Page 156 of Heartbeats & Highways

Savage’s hand tightened on mine and the room was silent.

I forced myself to keep talking. “Another year went by and still nothing had happened. I was nineteen and just coming out of the fog the loss of my parents caused. Grief is strange, you know? They were fanatics, and they abandoned me, but they were still my parents. I was completely lost without them.”

I shook my head. “One night the Grand Patriarch came over for dinner. He watched me all night long—calculating. I pretended to go up to bed, but I hid in the hallway upstairs so I could listen to his conversation with my hus—Randall. The Seed Reapers don’t believe in divorce. You have to understand, they’re literal in their belief system. There are no exceptions, not for anyone. In our—theirworld, the only way out of a marriage is death. And that night I heard them plotting ways to get rid of me so Randall could take a new wife—a morefruitfulwife.”

It sickened me to recount my past.

“Every winter, there was a festival, I guess you could call it. To say goodbye to winter and to usher in the spring. I was supposed to have anaccident.”

I rubbed the back of my neck.

“I struggled with what to do. I didn’t know how I was going to escape. It’s not like I had any money. The cult had been my life since I was fourteen. But I remembered the outside world even though I was sheltered. I remembered a sense ofnormalcy. I was so scared, but I knew I had to escape.”

I took a deep breath. “A few days before the festival, Randall was very high up on a ladder on the second story of our home removing a dead wasp’s nest. I was holding the ladder steady on the concrete. I didn’t even—there was this moment, and I just yanked it as hard as I could out from under him. He grabbed onto the rain gutter in a panic, but it wasn’t strong enough to hold him. He went down and hit his head on the concrete. It knocked him unconscious. His breathing was . . . it was really loud and steady, and he was almost gurgling like he wasn’t going to wake up.”

“Agonal breathing,” Savage explained. “It happens when someone has a traumatic brain injury . . .”

“Then what happened?” Colt prodded.

“I tried to see if I could wake him up . . . but when I couldn’t, I went to get the tractor . . .”

“What did you do with the tractor? Did you bury him—alive?” Colt asked.

I fell silent and clamped my mouth shut.

“The rest of it,” Colt commanded. “You can tell us, Evie.”

I forced myself to look Savage in the eye. I forced myself to be brave. I forced myself to look at the man I loved when I told him something that might make him stop loving me.

“I got the tractor,” I said, my voice sounding very far away in my head. “And used the loader bucket to pick him up and dump him in the pig pen behind the barn. The pigs . . . after a few days, if you don’t feed them, they’ll eat anything—and I meananything. We’d stopped feeding them a few days before, to get them ready to sacrifice for our winter festival, and when I dropped him in . . .”

Silence reigned for several beats.

“Wow,” Zip said. “You’re so perfect for Savage.”

“Zip,” Colt warned.

“What?” he demanded.

“This isn’t a joking matter. This is some serious shit,” Colt said.

Savage hadn’t reacted to anything I’d said. His expression was clear of emotion and for the first time in a long time, I couldn’t get a read on him.

I bowed my head. “After that, I—went on the run. Grabbed some things of value and some money Randall had stashed away. I took my papers from before we came to The Farm, and I bought a bus ticket. I didn’t think about there being a missing person’s report. That doesn’t make sense to me.”

“Why not?” Colt asked.

“Local law enforcement doesn’t have any jurisdiction on The Farm. I don’t know why, but it’s the way of it. We—they deal witheverything internally, even punishment. The Grand Patriarch must be using the police to find me, that’s all. He’d never tell the authorities what I did, even if he knew the truth—which he doesn’t.”

“So, he’s trying to get you back,” Colt said. “It’s what I’d do if someone crossed the club, and we needed to deal with it on our own.”

“So, what happens now that you know the truth?” I asked, fear creeping into my voice.

Colt and Savage exchanged a look and then Colt said, “I’ll look into it, and the club will handle it.”

“You’re not going to toss me out? I’m a stranger who lied to?—”

“You’re not a stranger,” Colt stated. “You’re Savage’s Old Lady, which makes you family now. Your problems become our problems. And the club will protect you.”

---