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Prologue
GIA
“Why are we going to the church?” I ask.
We’re driving toward the school, and it’s already nightfall. I’m seated across from the twins, but they are silent since the showdown with my parents at dinner, involving my mother and their father. I wonder if Dravin planned it that way, instead of him actually wanting to meet my parents.
“You’ll see,” Dravin says. “Just remember, I love you, Gia. Everything we do has a purpose. What happened at your father’s house was for you and your mother’s benefit.”
“My mother?”
“Since the hospital, your mother and my father have been in contact with each other, but that is the first time my father and your mother had sex. I think he planned it that way.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s what my father wanted. Don’t worry, we won’t hurt your parents, but Carolyn is a two-faced bitch that needed to be outed that way.”
I agree with him on that. The look on my mother’s face when Mr. Bedford threw the money for the soap dish on the table was priceless. I bet she couldn’t get that satisfaction anywhere. I never thought my mother would be that promiscuous. Good for her.
The driver pulls up to the gated cemetery and opens the rear passenger door. We arrived three hours ago from Wisconsin, and then they brought me here. They didn’t tell me why we were coming to the church, but I’m curious. Is it a meeting with the Order that I’ve been mandated to attend?
“Is this a meeting with the Order?” I ask when the door closes behind Dravin.
“No,” Dravin says. “We’ve created a society besides the Order in case there’s an attempt to disrupt or annihilate the legacy built by our founding fathers. It is known as the Consortium.”
Draven knocks on the door, and it opens; once inside, people wearing black leather plague bird masks with black robes simultaneously turn their heads in our direction. I notice they have white crosses marked on their foreheads with what seems to be ashes and under the cross it readssinner.
When I walk inside behind the twins, my first reaction is to turn my nose up at the putrid smell of a rotting corpse. “Oh, dear God,” I say, placing a hand over my mouth.
“Welcome to the Consortium, my love,” Dravin says.
CHAPTER1
Gia
My hand trembles as I cover my mouth, struggling to bring oxygen into my lungs from the images in front of me. The masks cover the faces of everyone sitting in the pews of the church, and where the altar is supposed to be, there’s a man nailed to a cross, someone who seems to have been sacrificed for sacred worship. I pinch my nose and try to get air into my lungs through my mouth, watching everyone slowly face forward, acting as if this is a normal occurrence and there isn’t a man in front of us with his eyes fixed in a wide, unblinking stare. A man I recognize as the barista from the coffee shop.
His head hangs, his eyes wide open bulged out from their sockets, the whites tinged with a sickly yellow hue. His pupils are dilated, and the irises have lost their color, giving them a lifeless, glassy sheen. It’s as if the very essence of his being has been sucked out through those gaping, staring orbs, leaving behind nothing but a shell of a man, forever trapped in his last, fearful expression.
Unflinching.
Dead.
On the cross, the man is completely naked and his arms are spread wide and large nails are hammered into the flesh at the wrists on two wooden beams. As my eyes trail down his chest, a path of blood flows from the wounds down his body. His feet are placed one over the other and nailed by the ankle and heel bone to keep him pinned on the beams.
Dravin leans close, his lips ghosting my ear, and whispers, “Scientists are indeed correct. If Jesus was nailed to the cross, it had to be by the wrists and not the palms of his hands because there is no way to keep him from falling if he’s not nailed at the wrists.”
My eyes fill with tears. I have never witnessed a dead body before, and even if I had, I would have never imagined this would be the way I would encounter one. What I am witnessing is another level of depravity and sacrifice. Shock and disbelief course through my body, amping up my nerves and making my stomach clench as a wave of nausea hits me. I try to keep my balance, but my body bends.
“None of that, my love,” Dravin says, holding my arm then handing me a mask. I take it from his hands. It is a full-face silver mask and I notice it has a built-in filter that completely blocks the putrid smell that’s causing my stomach to revolt.
Once I get my breathing under control, I close my eyes, hoping I will wake up from this bad dream, but when I open them, I know that this is real. I try to look away but can’t help myself. My mind wants to know who and why they have decided to do this this way but, deep down, I know the reason. This is revenge for what happened to me. What he did was irredeemable. It was inhumane to purposely drug someone. Especially, a pregnant woman that could have died along with her baby.
That motherfucker killed my unborn baby. He almost killed me and what scares me the most is that I feel no remorse. How could I? I wonder if that makes me the same as his killers. A chill slides up my spine because that means all of the people sitting in the pews of the church are sinners and killers. The only two I recognize are the two men that have my heart and soul in their hands because they were the ones walking to the altar as soon as we entered after donning their masks. The rest, I have no idea who they are, but they know who I am.
I watch as Dravin heads toward the center of the church, directly behind the pulpit, and places his hands on the wood like he’s the church’s priest. “I apologize to all of you for taking so long, but we can all agree that Gianna must know that she will soon be part of the Consortium. She must know what we do when someone disrupts the Order or tries to take a life without a vote. In his case…our child from our chosen’s womb. An innocent life that wasn’t his to take.”
Dravin’s voice echoes with conviction, and I can feel his eyes on me, the feel of anguish and hurt rip right through me. Raw pain from the loss of my baby grips my heart, and I don’t feel an ounce of sorrow for the man nailed to the cross because he didn’t feel sorry about me or my baby.
