The Last Housewife (54)

The man’s face was cold. “Tread carefully.”

“Yes, Pater,” Nicole said. To my relief, the man let go of me. Nicole wasted no time, hurrying me down the hallway.

“You’re going to be the death of me,” she hissed. She wore all black, her makeup lighter than before. She looked younger than I’d first pegged her. “You didn’t say you were a gift from a humble daughter. Remember? There are rules here. They keep us safe.”

I swallowed back my guilt at getting her in trouble and struggled to keep up. “You’re taking me to the Lieutenant?”

She turned a corner, and we stopped in front of a closed door. “Last chance to change your mind.”

I shook my head.

She knocked, and someone called, “Come in.”

Inside was a sitting room, filled with what looked like leftovers from a church yard sale: crucifixes in gold and marble and garish painted plastic, pillows with embroidered Bible verses and cheery little flowers. There was a fireplace in the center with a crackling fire. A man sat before it, examining us. “What have you brought?”

It was the man in black’s voice, just a hint of a Dutch accent in the way he pronounced brought. Unmasked, the Lieutenant was different than I’d pictured: older, in his fifties, with a thick blond mustache and full head of wheat-blond hair. The way he sat, spine straight as a rod, reminded me of a soldier or a Boy Scout.

Nicole’s demeanor had changed the moment we stepped into the room, her shoulders tightening, eyes cast to the man’s feet. “A lost girl,” she said, “who wants to learn her place.”

I blinked. The words rolled off her tongue as if rehearsed.

“Mrs. Shay Deroy.” The Lieutenant’s eyes scanned me. “Remind me where you found her?”

“At the Sparrow.”

He nodded. “Very good, Nicole. Keep this up, and it won’t be long now.” His eyes shifted back to me, and he raised an eyebrow. “A married woman a long way from home, found trolling the Sparrow. Whatever are you doing here?”

I swallowed. “I went to college here, years ago.” They would know that from the background check. “And now I’m moving back. A…friend recommended Tongue-Cut Sparrow. I found Nicole there, and she said this was a place for people who wanted something real.”

“And what does your husband think about that?”

“Nothing, because he doesn’t know.”

The fire crackled behind the Lieutenant’s head. “Why do you want something real?”

“Because I’ve done things I deserve to be punished for,” I said.

The Lieutenant watched me closely. “Most new members come for the parties.” I couldn’t tell if he was being serious, so I held my tongue. “It usually takes a lot of teaching before they can admit to what you’re saying.” He gave me a sly look. “What if I said you deserved to be punished simply for being born?”

I gathered my breath. “I’d say I’ve had that thought before.” I was an A+ student. Because of course I was cheating: Don had shown me the right answers years before.

The Lieutenant’s eyes flicked to Nicole. “She almost sounds like a true believer. A little bit like you. You’re willing to vouch?”

She looked at me, warning in her eyes. “Yes.” The word had teeth.

After a moment, the Lieutenant nodded. “Okay, then. Take off your clothes.”

I froze. “What?”

“I need to know I can trust you. And that you mean it. The price to enter is a gift you can’t take back.”

If I took my clothes off, they’d find my recording device.

The Lieutenant’s voice deepened. “Now.”

I slipped off my heels with shaking fingers, then unzipped my dress, letting it pool on the floor. Both Nicole and the Lieutenant watched, expressions greedy in the firelight.

I had to think fast. What could I do with the recorder? I bent at the waist and unhooked my bra, popping the small black device into my mouth behind the curtain of my hair. I righted and smiled, feeling the smooth metal under my tongue. Now everything that was about to happened would go unrecorded, but I had no other choice. I stepped out of my panties and stood naked.

The Lieutenant’s eyes trailed over me. “You might have come here for pain or pleasure. I don’t care, really. Because the Pater Society is about liberation.”

The Pater Society. The snakelike sibilance of society nearly got lost in the hissing, popping fire.

“It’s about embracing the truth. Something that’s become so controversial there’s few safe spaces left in this country to do it. Everything we submit our bodies to here, every gathering, every ritual, it’s all testimony.”

He rose from his chair. “The first truth we recognize is that society is rotting from the inside out. Becoming more unrecognizable every day. The Creator built men and women for a purpose, built a sacred order, and we’ve rejected it. What an exhausting performance, to have to deny our true natures, masquerade every day. But not here. Not with us.”

The Lieutenant walked to a table in the corner and rolled open a drawer. “Consider this you putting some skin in the game.”

He pulled out a black iron rod. On one end was a twisted metal shape: a triangle with four protruding columns, meeting in a rectangular base. It was the symbol on Laurel’s and Nicole’s arms—unmistakably a temple, looking at it now. A temple for the Pater Society.