With the vials still in my hand, I completely freeze.
We’ve been caught red-handed.
Shit. Shit. Shit!
What do I do? Where do I go?
It’s too late; there’s no way to hide this.
“There’s no use in lying, ladies,” Patrick says, casually leaning against the doorpost. “If you wanted to hide your crimes, you should’ve thought about that sooner.”
“What did you hear?” I say through gritted teeth.
“Everything.” The smirk on his face is insufferable, and I want to smack it right off. “I can’t believe you thought you could get away with this.”
“Natalie,” my mother murmurs, side-eyeing me.
“What? You wanna silence me?” He chuckles, crossing his arms. “Think you can stop me?”
My mother suddenly picks up the small light standing on the nightstand, and she throws it at his face. He dodges, but the lamp shatters into a million pieces.
“What the—” he growls.
But before he can finish his sentence, she’s already thrown herself on top of him. She’s punching and kicking him in the stomach, trying to get him to go down, but he’s too big and muscular for her to bring down on her own.
Then he grabs her by the waist and picks her up, throwing her over her shoulder. “Simmer down!” he growls.
“Put her down!” I yell. “Don’t you touch her!”
“In case you haven’t noticed, she attacked me,” he yells back. “Why do I even care? You two are going to hang anyway.”
My eyes widen.
Hang?
No. No, no.
Fuck!
“I can’t wait to see the look on his face when I tell the president his own wife and daughter tried to kill him,” he says. My mom is slapping his back, trying to get him to drop her, but it doesn’t even seem to faze him.
“You wouldn’t dare,” I growl at him.
His lip drags upward. “Watch me.”
And then he turns around, putting my mother down on the ground only to grab her arm as if he intends to offer her up as a sacrificial lamb.
“Let me go!” she screams. And as she glances at me with terror in her eyes, something suddenly clicks.
I lose all self-control.
Like a mad bull, I bolt straight at him, head down, arms stretched out. And without thinking, I ram into him as hard as I can, shoving him forward.
Straight over the balustrade.
Right before she tumbles over too, I grasp my mother’s hand and hold on tight.
Patrick screams.
CRACK!
Silence follows. The floor underneath his head stains with blood, the puddle growing bigger and bigger. And I stare at the scene below like it’s straight from my nightmares.
Did I just … kill him?
Noah
I drop the book I was reading in the study and rush out the door … and run straight into Patrick’s limp body. One glance up onto the balustrade from which he fell tells me enough.
Natalie and her mother are there, glaring at the body.
Did they push him off?
“He saw us,” Natalie hisses.
I frantically look around. All the patriarchs are busy preparing in their rooms for the daily prayer that’s about to happen in a few minutes, but I’m not waiting around until they come out. If any of them see this, they’ll hang my wife.
I immediately grab Patrick’s body and start hauling him, but he’s heavier than I thought.
Natalie and her mother come rushing down the stairs, and Natalie grabs his legs to help me out. “Where to?”
“I don’t fucking know, but he has to go! Now!” I growl. “What the hell did you two do?”
“He saw us with the vials. Heard us talk,” Marsha explains.
“And you killed him for it?” I growl back while dragging his heavy body.
“He would’ve gone straight to the president!” Natalie barks. “What else was I supposed to do?”
I look up, completely stunned. “You killed him?”
They both look at me as if it’s a weird question to ask.
“Well, don’t just stand there,” I hiss at her mother. “Help us.”
“C’mon, in here,” she says, as she guides us along into a hallway up ahead. “To the women’s room.”
“What?” Natalie drops the body.
“They’ll help us get rid of him,” Marsha says.
“No way.” Natalie rubs her forehead, smearing blood all over. “Those women love their husbands. If they find out we killed him, they’re gonna kill us.”
“They won’t,” Marsha says, standing her ground. “I know those women. I can convince them.”
Natalie sucks in a breath through her nose. They’re clearly divided in how to handle this, but we have no other option. “We can’t bring him anywhere else. All the doors are guarded. There’s no way out with this one,” I say.
Natalie looks at me sternly but then nods in agreement. “Fine. If you believe this’ll save us, I trust you,” she says to her mother.
Natalie and I pick up the body again while Marsha quickly snatches a mop from the closet and wipes down the bloody trail behind us until we reach the door. She doesn’t knock as I presumed she would. Instead, she opens the door for us and waltzes in.
“Hello, ladies,” Marsha says.
When Natalie and I appear too, carrying a body, all the women jump up from their seats.
“Oh my … Patriarch Patrick!” Ashley immediately approaches the body. “What happened?”
Natalie opens her mouth, but I quickly intervene before she tells the truth. “He fell off the balustrade. Broke his neck, probably,” I say.
“He needs a doctor,” Ashley says, inspecting his face and his breath. “He’s not breathing.”
“He’s dead,” Marsha suddenly says.
All the ladies gasp in horror.
“And we need to hide the body,” she adds before I can pitch in with a lie.
We eye each other down. She knows I don’t like her approach. What if the women rat us out? She trusts them too much.
“We need your help, ladies,” Marsha says.
“What? You want us to cover up?” Abigail asks. “For what? If he died, we should tell the president.”
“No one can tell him,” Natalie says. All eyes are on her now. “If he finds out … he’ll know we caused his fall.”
She swallows. Everyone’s eyes on her lips.
There goes my plan.
“I didn’t mean to kill him,” she says. She’s not crying. She’s serious as hell. “It just … happened.”
“How?” Trisha says, raising a brow. “How does one accidentally kill a person?”
“Because he was threatening me,” Marsha says.
“All the patriarchs do that. To all of us,” Natalie says, and she narrows her eyes. “You all know the patriarchs better than anyone else. You’re married to them.” When Trisha raises her hand, Natalie adds, “Or your father is one.”
“So?” Meghan says.
“So you want to be treated like that? Like you’re trash? Like you’re nothing?” Natalie says. “Aren’t you all done with coming in second, or third, or worse? These men don’t love us. They hurt us. They use us for their own pleasure.”
Abigail seems visibly unnerved. Natalie’s getting close.
“We’re not human here,” Natalie says. “No one sees us as equals.”
“The men are more important,” Sylvia says.
“Says who?” Natalie retorts. “Them. Of course they’d say that. They want to keep us in that place. Subdued. Beneath them. Worthless.”
“But we’re not …” Meghan says. “We birth every child.”
“Exactly,” Natalie says, pointing at all the women. “We make the children. We make this community. Without us, they’d be nothing.”
She’s getting through to them because none of them rebuke her words.
“We don’t need them,” Natalie says, and she looks at her mom for support. “They need us.”
“You’re ridiculous.” Trisha rolls her eyes.
Marsha storms at her, grabs her arm, and forcibly tears down her dress, revealing bruises and marks all over her arm. “We’re ridiculous? You’re ignoring the obvious.”
Trisha jerks her arm back, shocked that Marsha would go that far.
Her secrets are out now.
Not even the fathers are safe.
But I am a patriarch too … and now all the eyes rest on me. “I’m not going to stop you all.”
“From doing what, exactly?” Sylvia asks, folding her arms. “Because even if you wanted to stop them from being in charge, how do you intend to change the opinions of the hordes of people outside the temple?”
Marsha cocks her head. “Simple.” And she gazes intently at Natalie. “She can convince them.”
Natalie glances at me, her mother, and then the women until it finally dawns on her that everyone’s waiting on her. She’s the one … the one who has the people’s hearts.
“They’ll listen to you,” Marsha says, grabbing her shoulders. “You can do this. I know you can. You’re my daughter.”
She smiles, and it makes me feel warm even though it feels odd to admit that to myself.
Natalie nods. Courage flows into her like a sea claiming back the beach, and she makes a fist with her hand. “This community belongs to us. Let’s take it back. Start a revolution.”
“But how?” Abigail asks.
Marsha fumbles in her pocket and takes out a vial, holding it between her index finger and thumb to show all the ladies. “With this.”
