I could tell by AK’s expression that he could not speak. So I continued. “I had never been outside of the commune before. There were so many sights and sounds that made me scared. But the brothers who would drive us out into the towns would keep us safe. They would keep us focused.” I sniffed as I recalled walking into the hundreds of bars I visited as a child, then later as an adult. “The men always took the bait. When they saw us coming in they would practically salivate on the spot. We would dress seductively, take them back to the bus that took us into the town. We would give them pleasure like nothing they had ever felt, and then we would convince them to return to the commune with us. And they mostly always came. Especially when they saw what awaited them there. More free love. More women . . . little girls.”

“The pedophilic cunts,” AK snarled. “I’m glad I put a bullet through that fucking dick’s head. And took out dozens of the other cult fuckers too.”

I stilled and blinked at AK, allowing his words to sink in. “You . . .?” Surely I was mistaken. “You killed Prophet David? You were the devil’s man that took his life?”

“Yeah.” He pulled me closer to him. “I fucking watched that pedo prick fall as my bullet got him right between the fucking eyes.”

My breathing sped up at his confession. In the commune, I had mourned the prophet’s death as though my heart had been ripped in two, but now, after everything that had happened, knowing that AK had been the one to slay him only made me want AK more.

I lifted his hand and kissed along his fingers. “Thank you,” I whispered. He would never understand the level of my gratitude. Yet with that enlightenment came my greatest pain.

My regrets illuminated.

AK held me close as the tears fell from my eyes. He pressed kiss after kiss on my forehead. He made me feel safe. “There have been hundreds upon hundreds,” I confessed and felt the deep shame run through me like a sweeping tide. AK was as still as a statue underneath me. “I have serviced so many men I do not even know a number. Sometimes by choice and sometimes by force.” I sucked in a breath. “But if it was the latter, it was because I had failed as a Sacred Sister.”

“What? What the fuck does that mean?”

“If the seduction was not well performed, or my whisperings of God’s scriptures were not strong enough in conviction, sometimes the men would be unkind and take away our will. They would take the tithe of our flesh for our failure.”

“Rape?” he growled. “You’d be blamed if they raped you?”

“It happened sometimes,” I said, remembering the first time I had a knife held to my throat and was beaten as the man thrust himself inside me . . . in my every entrance. I remembered Meister and how he had been one of those males. “Meister did not like to be seduced; he liked to take. He took pleasure in extracting pain from my body. But the less I protested, and the more I allowed him to do with me what he wished, the more his possessiveness of me grew. I could see him becoming addicted to me, day by day, and I was frightened. But Judah ordered me to be beside Meister as long as he wished.” I closed my eyes. The rest of that story was blurred, due—I knew now—to the drugs. “He never gave me up.” My fingers stroked over AK’s face. “Until you came to claim me from his command.”

“You’re never going back to him either,” AK said firmly, and I felt my heart break at the promise.

Fresh tears flooded my cheeks. I could not believe this man was fighting for me. “I do not . . . I do not know how to live in this world, AK.” I swallowed. “I do not know how to be anything but a . . . whore.” I laughed without mirth. “People on the outside world would talk of us. ‘God’s whores,’ they named us in the bars. Prophet David and Judah would call us ‘David’s Whores’. It is what Meister wanted me to stop being. I was to be his whore and his alone.” I squeezed my eyes shut and felt the salt from my tears sting my lips. “In this world, whores are not revered but punished. What man would ever want a woman like that as his life’s love? A woman who had taken men in every way possible? Who had sucked and stroked and fucked so many men that she could not recall a single face among the masses?” I shook my head, choking on my words. “Who would want a woman who lost her innocence as a ten-year-old and was frequently touched before that?”

And then I felt it rise up within me. My most secret confession, my deepest pain. I tried to hold it back. I had tried to hold this, my biggest regret, inside for so long. But I could not. AK was safe. Here was a safe place for me to shed this guilt.

I had to finally let it free.

“What man would want a woman who was with child at the age of twelve?”

As the words left my lips, I felt AK tense underneath me. His breathing stopped, and his hand stopped moving on my back.

“Phebe . . .” he eventually said, softly. My eyes scrunched up as I hid my face in agony. I shook my head, trying to not let the floodgates of those times open in my mind, but I could not resist. So I let my story—my sins, my failure—spill forth . . .

I looked in the mirror and ran my hand over my stomach. The bump was so large now that Brother John had taken me from Sacred Sister duty and ordered me to rest. My back ached, and since this since this morning, waves of blinding pain had clenched my stomach, making me scream. Martha had told me this was normal, that this was my baby coming. She had been assigned to stay with me. She had been with child, too, but delivered a few weeks ago. Since then, all she had done was cry. She had been punished for those tears, lashes taken from her flesh, yet she could not stop crying.

Because they took her baby boy. They took him for the cause. And they would not let her see him.

My back ached as another agonizing slice of pain ripped through me. I cried out, feeling a dull pressure building at the bottom of my spine. I stumbled on my feet. Martha ran through the door just in time to catch me.

“Come, Phebe.” She led me to the bed. I clutched the bump, screwing my eyes shut as the pressure became unbearable and my entire body was overwhelmed with the need to push. “I think it is coming,” I said, just as my bedroom door opened and Sister Leah entered.

“The baby is coming,” Martha told her.

Sister Leah parted my legs, and I felt her hand inside me. “You have to push,” she ordered.

Martha gripped my hand. “You can do this, Phebe,” she said, tears pouring down her face. I knew she was thinking of her boy. I knew she was in great pain.