Black Sheep

If Bria Brooks is the devil, I will gladly burn in hell.

That’s my first cohesive, post-caffeine thought as I sit at the little round table in our cabin with a cup of coffee in my hands, probably looking as harried as I feel. I’ve never felt this mix of satisfaction and need before. It’s as though the euphoria of release fights with a coiling knot of desire in a constant push and pull. And Bria puppets these sides of me around like I’m pieces on a chessboard. I’ve never been so torn apart by a woman. Never so ready to both fall at her feet in worship and tie those ankles wide on my bed and fuck her until I die.

Except those feet are…not here.

When I woke, there was no Bria. Her side of the bed was cold. Just a note on the pillow. Direct and no fluff, just like the woman who wrote it.

Running. Back soon. 

I check my watch. Seven. A needling worry twists in my guts. We didn’t fall asleep until nearly three. After the parking lot we did find a club, which was surprisingly packed, though I guess it’s not that shocking as the selection is limited in a city the size of Ogden. But the dance floor was dark, the music deafening. No one noticed as I lifted the hem of Bria’s dress when she was grinding into me. No one saw me pull my zipper down and slide my rock-hard cock into her ass. No one heard her say my name as I bit down on her neck. Funny what people don’t see when it’s right in front of them. Or if they do, they never say a word.

Christ, the thought of last night makes me hard.

But the realization that Bria is gone and has been for a while sends the blood rushing back up to my brain. I stand and look out the window. Nothing but trees and more trees. I check my watch again. Only five minutes have passed, but it feels like thirty. Time crawls at an agonizing pace and my worry only grows.

Ten minutes later, Bria breezes in, her skin pink with a dewy glow. Her expression is blank and unreadable until she meets my eyes and smiles, pulling out her AirPods. I feel like I can breathe again, and I realize how hard my heart has been pounding in my chest.

“Hi,” she says simply as she tilts her head and scrutinizes my features. She seems to work out that I’m relieved. “Did you not see my note?”

“Yeah. But I was getting worried.”

Her head tilts the other way. With her piercing intellect shining through her cool gaze, it brings back Fletcher’s words from the faculty kitchen. Bria the Velociraptor. She can and does eviscerate me. And I like it, when it’s not my heart she’s shredding.

“You could have been eaten by something,” I say, moving to the kitchenette to pour her a coffee.

“Eaten? By what?”

I shrug. “Bears.”

“That’s why I went on the road. Bear avoidance strategy.”

“That’s even worse, Bria. Some lunatic could have picked you up.”

Bria laughs, the sound so wonderfully exotic in this simple cabin that I halt the motion of passing her the cup just to watch and listen. “At this time? On a Saturday morning?”

Good point. But still. “Possibly. Do lunatics operate by limited hours? Do they have morning curfews?”

Bria takes the mug and raises it to her lips, blowing across the steam with a devilish gleam in her eyes. She doesn’t even blink when her hand snaps out, quick as a viper, and grasps my wrist. “How’s the hand, Professor?”

I’m riveted, spellbound as she gives me a charming smile and raises my hand, pressing my knuckles to her lips. “Where did you learn to do that?”

“Kiss? Well, I was thirteen, and there was this boy—”

“No,” I say, rolling my eyes as Bria’s smile turns teasing. “The self-defense. It didn’t come from some overpriced class at a gym. Your reaction time is too fast. It’s a martial art, isn’t it? Which one? Is it karate? Krav maga? Jiujitsu?”

“Yes.”Belonging © NôvelDram/a.Org.

I blink back my surprise. Bria’s expression hardens, just a little, like armor shifting into place. That teasing smile is still there, but there’s no softness in it. “That was an either-or type of question, Bria.”

Bria’s eyes hold on to mine with a clinical curiosity, as though I’m a specimen in a lab. “I’m aware.”

“You know them all? How?”

“Like I said, Samuel valued a well-rounded education,” she says after a shrug. I wait for her to elaborate. My eyebrows climb in an unspoken request to give me more. But she doesn’t. “I’d better shower. We have to leave in forty-five minutes.”

Bria walks past me, her hands curled around her mug as she heads to the bathroom. I watch as she closes the door.

I just stand there a while, watching that door as though it might give up some revelation about the woman behind it. And in a way, it does. I realize now just how much she closes herself from view. What do I really know about her? What has she given up? Very little, really. Even on the long trip here, when I reflect on our conversations, the little anecdotes, the questions and responses, none of it gave me much insight into who Bria Brooks really is. If anything became too deep or invasive, she would redirect the questions to me. I knew she was doing it, but I didn’t want to scrape beneath those scars. But those brief glimpses into her shadows only make me want to cloak myself in her darkness.

Maybe it’s time to reach a little further into the absence of her light.

“How” is another question entirely.

That question haunts me as we eat breakfast. It follows me as we drive to the Hilton where a small meeting room has been reserved for the next three days. It drifts through my thoughts as Bria sets up her equipment and we review our notes. It only leaves when our first interview subject arrives, escorted by Agent Langille.

Theresa is our first subject. She’s quiet in a keen, observant kind of way. Bria walks her through the measurements she wants to take. She shows her how the devices work, what she will and won’t record, and how the data will be stored and used. Theresa asks questions and Bria answers each one succinctly. When the consent form is signed, Bria places the leads on Theresa and opens her laptop, and then the interview can begin.

I start Theresa off with standard questions. We discuss her first encounters with Legio Agni, when she was a new resident of New Jersey where she’d taken a job as a Food Processing Technologist at an industrial bakery. She describes her initial loneliness, and how relieved she was when another young woman at her gym befriended her, inviting her to a women’s “networking support” group. From there, she was quickly absorbed further and further into the insular subculture of the Legio Agni cult. First it was their meetings. Then their supplements. Their closed online groups. Their retreats. Their aspirations. Their crusades. If there was an enemy, a threat to Caron’s empire, it became her enemy. Her threat to crush.

We lay all the groundwork, and Theresa answers each question, with as much detail as she can pull from her memory. Bria and Agent Langille remain silent, Langille taking notes and Bria tracking the metrics from her instruments while she types observations. After an hour of discussion, we take a short break before moving on to questions specific to Caron.

“When did you first meet Caron Berger?” I ask after Bria has reattached the leads to Theresa and nods her confirmation to continue.

Theresa pulls at wispy strands of red hair that escape the loose bun at the base of her neck. “Not until after I was done working at Catalyst. I had to prove my commitment there first.”

“What’s Catalyst?” I ask as Agent Langille scribbles notes from his seat along the wall.

“It’s a lab. Epsilon Health and Wellness outsourced some of their product testing and quality control to Catalyst.”

“What did you mean you had to ‘prove your commitment’ there?”

Theresa twirls and untwirls a strand of hair as her gaze drops to her glass of water. “Cynthia. She arranged for me to speak on the phone with Caron directly. He said he wanted me to join the Lana compound. He said that first, I had to get a job at Catalyst. He wanted me to steal samples of Epsilon’s products that came in for testing, as well as any lab reports or other documentation I could find related to the company.”

Agent Langille and I exchange a glance. If Bria thinks anything about this revelation of industrial espionage, she doesn’t let on. She’s focused on her laptop as the readings tick along across the screen.

“I know it was wrong,” Theresa offers. Her gaze remains on the glass as tears fill her eyes. “But Caron said Epsilon was endangering people. He said their products were impure, not like ours. He promised I would be helping people. And I wanted to belong. I wanted to run away from the world, honestly. I wanted to live at Lana and be…special. Protected.”

“Did you provide Caron with what he asked for?” I ask as Theresa wipes her eyes with the edge of her thumb. I push the box of tissues toward her and she takes one.

“Yes,” she replies.

“Did you go to the Lana compound?”

“Yes.”

“What can you tell us about your first face-to-face meeting with Caron Berger?”

Theresa takes in a deep, tremulous breath, letting it out slowly as she looks to the ceiling and into her memory. “I remember thinking he was super hot,” she says with a huff of a laugh. “Isn’t that crazy? I’d been stealing for months for a man I’d never met, and I’d never stolen before in my life. My first thought wasn’t to be worried about it catching up with me or that what I was doing was wrong. It was just wow, he’s really good-looking. And then I felt so much gratitude. I was grateful to be accepted into the community, to have a chance to leave the outside world behind.”

“Did you take any photos during your time there? Any of Caron?” I ask, knowing it’s a long shot of a question.

Theresa shakes her head emphatically. “No. We weren’t allowed to bring any phones or cameras. Once you’re in the compound, there’s no access to technology at all without approval and supervision.”

“Whose supervision?”

“Only someone in the uppermost levels. Caron. Cynthia. One of the top-tier girls. There were a few.” Theresa’s gaze darts to Agent Langille. “I don’t want to get the girls in trouble,” she says.

“It’s fine, you don’t need to elaborate on them,” I reply, reassuring her with a faint smile. “It’s Caron I’d like to know more about. Did you have the opportunity to speak with him frequently? Did he tell you anything about himself?”

“Not much,” Theresa says as she runs her thumbnail along the veins of dark lines in the wooden table. “He wasn’t there often. One day he’d appear and he’d be there for a week, the next he’d be gone. But the first night I…”

I wait, silent and still. Bria’s presence looms to my left, though nothing about her has changed. When we prepared for these interviews, it was a suggestion she made. Wait for them to fill the silence. And after a long moment, Theresa does.

“The first night I slept with Caron, he told me a little about his past. He said he had a very religious upbringing and saw the harm it did to others. He said his family didn’t want him. They abandoned him. There was a night when he nearly died. When he woke up, he said that’s the day he decided to do everything to change his life and build a safe place for people like him. Specifically women. He wanted to protect women who had been hurt, or abused. Neglected. He wanted to make a safe community for us. And it was. It was a beautiful, safe place. Until it wasn’t anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

“I got sick.” Theresa says. “I have Lupus. I was in a long remission before I went to Lana. I thought maybe it was gone for good. After about six months at the compound, I had a really bad flare-up. I needed medication. Corticosteroids. But they didn’t like that. The others…they thought I should be able to manage with Lamb’s anti-inflammatory detox. It didn’t work.”

“What happened when it failed?”

“One of the other girls, she took me to the hospital. You’re interviewing her tomorrow.”

“Did you try to go back to Lana once you recovered?”

Theresa shakes her head, another tear rolling from her lash line to streak across her cheek. “No. We knew they wouldn’t let us come back. Once you’re there in one of the compounds, you can’t ever leave. But Sienna told me it was dangerous anyway, that we’d left in time.”

“Why?”

“Because someone is coming to kill Caron, and whoever it is, they don’t care who stands in their way.”