After years of hiding and covertly seeking out the Brethren, they had grown accustomed to being battle-ready, whenever, wherever. That had never been more apparent than last night.
As Noa followed Dinah, Jo and Candace into the tunnels that led to the manor, of course she thought of Diel. She had told him the truth. She had known he was coming for her. She’d seen the look in his eyes when the Coven had arrived at Eden Manor. She knew that tormented glint. One that promised death, in all its painful glory. Priscilla, their wayward sister, had worn it often. But Noa had also seen that look several times in her own reflection. Her brown eyes looking back at her, thirst for vengeance dilating the pupil and making the iris clear and bright.
With each rhythmic boot-step on the tunnel’s old stone floor, Noa thought back to Diel. The crazed fight he’d had within himself before her. She had watched with fascination as he switched personalities like a light being turned on and off at a rapid speed. One second the beast inside triumphed; the next, then did Diel.
Her thoughts lightened when she thought of Diel’s monster. The way it watched her, softened under her touch, like a tamed beast simply needing a moment of rest. Then she recalled Diel fighting back to the surface. The man with the glacial eyes. He acted in total opposition to the monster, recoiling from her touch as though it were a naked flame. Her chest pulled tight. Not in anger, but in deep sorrow.
As if hearing her thoughts, every single scar on her body began to sting; every bone in her body ached as if she been strapped to the rack and yanked apart. But there had always been more that came with the rack, as punishment for her perceived innate sin, for being the devil’s whore on earth.
More than the agonized pain and the muscular tears. More than the dislocations and the burning welts from red-hot pokers singeing her skin while she was bound to the wooden contraption. And if she was correct, the Fallen had been taken sexually by the priests too, just as she and her sisters were. An exorcism of the flesh wasn’t complete without the cleansing of the internal flesh too.
It was relentless. And not one of the Brethren’s “sinners” came away from their respective hells unaffected.
Nausea built in Noa’s throat as she remembered Diel rolling off the bed after lying underneath her. After the monster had pinned her down and wanted to touch her, gain her affection. She pictured Diel writhing on the floor, his voice lethal and dark, but the fear in his eyes shining so brightly it could have blotted out the midday sun.
Fear of her. Not of what she might do to hurt him, but of what she might do to soothe him. For someone who had been so cruelly and wickedly treated for too many years to count, the act of kindness and the simplicity of an embrace could be as destructive as a sword plunged directly into the heart.
And Noa knew its root cause was the collar.
She remembered the collar’s dagger-like electricity striking him down, wrecking his body as if he deserved it. She remembered the tight jaw, the taut muscles and the tormented roar as the volts burned his every cell from the inside out.
With the force of a migraine attack, Noa remembered the face of the boy from a few years ago. He had been tied up in a metal collar and chains, rabid and feral like a junkyard dog, hanging on for dear life, but fighting so hard to be freed that he’d used the last of his depleted energy to snarl and try to attack her even as she arrived to set him free. Even after being locked up like an animal and abused to within an inch of his life—skin and bone, and gray in pallor—he still fought. Because he had a monster inside him too. A beast, Noa knew, who protected him from feeling the harm that was inflicted upon him daily. His feral nature wasn’t immoral or evil—it was his salvation, the only way his mind knew to protect the purity in his spirit from being crushed.
Just like Diel. As if the past and present were colliding, Noa saw the boy and Diel mold into one damaged soul as clearly as she saw the stars in the sky each night. And as she’d stroked her finger down