Page 88 of The Preachers' Promise
I have no idea what she’s going to tell me, and I don’t want it to get back to Nataniele and others here if it’s something that could cause issues for me or the Preachers.
I link my arm with hers, and we walk to the bench. I gesture for her to sit, and she does, as I take a seat beside her.
“What is it, Daisy?” I face her and focus on what she’s about to say.
“Since you left, he’s been getting even more manic. He’s talking about the end of days?—”
“He was always talking about that,” I interrupt, aware I’m being dismissive but suddenly wanting to stop this conversation. There’s a sinking feeling I don’t want to face in my stomach.
“Yes, but now he believes they’re upon us. He says it’s time for the ascension. But there won’t be an ascension, Ophelia, because we’ll all be dead. Me, my mom and dad, my siblings, all the people in the commune.”
“What are you talking about?” I glance anxiously at the guys, who seem equally worried.
“He’s planning a mass suicide.” Her voice is barely a whisper. “He’s going to kill us all, and he wants you to be the main event.”
“No!” I gasp.
This can’t be real. All those people! Those innocent babies, and the poor women whose lives he’s already ruined. I can’t fathom it, and still, despite it all, he has his obsession with me,alive and burning. Her words fill me with utter dread. It sits like a cold stone in my belly, chilling me slowly from the inside out.
“He hasn’t given up on you, Ophelia. He’s still obsessed with you.”
I shake my head and stand as I take a step back, wanting to create space. “I don’t believe it. Not after all this time.”
She stands, too, and steps toward me, shaking her head as I move back again.
“I had to come. I had to find you. There’s something else. I overheard him talking, and he said something about you.”
“What do you mean?”
“He said he knew you were destined to be his before he ever laid eyes on you.”
I take in what she’s saying, but it doesn’t mean anything. It’s the kind of stuff he always said. He thinks he sees the future.
“He’s talking his usual nonsense, Daisy.”
“No,” she insists. “He was talking with a man, and he told him that he’d seen pictures of you, and he knew your name before he ever met you. He said as soon as he saw the photograph of you with your different colored eyes, he knew that you’d be his most important bride, and that he made the plans to be where your family were that day and take you.”
The world swims around me. How is that possible?
“He came across me by accident.” I say the words out loud as though hearing them with my own ears again will make what I’ve always believed to remain the truth.
“No, that’s not what it sounded like. He made it sound as though taking you had always been his plan.”
I glance over my shoulder at the Preachers.
What is she saying? That my abduction was intentional? It wasn’t an accident that I was the child taken that day—I wasn’t just in the wrong place at the wrong time? It had been arranged?
My gaze lands on Roman, and Cain, then Malachi. Then it’s drawn back to the girl standing in front of me, the one I haven’t seen for a year, but who managed to find me, despite everything.
She wouldn’t have risked this if what she was saying wasn’t true. She wouldn’t have come all the way here, and how did she even manage it, if she wasn’t trying to warn me, to help me? Unless … it’s a trap. But no, that makes no sense.
As I look between my men, my head starts to swim. I feel sick and faint, and my hands have gone all tingly.
Trying to take it all in, one question rings loudly in my head.
Who can I trust?
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