Takedown Teague (Caged #1)(61)

As much as I wanted to think school was the main concern, what I really wanted to know was why she was leaving me. Had I done something to piss her off? I didn’t think so, but I’d pissed people off before without realizing it, so anything was possible. Maybe it was the fighting. Maybe she was realizing with the way I looked, the other guy must look a lot worse.

Maybe she found some of that shit I still have shoved into the back of that dresser drawer.

More than anything, I didn’t want her to go. I was just starting to think that maybe, just maybe, we could be more. Maybe Yolanda was right, and it was time for me to take a chance again.

I hadn’t even tried to kiss her.

“No, no,” Tria said with a shake of her head. “Nothing like that—just for a few days.”

Well, at least my heart was pumping blood again, but that just fueled my anger.

“Did Douchebag call and tell you to come back? And you’re listening to him? You said before he was going to try to come up with a reason for you to go back there so he could keep you from leaving again, and now you are going to let him?”

“It’s not him.” Tria shook her head back and forth. “It’s Nikki.”

“Who the hell is Nikki?” I asked. I was suddenly annoyed that we did very little talking to each other about our lives.

“She’s my best friend,” Tria said softly. “She was there for me when I needed her. I can’t turn my back on her. Without her, I wouldn’t even be here.”

I stared at her for a moment, watching the wetness coating her cheeks as it glistened in the light from the lamp.

“She got you out of there,” I said. It wasn’t a question.

Tria nodded.

“I knew I couldn’t leave without a big confrontation. Keith had already told me that he wasn’t going to put up with my moving away. He even tore up the acceptance letter from Hoffman when he found it. I had been so happy when I got it, and he just tore it up!”

Tria leaned forward and put her face in her hands.

“He wasn’t going to let go,” she said, “even though I told him I wasn’t seeing him anymore. Even though I told him I wanted to go to school, he wouldn’t drop it. I shoved all my stuff in my dad’s old suitcases and ran to Nikki. She took me up near the Canadian border where her cousin lives. They were all on some extended fishing trip up to New Brunswick, so she hid me there until I could arrange to come down here.”

“I had a little bit of money after Dad died,” Tria continued. “I had been working at one of the local stores after high school and saved a bunch of that as well. I used it for the deposit on the apartment and the bus ticket. Nikki kept lying to Keith and Leo until I could move here, saying she didn’t know where I was. Her husband, Brandon, is one of Keith’s buddies. He was harassing her, too, but she still wouldn’t tell anyone.”

She raised her head and looked at me.

“I can’t just abandon her,” she stated definitively. “I can’t, not when they’re going to…”

“Going to what?” I asked when she didn’t go on.

“I’m not supposed to tell anyone,” she said. Her voice was reserved, but I wasn’t going to give in that easily.

“What the f*ck?” I snarled. “You can’t say something like that and then not finish.”

“I know,” she responded quietly. “But I think I heard it about five thousand times when I was growing up. No one outside the community was ever supposed to hear about the legends and rituals of the area.”

“About what?” Nothing she was saying made any sense.

“Well, she and Brandon have been married almost two years,” Tria said. “They’d been trying to have a baby, but nothing has happened.”

“Okay.” I frowned. I understood why that might be upsetting for a couple, but that shit happened all the time. Usually it wasn’t anything serious.

“The doctor doesn’t think there is anything wrong with her, so they checked Brandon out. He has low sperm count or something. He isn’t going to be able to father any children.”

“Well, there are other options, right?” I had the sinking feeling I was missing a major point.

“I told you,” Tria said, “the community is shrinking. She has to have a baby from the Beals community.”

“So, who is going to father the kid?”

“All of them.” Tria’s eyes met mine, and she nodded to me slowly as I comprehended what she was saying. “They’ll just keep going until she’s pregnant.”

The implications of her words slammed into me, and images from a website Wade had found once rocketed around in my brain. It featured this chick lying back in a chair while a line of guys waited to f*ck her. What I had considered kind of interesting at the time now seemed thoroughly sickening.

I was never one to bash another culture, but this was just f*cked up.





Chapter 17—Kiss the Girl


For the next hour, Tria explained how the Beals council had determined the best way to make sure their culture and way of life continued, which was to make sure every couple had many children. There was a minimum of three required because you couldn’t just replace yourselves. You had to add to the population. Since then, any couple who didn’t have the allotted number of kids was “helped out” by the rest of the community—either by making a surrogate mother available to carry a child for a woman who wasn’t fertile or by making sure any fertile woman was impregnated by some man from Beals.