Maddie and Lilah looked to one another in surprise. Lilah took hold of my hand. “Mae, who is Rider? You are not making sense.”
I gripped her fingers tightly. “Rider… he…” I swallowed back bile as I remembered him embracing Gabriel and the elders. Brother Cain, long time no see!
No! Impossible!
“Mae,” Maddie whispered. “You are frightening me, sister. Who is Rider? Where have you been all this time?”
I shook my head and blurted, “Brother Cain! Rider is Brother Cain.” I could tell by their sudden stillness that he was here, here right now.
“Mae. Brother Cain brought you here, with the elders, earlier this afternoon. The commune is holding a dinner for him as we speak. Everyone is so joyful. He returned you to Prophet David. Brother Cain is our savior. We were banned from attending. We have been shunned and kept in isolation since you left.”
Maddie took my other hand. The gesture surprised me. Maddie was never affectionate; she was always alone, preferring her own company to that of others. She was never that close to Bella and me.
Obviously something within her had changed.
Her bright-green eyes would not leave mine. As I looked more closely, I noticed she had lost weight since my escape. Her long black hair was limper, her skin paler. As I brought her hand to my lips and pressed a kiss to the back, a single tear rolled slowly down her cheek.
“I have missed you, sister,” I hushed out quietly.
“You left me,” she said almost inaudibly.
My heart plummeted. I had left her alone. She had just lost Bella and then I abandoned her too. She was only twenty-one, the most timid of us all. And I, her only family, had abandoned my Maddie here, in commune, with Brother Moses, the cruelest of all the elders.
“I am so sorry. So sorry…” I pulled Maddie to me. “I will never leave you again. I promise. I was so selfish.”
“Can you promise me that too?” I glanced to the side at Lilah. She was kneeling, watching us with huge blue eyes. With Maddie refusing to untie herself from my neck, I managed to inch closer to Lilah and she embraced the both of us.
I restated my promise to Lilah and Maddie. “I will never leave either of you, ever again. You have my word.”
“Oh, Mae, it was so bad when you left. The people thought God was punishing us. They were frantic. And the elders…” Lilah paused, and I felt Maddie stiffen and whimper into my hair. I stroked her head and rocked her in my arms. Lilah sat back, watching Maddie with sympathetic eyes.
“What about the elders?” I asked through gritted teeth.
Lilah swallowed. “They were so angry with you. When they came back hours after their search, they came in here, to us.”
Maddie’s whimpers turned into gut-wrenching sobs.
“They came for us,” Lilah murmured.
“Who did?” I snapped.
“All of them! All of the elders: Gabriel, Jacob, Noah, and Moses.”
Maddie clawed at my back, trying to get even closer. She was like a frightened child, so I shushed her, my alarm increasing with every sob. Lilah wiped her eyes.
“Maddie, calm. You are safe now. I am here.” I looked up at Lilah and mouthed, What is wrong with her?
Lilah swallowed and looked away. “They wanted divine retribution. The elders became obsessed with punishing the sisters for your disobedience. They were livid that you had somehow fled the commune and that you were out there living in sin.” She took a deep, sobering breath. “They said the Cursed were shameful, a hex on The Order: you… Bella… They said your bloodline was tainted with evil. Said Satan used you as vehicles for temptation.”
This time I stilled. Maddie. She was of my bloodline. Did they believe she too was a vehicle of temptation and sin?
I held my sister even tighter.
“They said they needed to make sure Maddie did not go the same way… That they had to break her once and for all. Exorcize her demons.”
Maddie was now crying uncontrollably. Her heart pounded against mine and her chest jerked with the intensity of her sobs. “They took her so brutally for hours and hours until she passed out. One after the other… sometimes at the same time. They made me watch but I could do nothing. Then they turned their attention to me…”
“How often? How often did this happen?” I asked, tightly squeezing Lilah’s hand in support.
“Several times a week…” She glanced down at the floor, then back up again. “Every week since you have been absent. It truly has been a living hell. Trapped in this room, taken until we bled, time after time. Mae, we cannot take any more… We cannot keep living like this…”
We huddled together until all the tears that could be shed had been shed. Eventually, Maddie shuffled back to sit before me. Her hand stayed welded to mine though. I do believe she planned never to let it go.
“Where have you been, Mae?” Lilah asked. “What was the outside world like?”
Where do I begin?
“Sisters, it is like nothing you can imagine—the technology, the way people live. It is so, so different. When I left here, the elders found me at the perimeter fence.”
Maddie jumped and frowned and I rubbed the back of her hand. She calmed.
“I only just made it to the other side of the fence, but not before Gabriel’s dog attacked me. My leg was badly injured, yet I managed to run. I made it to the edge of the forest and discovered a country road. A truck picked me up a short time later. The woman driver, a good lady, drove me far, far away.”
“What… what is a truck?” Maddie asked quietly. I cast her a small smile.
“It is a large vehicle, like the prophet’s car but much much bigger.” Her green eyes widened, so did Lilah’s, as they tried to imagine such a thing. I wondered what they would make of a motorbike, of the Hangmen’s Harleys and Choppers. I realized at that moment just how sheltered I must have seemed to the Hangmen when they found me in the compound believing I was in hell.