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“Looks like the girls didn’t get much sleep last night,” I said, turning back to Jacob.

“What do you mean?”

“They look exhausted.” I nodded toward the procession of dazed young women as they headed out of the dining room.

“Oh.” Jacob laughed. “No, they’ve just been dosed. It’s their duty to clean the mansion today.”

I must’ve looked confused, because he smiled and patted me on the back. “There’s still so much for you to learn about our ways. You didn’t think we clean the mansion, did you?” he asked.

“It hadn’t occurred to me,” I admitted, although now that he said it, I felt pretty damn stupid. The mansion was always in tip-top shape, and it wasn’t like the men out here ever lifted a finger to clean anything. “When I first visited the ranch before joining, you said the women were too scared to go up there.”

“That was before you were a member, so I had to lie. Sorry about that,” Jacob said. He leaned back and patted his stomach, seemingly full already.

I frowned. “What did you mean when you said they were dosed?”

“Well, it takes almost a whole day for a team of them to clean the whole mansion, and as you know, they all believe it’s too dangerous for women to leave the safety of the shelter for more than a few hours at a time. So... you know the vitamin pills we give them every day?”

I nodded. I’d seen the girls taking them, and it made sense. They spent the vast majority of their lives underground, never seeing the sun, and serious Vitamin D deficiencies could occur if the men didn’t provide supplements for them.

Jacob leaned forward. “The tablets don’t just contain vitamins. They contain a certain type of sedative too. Not so much something that makes them tired. More like…” He trailed off and pressed his lips together, presumably searching for the right words.

My stomach lurched. “Something that dulls their minds and stops them from thinking properly?” I said. “Makes them more docile?”

He grinned. “Yes. Exactly,” he replied. “Anyway, give ‘em a high enough dose and they won’t even realize what they’re doing or where they are. They won’t even remember any of the day when they wake up the next morning. The memories will just be gone. It’s too dangerous to dose them up that high on a regular basis, but every so often is fine.”

“So a different team of girls goes up to the mansion every week?”

He nodded. “Yes. If we rotate the schedule like that, each girl only gets mega-dosed every few months. No real risk of damage.”

“Smart.” And by that, I mean sick. “And they never figure it out?”

“No. They take the pills happily.”

I nodded slowly and cast my gaze around the dining room, coolly assessing all the other men. “Can I ask you something else?” I asked, turning my attention back to Jacob a moment later.

“Of course.”

“There’s over a hundred and fifty men here, and you’ve had this place up and running for almost twelve years. How is it possible that in all that time, not one man has ever turned his back on the lifestyle and tried to tell the women the truth? Or the general public?”

Jacob took a sip of coffee and nodded as I spoke. “Good question,” he said after swallowing and wiping his mouth with a white cloth napkin. “A few men have actually betrayed us in the past. Or at least they’ve tried.”

My muscles turned rigid. “What happened?”

“Sometimes our teachings just don’t take with the young men,” he said with a shrug. “On other occasions, we’ve had a new member live amongst us for a while and wind up deciding it’s not for him. All of those cases were managed.”

I leaned in with a frown. “You mean you killed them?”

He tipped his head back and roared with laughter. “Oh, heavens, no. We don’t kill men.”

Right. Murdering women was apparently fine, but the mere suggestion of a man being killed was ridiculous.

Jacob went on. “In the cases of the new members who changed their minds, they turned their backs on us, but they didn’t tell the women anything, and they kept their mouths shut when they returned to the outside world. We have information on them, you see. Information which ensured their silence in return for ours.”

Ah, of course. The blackmail.

Considering the type of men they admitted here—total sick pieces of shit—it made sense that the other members who’d joined over the years had dark pasts they didn’t want coming back to bite them in the ass. It wouldn’t surprise me if half of them were child molesters or something equally awful.

“I think they also know we’d come after them if they ever tried. As much as we despise the idea of killing a fellow man, if we felt threatened enough, we might just have to go ahead and do it. But of course, we always try our hardest to negotiate before things come to that. Like we did with young Eric Carmody.”

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