Through A Glass, Darkly (The Assassins of Youth MC #1)(65)
But I wanted her to know we were taking care of business.
CHAPTER TWENTY
MAHALIA
A beige dress hit me in the head.
“Get dressed, you slut,” snapped Allred Lee Chiles. “You’ve been lying around here buck naked just wishing that filthy biker would come in the gates. Now your wish has been granted.”
Gideon! Allred seemed to forget it was he who had stripped all my “outsider” clothes from me and burned them in the fireplace in a dramatic show of superiority. “How am I going to get dressed with my hands bound like this?”
Allred snorted as if it was a giant irritation for him to take five steps over and snip off the zip ties that bound my wrists with a pair of scissors he kept handy inside his severe black high-collared jacket. His attire meant we’d be moving again. I’d only been here two days and we’d moved three times.
Every time someone came in the gate, Allred would panic and move me. I wanted to tell him it couldn’t possibly be worth it, having a personal sex slave you had to move every twelve hours. Already he’d beaten me with an elephant bookend—the ivory tusks raked angry welts across my bottom—a fake potted plant, and of course his belt. He’d raped me anally, which luckily I was sort of used to. Then I realized how sad it was that I was used to something like that.
A few of my sister-wives were in attendance, but no one spoke a word to me. They knew I was being punished for having the gall to leave. I knew I was being punished for having a life outside of the compound.
“Blood atonement,” snarled Allred. He backhanded me across the cheekbone for good measure. “I’m done with spilling my own blood for the sins of others. I should’ve had your lover erased a long time ago.”
He termed people “erased” when they’d “gone to Texas.” I was still reeling from the knowledge that there was a Texas compound. Then what about the bodies Gideon had discovered in his mine? I figured maybe a small percentage of them, like the peckerhead who’d tricked me with flowers, actually did wind up there. That gave credence to the fable, and probably lured men away from Cornucopia when they thought they were being promoted. What a sick place the Texas compound must be if that was where the “good” ones went.
I got shakily to my feet and tried to step into the ugly dress as Allred continued to rant.
“Consuming fire and earthquakes are going to strike the planet!” He’d been on this “end of days” roll for several months now. It was a disturbing new trend in a sinister and creepy life that had been unfurling in front of my eyes for five years. “God is going to make waters boil and the decimating pestilence of illness will sweep the globe.” Abruptly he shifted his focus. “You’re fat and tainted by the touch of that abominable biker. I think I’ll send you to Texas where no one can touch you and you don’t cause trouble.”
Yanking me by my bruised arm, he shuffled me toward the door. I was barefoot and naked under the dress, never having felt so vulnerable. “Did Gideon come in the gate?” I dared to ask. Allred had finally installed a camera at the gate, so even people who used legitimate passwords were being denied access.
He rattled me even harder as we started down the hallway. “A storm of destructive power will be wreaked upon the United States, paralyzing everyone! It will be sent to humble the people who still persist in murdering unborn children. It is not of the pure way!”
To my credit, Allred had not been so radical and demented five years ago. It had been coming on slowly, a bit at a time, one revelation here, another revelation there. There were murmurs of consuming fires, illnesses that would sweep the world. Every time something like Ebola was in the news, Allred would utilize it to prove his point. Even if only two Americans wound up dying, it was still a “plague,” a pestilence sent to warn us of some goddamned infraction or transgression we were perpetrating.
Gideon’s love was welcoming me, but my guilty and dusty soul had drawn back to Allred’s house of pain and redemption.
Had Gideon climbed over the stone fence? That was entirely possible—I’d never seen any barbed or electric wire on top of it, and it was only about eight feet tall. Or had he somehow crashed the gate and ridden in on his Harley? If the latter, he would be driving down the main street momentarily. Had one of my sister-wives told him where I was? Had anyone dared defy the iron hand of Allred Lee Chiles?
He was hustling me toward the front door now. “Let all nations be warned again! Let all who would be of pure way walk before me because I am your eternal savior and judge.”
“Amen,” murmured some alleged sister-wives as we passed them by.
Boom! The front door blasted open so violently everyone jumped aside, certain a bomb was on the other side of it. Allred had been amping us up to expect such cataclysms, women fell to the ground behind appliances or partitions. For my part, I was certain Gideon had tossed a hand grenade, so I leaped behind the living room partition too.
Oddly, Allred stood still. Bravery wasn’t one of his best traits, if he had any best traits, so I was surprised. I peered above the top of the partition. The door had burst open so forcefully, the doorknob was wedged in the sheetrock.
Everything happened so quickly, it’s hard to say what came next. Gideon stormed through the entrance, and I mean that literally. With his heavy engineer boots, black leather cut, and chains and implements hanging from his belt loops, he was in fighting form. I’d seen him lifting weights in his infrequent spare moments in the empty dining room. He was gaining back the bulk he’d lost while recovering from being shot. He wasn’t quite up to his lovely mass yet, but he was menacing and imposing, a sight never seen before in these hallowed, quiet rooms.