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Mason

Blowing out a deep breath,I wiped the sweat from my brow and stepped out of my hired truck. It was almost four-thirty in one of Louisiana’s coolest months, but the air in Amiens was still heavy with heat and humidity.

I headed into the small general store to grab a drink. I thought about questioning the owner for information on the nearby New Eden ranch, which I was currently headed to, but the only person in the store seemed to be the girl at the till. She was a pimply-faced teen who probably knew very little.

With my thirst satiated, I got back in the truck and headed through Amiens. It was a quaint little town, and most of the residents lived on wide lots which backed up to the bayou. They all had their own private piers, but that didn’t mean any of them were rich. Most of the piers were warped and splintering from year after year of sizzling southern sun.

I couldn’t actually see all of that right now, but I remembered it clearly from when my mother made me visit this town as a teenager. It was only a few miles over from the place she grew up. I must’ve spent half my fucking childhood in this state, touring around and checking out everything that made my mom feel nostalgic.

After winding the window down, I stuck out one arm and groaned with relief as I headed down the main road which led away from the town. A breeze was blowing through the air now, and considering the air-con in this hired truck didn’t work for shit, this was the coolest I was gonna feel for at least an hour.

I could practically hear my friend Thad chuckling and making snide comments in my ear. You aren’t actually gonna go through with this fucked-up plan, are you? It’s okay to admit defeat, buddy.

That wasn’t going to happen, though. I wasn’t the type to give up, especially when Thad was involved.

A couple of months ago, I made a bet with him. It was part of a game we started years ago when we were idiotic college students. Essentially, one of us would bet the other he couldn’t bag a woman who was considered by most people to be thoroughly unattainable in some way, and if he actually managed to score, he’d get a payout.

For example, one girl Thad slept with a few years back was a church pastor’s daughter we knew from college. She’d always claimed she wanted to stay a virgin until marriage, but apparently, that wasn’t true at all. Thad managed to hook her, and he said she was one of the wildest freaks in the sack he’d ever had.

It was the intoxicating thrill of the hunt that kept us going with the bets, even though we’d long since realized that playing the game meant we were shitty people.

After losing a quarter of a million dollars and my renovated lake house in the last bet with Thad—I misjudged that one pretty bad—we made another deal. I was going to head to the New Eden cult compound in Vermilion Parish to try to score with one of the girls there. They were some of the most unattainable women on the whole fucking planet.

If I succeeded, I’d get my lake house back along with a million bucks of Thad’s endless trust fund.

I already had a sort of ‘in’ with the leader of the Path of the Covenant group (which started out as somewhat of a doomsday cult) as my parents had done business with him a long time ago. We’d even been there visiting on the day the cult members were attacked at the leader’s ranch, which had now become New Eden.

That afternoon, masked gunmen had shown up at a spiritual retreat Jacob Chastain was holding for his church members at the ranch, and they’d killed all the women and teenagers, leaving behind the men and younger children, who’d apparently (and very fortunately) been away from the marquee tent where the others were attacked and killed.

Even though my parents and I left a few hours before the attack happened, it still haunted me sometimes. I’d lie awake at night and wonder what would’ve happened if we stayed longer and I lost my parents at such a young age. They were probably the most decent people in my life. If they hadn’t been around to guide me through my rough teen years, I wouldn’t be as content and successful as I was now.

I wasn’t religious, but sometimes I’d think to myself: Thank fucking god we left early that day.

No one knew why the church members were attacked or who carried out the heinous event, but after it happened, Chastain reformed his congregation. All the members moved out to his enormous ranch and formed some sort of weird commune.

They were different to most cults in that they didn’t evangelize and try to recruit new members. In fact, they actively tried to keep people away from the area.

The men of New Eden occasionally had contact with the outside world, but the women never did. Ever. The occasional visitors allowed in the commune either didn’t see any girls or women at all, or they caught a glimpse but were expressly forbidden from speaking to them.

Only one person had ever been able to get close to a few of the young women there and say a few words to them, and that was a sociologist by the name of Jack Lazic who’d done some research into Southern-based fringe sects last year. He was allowed to visit New Eden for a few hours, and after making some veiled threats to Jacob Chastain about the strange lack of women (apparently he implied that they must be prisoners kept in chains in some sort of dungeon), Chastain actually went and fetched a few of the girls to prove they were healthy and happy.

The gaggle of girls he brought out were makeup-free, long-haired, and dressed in long-sleeved, full-length dresses like something from Little House on the Prairie. They all said hello and informed Lazic of how happy they were at New Eden, and they said they’d never been abused. Lazic had a sneaking suspicion that they were drugged and parroting rehearsed lines because they seemed dazed, but he had no real proof of that.

He did, however, manage to take some sneaky photos with a tiny camera he’d stuck in his shirt pocket. He’d published the photos in some obscure online journal that ninety-nine percent of the world couldn’t access, but luckily, my secretary Vlada knew about it (she was fucking the sociologist) and had an ID and password she could use to log in and show me.

When I saw those photos, I got the shock of my life.

One of the little kids I spent time with when my parents and I visited the ranch all those years ago was in one of the pictures. But she wasn’t a kid anymore. No way.

Jolie had to be somewhere around eighteen or nineteen by now, but she looked older. I didn’t mean that in a bad way. She was fucking gorgeous. Looked like a twenty-five year old Victoria’s Secret Angel, even without any makeup.

Not only was she one of the cloistered young women of New Eden, she was a Chastain. The Prophet’s only daughter.

Now that was unattainable.

Truth be told, though, I wasn’t entirely focused on the bet with Thad anymore. Sure, an extra million would be nice, and I wanted my fucking lake house back, but when I saw that photo of Jolie, I was struck with the most powerful urge I’d ever felt when it came to a woman. Even if a million bucks wasn’t on the table, I’d still want to return to the ranch for her sake. She was just that fucking beautiful. That fucking magnetizing. Of course, knowing how forbidden and taboo it would be to sleep with her was also hot as hell.

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