Page 341 of Eternal
“Emily?”
She nods.
“I’m not a journalist,” I say quietly.
“I know,” she says quietly. “You don’t look like one.”
I blink, startled. Then let out a shaky breath that might’ve been a laugh in another lifetime.
“I saw the photo.” I start, and she nods. “You were there,” I continued.
“I grew up there,” she says. “My parents brought me in when I was six. They called it a retreat. Said we were special,chosen.” She fiddles with the chain around her neck, and I see it, a small cross resting above her collarbone. Still worn. Still there. “They were watching us. Everywhere. And when my parents understood that it wasn’t a simple church, they wanted to disappear. But I’m pretty sure they never left alive.” She blinks like she’s remembering things. “The doors were locked, the windows too. They used God’s name for everything they did.”
I swallow hard. “What did you see?”
Her eyes glaze over, not with tears, just distance, like she’s floating somewhere far away and letting me see it.
“Women. Girls. Boys. Brought in on the weekends. Some never left. Some were handed off to men in suits who never gave names in exchange for a big bag of money. It was weird. Cause my parents disappeared pretty quickly after we arrived.”
A pause. Her voice lowers.
“They told us our pain was holy. That silence was proof of obedience. That if we didn’t fight, we’d get rewarded. The girls who cried too loud got taken to the back room.”
She looks at me again. “I was one of them.”
My hand tightens around my phone.
“I got lucky. A janitor helped me run. He’s probably dead now. But that night he left the door open for me, and I ran for hours in the woods and mountains until I found a car to bring me back to the city.”
“And you changed everything,” I say.
“Everything I could. Name, state for like 10 years, hair. I still feel her, though. Lena. Like she’s a little ghost I carry in my lungs. And a few years ago I decided to come back here.”
Silence.
That cross... it’s not hope. It feels like a wound she keeps wearing around her throat like a confession. That cross is similar to the one Christian wore, and it’s making me sick, because he never wore it with conviction. He simply used it against me.
“Why the cross?” I ask.
“Because I still believe in God,” she says quietly.
Bullshit.
“Not their God,” she adds, voice soft. “Not the one they used to justify what they did. That wasn’t God. That was control.”
She breathes in slowly, like the air still burns her lungs. “I believe in something else. Something quiet. Something kind.”A smile, tired and honest appears on her lips. “Faith isn’t the church. It’s what’s left when everything else is gone.”
My jaw clenches. I want to laugh. Or break something. Instead, I speak. “These people twist faith into control, into fear...”
She meets my gaze then. And she knows. She knows who I’m talking about.
“You’re right about that,” she says.
I should hate that. I should tear it apart. Because faith twisted by the wrong hands ruins everything. It ruins people, it ruins women, kids, families. Fucking lives.
Because it turned men into monsters. Turned monsters into martyrs.
Turnedmeinto this.
