Healing Hearts (New Hope Falls #6) - Kimberly Rae Jordan Page 0,118

in a cabin separate from everyone. By the time I fully understood everything, it was too late to leave. Once I was pregnant and trapped, he introduced me to the rest of the family.” She emphasized the word as well as putting air quotes around it. “They quickly showed me that I wasn’t anyone special, and that became my life for the next five years.”

“What happened with your family here?” Ryker asked. “Did they try and find you?”

“Ezekiel let me use a phone to call and tell my family that we’d decided to stay in Texas. I was pregnant already, and I just didn’t know what else to do. I already felt like my parents were mad at me for marrying him. I kind of figured that they would say that I’d made my bed.”

Ryker’s brows lifted. “Really?”

“Looking back,” Sophia said with a sigh, “I’m pretty sure that they would have come to get me if I’d managed to let them know what was happening. Ezekiel convinced me otherwise, however, telling me that my parents didn’t want what was best for me.”

“So it was a cult?”

She stared down at her food for so long without answering that Ryker wasn’t sure she was going to. “Yes. Although Ezekiel called us a family. Eventually, I found out that the cult had been started by his father, some eccentric rich Texan who’d made his fortune in oil years and years ago. When he’d died, Ezekiel assumed control. I don’t know where or even who his mother was. There were older women in the compound who were all called mother, so maybe one of them was his actual mother. I never asked. I didn’t really want to know anything.”

“What was the premise of the cult?” he asked.

After giving him a considering look, she said, “I don’t know, really. I mean, there was definitely a spiritual element to it. I recognized enough of Christianity in what was preached and what actions were expected from us to know they’d drawn some from that. I got the feeling that they kind of looked around at a bunch of different religions and picked the most conservative or fundamentalist aspects of them, usually carrying them out in a way that only benefitted the men.”

“So they cherry-picked what they wanted to incorporate?”

Sophia nodded. “Like women were supposed to only wear dresses, not cut their hair, and also wear head coverings. I know many women do those things as an act of submission to God. But in the compound, it wasn’t encouraged for that reason. They were acts of subservience to Ezekiel and the men there.

“Then there were the spiritual marriages. Several women married to the same man. Those were usually the teenage daughters of the members who had been around when his father had been the leader. There was a lot more rules, but I remember those because they impacted me the most.”

“How about the kids? How were they treated?”

“Out of everything there, the situation with the children was the worst.” Sophia glanced over at the bed where Bryson was sleeping. “Every birth was at the compound, regardless of the risks to the mom or the baby. If things went wrong, they didn’t seek medical help. The compound had its own cemetery for when the worst happened.”

The hand she lifted to her forehead trembled slightly, making Ryker want to pull her close and offer her comfort.

“And if a mother couldn’t nurse her baby, she had to hope that another nursing mom would help her out because there was no formula available. We did have animals that provided milk, but Ezekiel said it was the mom’s job to provide what the baby needed. That he didn’t want to take from others already in the compound to provide for a baby.”

Ryker was speechless. Okay, no, he wasn’t really, but he also wasn’t going to blurt out what he was thinking. He was well aware that there were ruthless people like Ezekiel had shown himself to be, but it hurt his heart to think that Sophia and Bryson had been exposed to that.

“As long as your baby was nursing, they let you keep them with you, but once they were weaned, they became family property. We were moms to all of them, though they made sure that the children we interacted with the most were not our own. Once a week, if we’d been good, we had time with our own kids.” She hesitated, swallowing audibly. “When I had my time with Bryson,