my stomach turns again as he presses himself against my backside. Sean must not have hurt him as badly as it looked.
“No, you won’t,” I tell him, surreptitiously making a claw of my hand and holding it straight down, hidden in my long skirt. Jeremiah leers at me, keeping eye contact, holding my chin steady. He doesn’t want me to look away when his other hand reaches its goal, touching me through the skirt. He wants to see in my eyes that I’m beaten, that I recognize his triumph.
Not. Gonna. Happen.
I quickly jerk my hips forward, away from him, and dig my hooked fingers into the softest bits of Jeremiah’s body, squeezing his balls, twisting them as hard as I can through his jeans, and I smile viciously at the gasp of shock and pain as his eyes go wide in breathless agony. You’re the one that wanted me to look in your eyes, you filthy monster!
For the first time in my life, I become a wild thing, giving in to every violent impulse. I jump on him, catching a fistful of greasy hair and clawing at his face with the other as I drag him to the ground. My nails are short and ragged, but I’m out for blood. Jeremiah’s fluttering hands bat at mine, blocking me while I try to gouge out his eyes with hooked thumbs. Even surprised and in pain, he’s stronger than I am, and he’s starting to catch his breath. Can’t let him recover yet!
I lift a knee and drive it squarely into his balls and fresh pain deflates him like a popped balloon, and his hands go limp for a moment. That moment is all I’m going to need. Snarling, I reach for his eyes again but never quite make it. My advantage ends when I feel fingers knotted in my hair, dragging me off him, leaving me sprawled on my back on the ground. The break is all Jeremiah needs, and he scrambles to his feet awkwardly, hunching over from the pain between his legs.
My mot- no, not my mother. Heather! -and Father Emmanuel pull me to my feet, and Heather slaps me squarely, her face red with fury. She takes a deep breath, getting ready to scream, but Satan stops her with a raised hand.
“Now, now, Sister Heather,” he says. “It’s no longer your place to discipline her.”
“But--” she sputters, but Emmanuel interrupts coldly.
“It is not. Your. Place!” Satan turns to Jeremiah – could anyone ever by more accurately called ‘the spawn of Satan?’ - holding out his hand. “My son will provide correction for her. After all, she will be his wife.”
“Not yet!” I spit the words defiantly at him.
“A mere technicality,” he says with a shrug. “Which will be corrected soon enough.”
“I will never be his wife!” With effort, I regain my calm, forcing my face to relax into an expression of serenity. “I’d sooner spend eternity in that hole with Daniel and Joshua than spend a single moment as wife to your son.”
“Oh, my dear child.” Emmanuel seems amused by my defiance. “You have a much grander destiny than that. You will come to accept your place in The Lord’s Plan. In time.”
I open my mouth to make a hot retort, but Jeremiah has recovered enough to silence me with a hard fist on top of the already black eye my mother had given me at the camp. He’s cocking his fist back for a second blow when his father stops him.
“You should perhaps go easy for now,” Emmanuel tells his son in a deceptively mild voice. “After all, if my dear daughter Courtney is unconscious, she may not absorb the full impact of today’s lesson.”
“Yes, father,” Jeremiah says, with a venomous glare at me.
Emmanuel looks at me, folding his hands as if in prayer. “You should pay attention, my daughter. My brother, your husband – your late husband, I should say – violated The Lord’s commands. I did not wish to see him come to this end, but Daniel’s unnatural acts doomed him. As The Lord’s word says: ‘their blood shall be upon their own heads.’”
“You’re a murderer,” I say. My cheeks may be swollen and bruised, wet with involuntary tears, and I feel a trickle of blood again from a re-split lip, but I won’t give him the satisfaction of crying. Never again.
“Hardly, my child. Hardly. Man’s law may say so, but we do not recognize the laws of Man. The Lord has commanded that sodomites