movements and a barely audible wince of pain under his breath. I scooted farther away from him, confused. I had no clue what was going on, but the more-than-obvious pain on Joseph’s face told me one thing for sure. Joseph wasn’t planning on hurting me, not in that way anyway.

  “You think you’ve had a tough time here? That my father has treated you badly? You haven’t seen half of what he can do,” Joseph warned.

  He turned around and lifted his undershirt up over his head. The fabric caught in spots, the thin white cotton adhering itself to the weeping wounds. Red welts marked his back, each one strategically placed to hit more flesh than bone. I knew exactly what they were, my mind flashing back to the black leather belt my father was so fond of wearing. There’d been no “chat” that morning, no peaceful reminder to fall back in line. Elijah had beaten him with a belt.

  My dad only hit me with a belt once, and it was a long time ago. But I remembered it well, still cringed whenever Luke took his belt off. Joseph might hurt now, but if memory served me right, those marks would sting like hell the second day, when the slightest of movements would force them to crack and re-open.

  “He did that to you?” I asked.

  It wasn’t a question, but Joseph nodded anyway.

  “He tried to get you to tell him where they are, didn’t he?” I asked, and Joseph shrugged. “Why didn’t you tell him? Why would you let him do that to you in order to protect Luke and Mike?”

  I couldn’t wrap my brain around any of this. We’d downright refused to come in here willingly and save his sister. Yet Joseph had taken a beating to protect them, to protect me. That made absolutely no sense.

  “I was raised in this. I’ve been hit more times than you can imagine. Don’t worry,” he said with a weak smile. “I won’t break. If he starts in on me again about where they are, I won’t give into the pain. I figured you would, so … ”

  No, I wouldn’t. I hadn’t yet. I didn’t break during the thirteen years I lived with my father, or when the girls in the group home taught me my place. And I definitely wasn’t planning on breaking now.

  But Joseph had no way of knowing that.

  “I know what you must think of me. But try to remember, I never had a choice in any of this. Nothing here is as black and white as it seems, Dee. You can’t simply decide you want to leave one day and get up and go. It doesn’t work that way.”

  “That’s not true,” I argued.

  “You’re an idiot if you think that,” Joseph replied. “My mom and I planned our escape for over a year. We hid all of our tracks, and he still found out. If you want to get out of here, then we have to play his game for now. Let him think he’s won, buy me some time to figure something out … a way that gets all of us away from him.”

  When he said “all,” he didn’t just mean us and Luke and Mike. He meant Eden too. That would take time, and time was the one thing I didn’t have. “How long do I have to play along?” I asked.

  Joseph ran a hand through his hair and sighed. “Luke was pretty clear about not helping me save my sister, but I’d stake my life on the fact that he’ll come in here to get you.”

  “And?”

  “Well, I’m banking on that—not only for Eden’s life and mine, but for yours too.”

  I shook my head. If that was his plan—waiting on Luke to come to me—then he was dumber than I thought. I had no intention of sitting around here, dressing up and playing Elijah�
�s bride. I was outta here, with or without Joseph and his precious Eden.

  But for the first time since I’d met Joseph, it felt like I had leverage, something I could use to force his hand. Luke.

  Nineteen

  “Let’s go get them now,” I said. Luke could help; he would help. “If it makes you feel better, I promise we’ll come back for Eden. You have my word.”

  “We can’t. Not yet. We need to give my father some time to let his guard down.”

  “How long?” I asked again. In my mind, right now was the perfect time. I couldn’t shake the vision of Luke and Mike locked in that shed, screaming with no one around to hear them. Freezing as the temperature dropped with nightfall, huddled into each other, hungry and tired but unwilling to sleep. The image was terrifying, but like staring at the wreckage of a deadly crash, I couldn’t seem to pull away.

  “Dee,” Joseph said, shaking me. I hadn’t realized he was trying to get my attention. I was too lost in my living nightmare to even hear him speak.

  I looked up and met his stare, pleading with him to take my side and go get them now. “They don’t have any food or water. It’s freezing out. They’ll—”

  “No they won’t,” Joseph interrupted. “I’ve survived out there a lot longer.”

  He took my hand and led me over to the chair, then picked up the papers outlining my new life and laid them on the dresser for me to see.

  I stared down at the papers, the words blurring into one giant black spot. I went to say something, to argue my case for leaving right now, when he put his fingers to my lips, stopping me.

  “Trust me, Dee, please. Play along for a little while. Like I said, once he lets his guard down, we can take Eden and slip out.”

  Somewhere in this messed-up conversation, I’d come to the terrifying conclusion that I might have to give up control. Maybe Joseph was right—sometimes you had to place your faith in the untrustworthy to survive.

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked.

  “Memorize this,” he said. “If you don’t, none of us have a chance.”

  I glanced at the papers, scanning for the information that seemed to be the most important. If I’d had a month, maybe I could’ve memorized it all. But less than a few hours wasn’t nearly enough time.

  Joseph handed me the clothes Elijah had set out. I took them and exhaled. I got why he couldn’t leave his sister behind, understood more than he probably realized. And I wasn’t saying that I didn’t want to help. I just wasn’t sure I could.

  “Can I ask you some questions?” I asked, and he nodded. “Why is your father keeping such close tabs on Eden? He pretty much said that it was you who would eventually lead this town, so why does he care so much about her?”

  “She’s important to my father. Valuable. She’s the only daughter of our … ” He paused only long enough to correct himself. “The only daughter of this town’s prophet. The first girl to be born to the Hawkins family in over three generations.”

  I shook my head, not understanding what he was getting at. I was my father’s only daughter. Hell, I was his only child, and that didn’t seem to make a difference to him or his fists.

  “My father protects her, spares her from the disciplinary actions most of us receive. He wants to keep her thoughts as pure as her body. Eden has no reason to be afraid of him, no reason to think about leaving.”

  I felt like I’d been punched in the gut. Joseph was putting both our lives on the line for his sister, and she didn’t want to leave. “So let me get this straight. You dragged me in here, risking not only my life but Luke’s and Mike’s, and your sister wants to stay ?”

  His face fell. Joseph knew what he was doing, what he was asking of me, and for once I was glad to see a flash of shame. “You don’t understand, Dee. She’s young, barely twelve. She has no idea what he has planned for her or the discipline a husband is expected to exact on his wife. My mother hid it from her. He’ll marry her off in less than two years as a way to secure the most influential of his followers to him. She won’t survive it. She can’t.”

  I thought back to when I was twelve and remembered how hard it was to find the strength to get up and leave everything behind. It took me an entire year to do it, to finally admit to a judge what my father had done to me and ask to be taken away from him for good. Those were things no child should ever have to do, and yet I had.

  Joseph handed me the skirt Elijah had laid out and motioned for me to get up. “You need to get dressed and start reading.”

  I slipped my shoes from my feet and waited for Joseph to head for the door. He caught my look and turned his back, but didn’t leave.

  “Can I get a little privacy?” I asked.

  “Nope. I’m staying. You’re safer with me in here,” he argued. “Now go on and change.”

  My cheeks flushed as I undid the button of my jeans and hastily stripped them off. Tossing my shirt aside, I grasped the cotton shirt and yanked it down over my head then pulled on the skirt.

  “You can turn around now,” I said as I twisted my hair into an ugly braid. “And I have more questions for you.”

  “I figured you would. Go ahead,” he said.

  “These people who are supposed to be my parents—Samuel and Abeline Smith—who are they?”

  Joseph shrugged. “I have no idea. There was a couple who died in a house fire about ten years back. Their last name was Smith, but I think the husband’s name was Nathaniel or something. And I don’t think they had any children, but then again, my father could’ve fabricated the whole thing. Knowing him, they never existed.”

  “This doesn’t make any sense,” I muttered. “He makes up entire families? How is that even possible? How has he never been found out?”

  “What’s to find out?” Joseph asked as he handed me the pair of clogs I was expected to wear.

  I grabbed the clogs from his hand and jammed my feet into them. “Oh, I don’t know, kidnapping? Maybe child abuse? Neglect? Murder? Take your pick.”

  “And who would report it?” he asked, unfazed.

  His question was so honest, yet so unfathomable. “So you’re saying that no one here, not one person in God knows how many years, ever realized that your father is nuts? That what he’s doing is wrong?”

  “I never said that, but you’ve got to go some distance to find a town that he doesn’t control.”

  “What does that even mean?” I snapped. Joseph’s tone was serious, but I didn’t have the time or the patience to play twenty questions. I thought back to the last town we’d passed, the one with an abundance of Twinkies and the gas station we didn’t use. They’d seemed normal, friendly.

  “I’ve been told that my Grandfather wasn’t as strict of a leader as my father, that for generations several of the men were allowed to work outside of Purity Springs. All their money went into Purity Springs’ communal pool, but they worked in neighboring towns, nonetheless.”

  I nodded; that would explain how the town survived, financially anyway. “What changed? Why aren’t people allowed to leave anymore?”

  “My father happened. When he took over, he called them all back. He said the risk of being exposed to the true evils of the world was too great, and that he needed them close by, where he could protect them.”

  “So that was what, like, seventeen years ago? A lot can change in seventeen years.”

  “Not in those towns,” Joseph continued, his attention flicking toward the window. “He left two people outside, two people he could trust. His brothers. One is the sheriff in a town about fifty miles north of here called Camden Hills. The other sits on the town council of a tiny farming community to the east. Other than those two towns, there’s no one around here to even notice us.”

  That made absolutely no sense. Surely anybody who had the chance to live outside this place would never come back, never mind help Elijah. “I get that
they’re his brothers and all, but in their jobs, they must interact with people from outside this town all the time. They know we’re not all evil.”

  “They grew up here,” Joseph said matter-of-factly.

  What? Was he drinking his own Kool-Aid? You couldn’t tell me that being born and raised here meant you couldn’t see the truth. Couldn’t see the real Elijah. His mom had, and if what Joseph was saying was true, then he had as well.

  I threw my hands out, dismissing his answer. “Not buying it.”

  “Their families live here, Dee. My aunts … my cousins all live here in Purity Springs.”

  I tried to wrap my brain around this, around the notion of two men, intelligent enough to hold decent jobs, leaving their families behind in this town with a madman. I couldn’t.

  “Do they want to leave?” I asked, wondering if their wives were part of the group Joseph’s mom had planned to come back for. “The families?”

  “No.”

  His answer left little room for reply, so I let it go and moved on to something more pressing. “So why not go farther, skip those two towns and keep going?”

  He didn’t answer immediately, just studied me for a minute as if judging the validity of my question. “Come here,” he said and held out his hand.

  I followed him over to the window above the bed. He leaned over and pulled the curtains back, gesturing for me to have a look. “Do any of them look abused to you? Unhealthy? Miserable? From the outside, there’s nothing to report.”

  I peered out the window, squinting against the mid-day sun. The street was littered with people, and he was right—not a single one looked beaten down or broken. They looked … content.

  Across the street was the bank. An older man was hanging up a closed sign while another was on a ladder, changing what appeared to be the bulb in a streetlight. A young girl, probably no older than seven, was sweeping the front steps of the tiny diner, smiling at Elijah as he walked past. Then a car passed by, pulled into the gas station, and actually got gas.