Page 84 of Blackmail
He has the nerve to fucking laugh.
“You motherfucker.”
“Not quite. But I did fuck your sister.”
What the fuck? Gabe said Becca had a baby. Is this piece of shit the father?
The way he crouches in front of me, a sinister smile on his face in the dark, makes me want to punch the shit out of him. “Oh. You didn’t know? That was the deal. My reward for getting rid of your father. Getting rid of you. And coming up with a way to bring in fresh blood to a community that’s frankly so full of old men their farts are dusty.”
“My father had a heart attack. You didn’t get rid of him.”
“Your father was in poor health. Then he happened to ‘accidentally’ find you naked and tied up out here.”
For a minute I almost can’t breathe. For years I’ve blamed myself. And maybe I wasn’t blameless, but I’m not the one who set everything in motion. Who does something like that?
“You twisted piece of—does your father know about this?” Pastor Lazarus was always a self-righteous piece of shit, but I can’t see him agreeing to…to what? “Gabe said teenagers have been disappearing. You’re involved in this human trafficking shit?”
“Father had an unfortunate accident a few years ago. Very sad. So it’s been on me to keep this place running. Tony was right, we’ve been having some money trouble. Father’s strict rules meant not a lot of cash coming in, meanwhile we had mouths to feed and land to maintain. Sometimes leadership means making the hard decisions.”
“You sold your own people out, you sick piece of shit.”
Elijah makes a tsking noise. “Your father would whip you for that language were he still alive.”
“Yeah, well, he can’t die twice. That’s your fault too, isn’t it?”
He shakes his head. “It wasn’t supposed to be that way.”
For a second, I think I see remorse on his face. It’s nearly dark, though, and I must be wrong, because his next sentence makes me think I’m hallucinating from all the drugs in my system.
“Actually, it worked out even better than planned. See, your father and mine were at odds about how things were being run at the time. Since some of the elders were siding with your father, the idea came up to disgrace your family in such a way that you would all be forced to leave.”
Are you fucking kidding me? “So you somehow figured out I was gay and made me your scapegoat?”
He actually fucking laughs. “My original plan was to seduce your sister. Get her pregnant, she’d be forced to marry me or leave, and your father would be run off for failing to keep his family in line. Then I saw the way you looked at me when I took my shirt off on hot days in the field.” He laughs, either at me or his brilliant, psychotic idea. “It was a bonus, the way your father’s rampage pushed his heart over the edge. When we moved in to help your mother oversee the rest of your family in her time of need, she was so relieved.”
“You’re an absolute psychopath.”
Or a sociopath? Narcissist? I don’t fucking know. The psychiatric stuff is above my pay grade, but I’m calling it. There’s something wrong with him. How did I not notice sooner?
Teenage love and hormones, that’s how.
My eyes squeeze shut, and I see Sebastian behind my closed lids. All this time I’ve been holding him at a distance, thinking things might end with him the way they ended with the first boy I loved. Turns out I was comparing apples to psychopaths.
Elijah reaches a hand out, trailing a finger down my leg. I’ve got loads of practice letting men I don’t like touch me, but after Sebastian’s sure hands and bruising grip, it feels nauseatingly wrong.
“Am I really so awful? You did let me fuck you.”
“When I thought you loved me. When I thought you actually wanted to leave with me and be together the way we talked about. I may have been too sheltered at the time to see all the red flags, but I see them clearly now. Even in the dark.”
“You know, before your mother died, she asked for you. Poor Isaiah, out in the world all alone. She never stopped worrying.”
I’m unprepared for the agony that tears me right down the middle. I knew someday my mother would die. I knew I’d probably never see her again. But this…
I clamp my mouth shut and do my best to take a deep breath. He’s enjoying my pain. He wants to get a rise out of me. I can’t let him win.
I remind myself that my mother, though I loved her when I was young, was the same woman who stood by weeping when my father whipped me but did nothing to stop him. For all I know, Elijah is lying so he can hurt me. Clearly, it’s something he’s good at. Still, the idea of her asking for me on her deathbed is a knife in my chest.
I manage a deep breath, and then another. When I think I can control the tremors in my body, I say, “I’m going to fucking kill you.”
