Damnable Grace (Hades Hangmen, #5)

by Tillie Cole

There were about twenty of us when I trained. All similar in age and all receiving our first sexual encounter from Brother John. More lessons followed. Lesson after lesson on how to hold a man’s length, how to stroke it until he begged for more.

How to take a man in our mouth and entice them with the subtle movements of our body, how to make them fall into our arms and give themselves over to the Lord through our bodies. ...

“They trained you to fuc...

“In the commune at first. Prophet David often invited men who were important to our cause to his many communes, both domestic and abroad. I never knew what they were there for—business, we were told—but from the age of ten I was called to seduce them. Many liked young girls, even more so when we could service them in be...

I came to believe in what I was doing so much that I rejoiced when I was chosen by a visiting male from the lineup. Even more when I reached the age of fourteen and was sent outside into the world. Only the best Sacred Sisters were s...

“I had never been outside of the commune before. There were so many sights and sounds that made me scared. But the brothers who would drive us out into the towns would keep us safe. They would keep us focused.” I sniffed as I recalled walking into the hundreds of bars I visited as a child, then later as an adult.

“The men always took the bait. When they saw us coming in they would practically salivate on the spot. We would dress seductively, take them back to the bus that took us into the town. We would give them pleasure like nothing they had ever felt, and then we would convince them to return to the commune with us. And they mostly always came. Especially when they saw what awaited them there. More free love. More women . . . little girls.”

“The pedophilic cunts,” AK snarled. “I’m glad I put a bullet through that fucking dick’s head. And took out dozen...

“You . . .?” Surely I was mistaken. “You killed Prophet David? You were the devil’s man that took his life?” “Yeah.” He pulled me closer to him. “I fucking watched that pedo prick fall as my bullet got him right between the fucking eyes.”

My breathing sped up at his confession. In the commune, I had mourned the prophet’s death as though my heart had been ripped in two, but now, after everything that had happened, knowing that AK had been the one to slay him only made me want AK more.

“There have been hundreds upon hundreds,” I confessed and felt the deep shame run through me like a sweeping tide. AK was as still as a statue underneath me. “I have serviced so many men I do not even know a number. Sometimes by choice and sometimes by force.”

“But if it was the latter, it was because I had failed as a Sacred Sister.” “What? What the fuck does that mean?” “If the seduction was not well performed, or my whisperings of God’s scriptures were not strong enough in conviction, sometimes the men would be unkind and take away our will. They would take the tithe of our flesh for our failure.”

“Rape?” he growled. “You’d be blamed if they raped you?” “It ...

remembering the first time I had a knife held to my throat and was beaten as the man thrust himself inside me . . . in my every entrance. I remembered Meis...

“I do not . . . I do not know how to live in this world, AK.” I swallowed. “I do not know how to be anything but a . . . whore.”

“People on the outside world would talk of us. ‘God’s whores,’ they named us in the bars. Prophet David and Judah would call us ‘David’s Whores’. It is what Meister wanted me to stop being. I was to be his whore and his alone.”

“In this world, whores are not revered but punished. What man would ever want a woman like that as his life’s love? A woman who had taken men in every way possible? Who had sucked and stroked and fucked so many men ...

“Who would want a woman who lost her innocence as a ten-year-old and was frequent...

“What man would want a woman who was with child at the age of twelve?”

A David Baby. Babies born to Sacred Sisters. Babies that are “owned” by Prophet David and not their mothers. Raised not by their parents, but communally by carers.

They had done this to Martha too. Took her baby boy away when she had wanted to keep him.

“She is a David Baby. She belongs to the faith. You are a Sacred Sister. And you have a different path than being a mother. A much worthier cause.”

“Brother John told me that we can earn the right, through fishing, to see them on occasion. We are forbidden from saying who we are to them, but we may claim that we are their sisters. They will at least give us that.”

“Fuck, Phebe,” he said. “I got no words for that fucked-up shit.” He pulled me even closer to his body. “Did you ever see her again?”

“It took me two years to see her again. They said I needed time to set her free from my heart. It never worked, of course. I knew that my bond to her would never fade. The day I met her again, she was playing outside with some other children.”

“She had the brightest, blondest hair, similar to Lilah’s, but Sapphira’s eyes were so dark, like midnight—I did not know who her father was, he could have been any one of the several men I had served, but he must have had those eyes. And to the side of her left eye lay the large freckle, the memory of which had gotten me through the two years before.”

“I sat beside her on the grass. I was so nervous.” I laughed. “Nervous at meeting my own flesh and blood. I was shaking so hard that it took me forever to ask if I could play with her. She was nervous at first too. It transpired that she was a very shy girl. Beautiful, but extremely shy. It took a further two visits for her to speak to me. For her to smile.”...

“She was six when I told her I was her sister. Her blood. Her sister, AK . . .” I shook my head. “My soul died that day. Died when I could not tell her that she was mine, that I was her mother and she was loved more than I had known possible. She was the fabric of my soul. The very air I breathed.”

“And you earned those visits?” AK said tightly. His hold on me grew firmer. “I fucked men, AK. I fucked my way through so many men to get to those visits. I fucked so well that I won rewards from the prophet for my recruitment record, medals. And they rewarded me with a much-coveted position—head Sacred Sister.

I taught others; I led our missions. I was called upon to entice and impress the most important of Prophet David...

“But they made her a Sacred Sister too, AK. My baby, my little girl, they made her a Sacred Sister. They tu...

“I knew it was likely. The female David’s Babies were often put into the same circle as their mothers. The prophet deemed them worthy of being one because it was already in their blood. But it still hurt mo...

“Fuck.” AK pressed a kiss to my head. I reared back, refusing his kind touch. His eyebrows pulled down. “No,” ...

“I believed in it all, AK. I believed that my sacrifice, no matter how hard it was to endure, was necessary because the prophet deemed it so. Even when Sapphira was made a Sacred Sister, I believed it was God’s way. Despite the pain it caused, the hardship to us both, I...

“I was stupid and...

“I failed her in every way because of my blind faith. I failed Lilah, encouraging her to believe and rejoin th...

“It was not until we all came to New Zion after Prophet Cain’s ascension, and things began to change, that the veil that had shrouded my eyes drew back and the truth of our so-called mission was revealed to me. It was all false . . . everything we did had been due to th...

“Sapphira . . . the suicide . . .?” “She was not there,”

“The only good thing Judah did when I was his consort was send her away. I begged him to stop her mission as a Sacred Sister. I said that if he loved me as he claimed, he would do this one thing for me. He would save her.”

“He did as I requested and sent her away, sent her from a life of sexual servitude. She was thirteen at the time. She would be fourteen now. Judah informed me there was a smaller commune where the elderly or impaired were placed. Judah sent her there to work. It was abroad and far away from Texas.”

“I never even got to say goodbye to her, but I took comfort that she was away from New Zion, where I could see everything was falling around us.”

“But my daughter is still out there in the world somew...

“I have to believe she is okay, that she breathes, or else I would cease to be. I would waste away.”

“You weren’t to blame, Red,” he

“You were a fucking kid. You were a kid who had a kid, and those fuckers took her off you, giving you some bullshit trope, all that you could still be their whore. They brainwashed you. About every single thing in your life. And you have fuck all to be sorry for.”

“I am nothing if not a whore, AK. I do not know how to be anything else.

“I do not know how to live with all my demons. My failure of Sapphira, Lilah, and all the lives of the men I seduced, wasted when Judah ordered them to drink his poison. I brought those men to the commune, to our faith, and they died under Judah’s command.”

“And I do not know how to live in a world where I see my daughter in my arms whenever I close my eyes. Not knowing where she is in ...

“Meister’s potion took all that away—the cares and the worries. The drink I found on Ky’s porch did the same thing to me, when you had taken the potion from my veins. It was a suitable substitute. It m...

I saw Lilah with Grace, and although it makes me elated they have one another, it killed me to see what a mother ...