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“But the fires of that fear must be stoked by men. We must always keep up the pretense of the Great Reckoning in order to protect the women from themselves,” he went on. “That is our number one rule for the men here. Never, ever reveal the truth to the women.”

I nodded. “Of course.”

The first fucking chance I got, I’d tell Jolie the truth. The rest of them, too.

Thibodeaux looked at a piece of paper in front of him, then glanced back up at me. “You also mentioned during your interview that you believe, and I quote, ‘Submission should be forced by any means possible. Even violence. Sometimes pain is the only real way to teach creatures as naturally simple as women’.”

My jaw twitched. “Yes, I said that.”

“We’re very glad you believe that, because we have a lot of strict rules here to keep the women from straying off the path set out for them. The punishments for breaking any of the rules are very harsh in order to keep the girls scared and submissive, as that usually deters them from acting out. Still, some girls are incorrigible and must be punished time and time again. Sometimes a reckoning is even necessary. We won’t go through it all tonight, though. You’ll learn the details of the rules and punishments for the women as we go along.”

I frowned. “I saw a woman earlier who was missing a finger. Was that due to a punishment, or did she have some sort of accident?”

Surely it was an accident and not a punishment. These guys were screwed up, but they couldn’t be that screwed up, could they?

Jacob nodded. “That was her penance. She was caught reading a magazine the men accidentally brought down to the shelter. Women are only permitted to read His Word or cookbooks.”

My guts roiled. Holy shit. They fucking chopped fingers off women for reading?

This was way more fucked up than I thought it would be.

I was starting to wonder if any of the men here were actually religious. Did they truly believe in this vengeful, misogynistic higher power of theirs, or did they only pretend to believe so they could exert complete control over the women?

“You look shocked, Mason,” Jacob said.

I shook my head. “I’m just… I’m surprised you teach the girls to read, that’s all,” I said, scrambling to recover my wits. “Seems to me that denying them an education would give you a greater level of control over them.”

“We thought of that, but we need them to be able to read so they can learn to cook for us, among other things.”

“Ah, of course. You said they were allowed to read cookbooks.” I nodded slowly, as if it all made perfect sense. “What about education in general? How do you teach them?”

“A few of the members were teachers before we started this place. They teach lessons to the boys and girls. Separately, of course. The boys are taught much more, for obvious reasons, and they’re also taught different things.”

“Do you ever tell them the truth?”

Jacob frowned. “The boys? Yes, of course. When a young man reaches the age of fourteen, he is let in on our secrets.”

I shuddered to think of what this place would be like in twenty years if no one did anything about it. The second generation of any fundamentalist religion was always the most dangerous, because they were the ones who’d been raised within it from day one.

The young men of New Eden were being raised to genuinely believe they were above women, rather than this older generation who knew it wasn’t true and had to force their domination and control via lies, so they would probably wind up treating women even worse than the current generation.

The Elders spent the next half-hour telling me about the usual goings-on in the shelter. This covered everything from meal times to mass weddings in April.

Apparently, like Jacob mentioned earlier, there was one day in spring where all the unmarried young women were paired off with single men. It didn’t seem like any of the girls had a choice in who they married.

Fuck that.

There were also strict rules regarding these marriages. If a married woman was caught sleeping with a man other than her husband, she would be harshly punished (they didn’t tell me how—apparently that was just one of the many things I would simply have to learn by living here) and the man she cheated with would be banished from the commune.

Apparently that was why a few male members had left over the years. They couldn’t keep their dicks in their pants when it came to married women and were subsequently thrown out on their asses. They never spoke about what they experienced during their time at the commune, because they were too scared of retaliation from the church.

No wonder no one knew anything about the place. Fear works.

“Lastly, we have the Joining rituals,” Jacob said. “These happen every Friday night from nine o’clock onwards.”

“What’s a Joining ritual?”

Elder Landry leaned forward. “Something we realized from the start was that there would always be far more men than women here at New Eden, even once all of the original girls had grown up. We also knew that societies can go bad when there are lots of frustrated men, so we invented the ritual as a way of keeping all the single men satisfied. See, unlike many religious groups out there, we understand how important carnal pleasure is for men.”

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