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Noa’s heart raced. She felt small. She felt vulnerable. She didn’t like feeling vulnerable. But this was Diel.
She covered all of his wounds, then stood. Diel’s hands were immediately on her waist, his fingers gently rubbing her lower back. Her gaze fell to his neck scar. The scar made by his collar. The one he’d had in common with the young boy tonight. The one he’d had in common with …
“It happened a few years ago,” Noa said quietly, staring at nothing over Diel’s shoulder, unable to meet his eyes. If she did, she would fall apart. Her vision blurred as she was propelled back to the past. To the days when she had given herself over to the alluring darkness within. She had allowed rage and anger and bitterness to be the emotions that led her, that governed her every move. She had followed Priscilla into blackness, idolizing her older sister as if she were the Triple-Headed Goddess herself. Trying to be like her, joining her in her mission to rid the world of the priests who had destroyed them and their families.
“It was just another night of hunting the Brethren,” Noa said, her voice little more than a broken whisper. The fire in the hearth was unlit, and Diel’s bedroom felt cold and stale, oppressive. “As always, I joined Priscilla in the hunt for the priest. My sisters would look for the children in the homes we raided.” Noa remembered arriving at that godforsaken house. That fucking house of horrors.
A chill ran down her spine. It had been an old nineteenth-century house hidden from view—they were always out of sight, rural. It was large, built from oak wood and nightmares.
Noa inhaled a shaky breath. “We went in as usual. Dinah, Beth, Candace, Jo and Naomi looked for the child we knew would be inside. From her scouting missions, Priscilla had flagged that priest as being particularly devout to the Brethren cause, one to watch. One we had to break.” Diel’s hands tightened on Noa’s waist. He knew too well what that kind of dedication would have meant for the child in the priest’s home.
Noa shook her head, refocusing. She laid her hands on top of Diel’s. The warmth from his skin flooded into her body like an undercurrent of strength. “But when we went inside …” Noa’s voice quivered. “When we went inside, it was worse than anything we had ever seen.”
Noa could see the inside of that house as though she were standing in its doorway again. The house was clean, and furnished with elegant wooden furniture. But … “There were children in every single room,” she said, her head turning as if looking around the priest’s foyer. “They were tied to crosses, cut and bleeding, some starving because the priest believed they represented the deadly sin of gluttony. There were children whose faces had been mutilated beyond recognition by knives because he believed they had been vain.”
Noa felt it then; she felt the same wave of fury sweep through her that had engulfed her that day. The need to punish him for what he had done. The need to rip him apart for playing God and ruining the children’s lives.
“We hadn’t been out of the Circle too long at that point,” Noa said. “The tortures they’d inflicted on me and my sisters were still fresh in our minds. The final scars they had given us were still obvious on our bodies.”
Noa’s eyes shimmered. “If I was fury, then Priscilla was wrath incarnate. She had always been that way, but that night, seeing all those children, more than we could have ever expected, in worse condition than we could have ever dreamed up in our nightmares …”
Diel laid his forehead on her chest. She felt his breath ghosting over her shirt, feeling its comfort even through the leather.
“Darkness truly overcame me that night.” Noa saw herself so clearly in her mind’s eye. She saw the living demon she’d become. If revenge had ever had a physical form, that night, it would have been Noa. “And I snapped,” she said, breath hitching. “I searched for revenge … and in the end, it brought only pain.” Noa’s eyes closed, and whether she wanted it or not, she was thrust back to that night …
Noa gripped her knives at her sides, the metal vibrating with just how livid she was, with how much anger surged through her veins, potent as poison.
She watched Dinah and Candace pull down a boy from an upturned cross. Naomi pulled a child from a cage laced with razor blades, her efficient healer’s hands instantly going to work on the infected wounds the serrated blades had caused on his broken dark skin.
Noa felt Priscilla’s wrath from beside her, talons of hatred crawling over Noa’s flesh in search of an ally. Noa risked a glance up at her sister and almost swore there was fire blazing in her omniscient black eyes. But Priscilla didn’t look at Noa. She just grabbed her knives and said, “Find him.” Then Priscilla took off into the nearby rooms, searching for the priest who had done this to the children.
