Page 1 of Ripped Veil (Ripped Bratva)

Elyssa

Somewhere In The Desert Of Nevada

To serve is to find peace.

To obey is to find happiness.

To listen is to find truth.

The words repeat in my head like a dirge. How many times have I said them? Too many to count. Every dawn, noon, and dusk for the last nineteen years. Every day of my life.

Fumbling shapes flit through my subconsciousness. My head hurts. So do my legs.

I can smell the strong accents of incense and fire. Patchouli oil. Desert sand.

And something else beneath all that, something sharp and wet and metallic.

My eyelids remain stubbornly closed as if I’m not in control of my own body. It’s easier to remain blind sometimes. It keeps you from seeing the monsters.

Heat suffuses the dry air around me and seeps into my body. That’s what finally forces me to open my eyes—the heat. Why on earth is it so hot?

My vision blurs as I push myself into an upright position. More questions bubble to the surface. Why am I on the ground? Why do I feel the indents of the floorboards on the side of my cheek?

I blink a few more times, temporarily distracted by the layers of tuille draped in front of my face. I’m so used to simple cottons and softened white linen—the uniform I’ve worn all my life, the same one my parents wear, and my friends, and everyone I’ve ever known—that the tuille over my head feels invasive, strange, unwelcome.

I swat at the fabric, but it follows my every movement. My head spins and the room tilts for a moment, forcing me to take stock of where I am.

This… isn’t my room.

Fear pierces through my body as the thought settles. My room has roughened adobe walls that I’d painted an ugly yellow when I was too young to know better. It has a thin mattress lying bare on the floor and a loose board in the corner where I stash all the books I don’t want Mama and Papa seeing.

This is not my room.

In here—wherever “here” is—the walls are polished wood. The floor doesn’t creak. The bed frame is iron and ornate, far fancier than anything I’ve ever seen, and the sheets are twisted and half-ripped off the bed like someone has thrashed them to the floor in the throes of a nightmare.

Everything is tilted and leery and wrong. Butwhatis wrong? I can’t remember anything about how I got here. Like today is the first day of my life.

I wait for the unsettling disorientation to fade, but my memory is still patchy. Gauzy flashes wisp across my mind, but they don’t linger long enough for me to decipher them.

I decide to focus instead on what I see right in front of me. But it’s so hard to see, to make sense of things. The world keeps spinning, colors bleeding together.

It reminds me of the time when Father Josiah made all the women and girls gather in the main hall of the Sanctuary to drink the purity water. He said it would cleanse us. But all it did was make a lot of us sick.

Mama couldn’t eat for two days. Carrie Wilson vomited her guts out after just one sip. Old Mother Hobbs had taken right to her bed.

Father Josiah insisted that the purity water had worked exactly how it was meant to. “You’re cleansed!” he’d boomed in that gravelly voice of his. “All your sins swept away like desert sand after a rainstorm.”

To make sure, he had met with all the women individually after the fact. I’d been exempt because I was only six. Mother Hobbs was exempt, too.

Not that it mattered much. She died three days later.

We held a prayer circle after the burial to thank Father Josiah for purifying Mrs. Hobbs’s soul before she was taken by the powers that be. He stood in the middle and soaked up our prayers and told us to say them louder. “I’ve been sent to guide you to salvation,” he said again and again. “Let me guide you. Let me guide you.”

My finger slips in something sticky and warm. I look down at my hand and as I do, my confusion intensifies.

I didn’t even realize I was holding something until now. Something heavy and solid. I hold it up in front of my whirring eyes. The first thing I notice is the graceful curve of dark wings carved into the metal. They rise up a swooping swan’s neck to the point of a beak.

It’s a paperweight, cast iron and expensive by the looks of it.

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