Page 148 of Patching Over

I’m impressed as hell, to be honest. I can make change in my head and do that so I’m sure I’m not being fucked over, but that’s a far cry from doing a mathematical equation completely in my head.

“As Banshee said, it’s interesting, but what does it have to do with this?” Brick questions, his fingers steepled and his elbows pinned to the table.

“I’m also a whiz when it comes to programming because of the way my mind works,” she replies. “My mother wanted to see how far she could push me, so she took me on an outing, and set me in front of a computer for the first time at the library. I was instantly intrigued by the data, coding, and security settings of the web. Now, mind you, the internet was a new thing back then, so things were easily broken into. But with a few strokes of my fingers on the keyboard, I was rewriting and encrypting systems. I was ahead of the times, so to speak.”

“Was that back when Apple invented the first computer?” Hawg asks her, curiosity beaming from his eyes.

“Yes. Back when you had to have certain variables in order to cipher the structures and there was no taskbar to ease your way from one site to the other.” She giggles then continues, saying, “It was barbaric compared to how things are now.”

“That’s both incredible and downright frightening,” Scythe states. “You could’ve brought the world down around you without knowing you were doing so.”

“Oh,” she says, snapping her fingers. “I knew exactly what I was doing. I’m not sure how I had that knowledge, or how I instinctively figured it all out, but I got what I was capable of, and eventually, when technology caught up, so did my mom.”

“Spooky shit,” Brick mutters.

“Yes,” she states, answering his unspoken question. “I wrote a program that allows them to be alerted if someone is seeking them. It’s how they stay one step ahead of everyone, including law enforcement, and apparently, your tech guys. I’m the bad person here.”

“You absolutely are fucking not!” Butcher snaps. “You were a damn kid, Lah. You had no control over what they forced you to do.”

“He’s right again, Selah,” Brick insists. “If any one of us was in the situation you were in, and didn’t know better, we’d have done the same thing.”

“I knew better,” Selah confesses. “But they literally were holding my brothers, then later, my daughters under the knife. I did what I did with knowledge of how it was helping those assholes and their vile organization stay under the radar and ahead of the game. If I wanted them to live, if I wanted them to have less severe punishments, I did as instructed. And I did it willingly, it saved my brothers and my girls.”

“How so?” Banshee asks, tilting his head sideways.

“Instead of using knives to mar Wrecker’s skin, when he was put in the neck brace and displayed in the center of town as devil marked, they’d use whips to drive the sins out of him. Instead of leaving him untreated, I’d refuse to input the next sequence into the computer until he was seen by a healer. I forced their hand and made Mammoth be his punisher instead of our community's enforcer, because even though Mammoth had to appear as if he hated our brother, he assuredly didn’t, and he secretly and covertly made sure that our big brother was gone easy on even if it didn’t appear that way. Mammoth made sure that he had herbal salves on hand to help him heal quicker without as many scars as he would’ve had if we hadn’t intervened.”

My head is spinning with the information she’s giving us. Her parents as well as that entire fundamentalist organization need to be drawn and quartered. “That’s a lot of pressure y’all had on your shoulders,” I state. “I can’t even imagine being in your shoes and having to make those decisions.”

The thought that she was made to do these things reinforces just how evil these fuckers are, especially knowing she was a kid when all of this started. I can see the guilt she still carries on her face, as if she was the one making those decisions.

Only… she wasn’t. She was under the thumbs of a bunch of misogynistic assholes who used her abilities to further their cause.

“It broke my heart when Wrecker thought we hated him and enjoyed his torture. We had a role to play, and if we didn’t execute it, things would have been worse… deadly even. To this day, he doesn’t know how much was sacrificed to keep him alive. I bartered my virginity and willingly became a breeder, even though that wasn’t my intended role, in order to keep him breathing.”

“Fuck!” Butcher roars, unwrapping his arm from around her and slamming his fists on the table.

“There’s more,” she whispers, placing her hand on Butcher’s trembling arm. “Will you be okay to hear what else I have to say?” He looks at her and nods his head.

“Do you need a breather, Brother?” Brick asks him.

“Yeah,” Butcher answers, as he stands up and heads for the door.

“Let’s all take a minute, and we’ll meet back here in an hour,” Brick orders. He walks behind Selah and squeezes her shoulder. “Give him a bit to collect himself. That’s a hard load for a man to carry when he hears things like this about his ol’ lady.”

Scythe lifts her up by the pit of her arms, and murmurs in her ear, “Let’s get a drink, yeah? Your man’s not the only one who needs a break.”

He’s got that right. I think I could down a full fifth of whiskey and not feel a damn thing. I watch as Scythe plops Selah on a bar stool, then she’s handed a glass of what looks like tequila. She shoots it and I watch as within minutes, she’s jumping off the stool with her hand over her mouth.

“Fuck, didn’t think she would get sick,” Scythe mutters, watching her run. “Better go find Butcher so he can check on her.”

I nod because that’s how the brothers are with the ol’ ladies. If their man is around, we get them, but we’ll also jump in and handle things if necessary. Since we’re virtually strangers to Selah, it’s better that Butcher checks on her instead of Scythe.

When Butcher makes it back, we usher him to a seat, letting him know the other ol’ ladies have his taken care of. He hesitates for a minute, but when he sees Belle leave and come back with something in her clutches, with no signs of stress on her face, he gives in and plops down next to us, shooting a glass of whiskey in one fell swoop.

We settle in to relax for a bit per Brick’s orders and I watch my brothers as they grab something to eat from the kitchen orhave one of our prospects hand them a beer. I’m in the middle of taking a long pull on mine when Selah comes rushing from the bathroom, something clutched close to her chest.

She runs over to Butcher and says, “I know who M is.”

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