Page 134 of Bound By Shame
A blush rises in his cheeks. He shrugs. “They’re romance novels.”
I take a closer look at the titles. And the covers. Some with women. Some with men. Some with two men and a woman. He’s got a shitload of those.
I snatch one and scan the blurb. “So wait, you read queer porn? Isn’t that against your religion?”
“Yeah, I guess it is,” he laughs and something warm bubbles inside me. I want to hear it again. He sinks onto the couch and flips open the laptop.
Not any laptop. The one I built ages ago.
“Why do you have that?”
“Why don’t you come over here and see?”
I drop the book on the shelf and take a seat next to him. His elbows rest on his thick thighs as he leans forward, using the touch pad to access an encrypted folder that takes too many passwords and two-step verifications to open. I’m actually kind of impressed.
He tries to rush past the next screen, but I grab his hand and point the cursor at the separate folders he unlocked.
“Trinity?”
The blush is back in his cheeks. “That’s… just stuff I saved that reminded me of you two.”
“Like what?”
He’s bright red. “Pictures. Songs. Stuff.”
Well shit. That warm, gooey feeling? It’s spreading.
“And this one?” I ask, moving his hand to drag the cursor to the St. Gem Folder. He double-clicks it.
Hundreds of files load.
“What the…”
“When Andrea took you home that night, Sinclair threatened me. Blackmailed me with that picture he took of us. And yeah, atfirst, I did his bidding to make sure it didn’t get out, but working for him… opened my eyes. Especially after being with you both… like that. There was nothing sinful about what we did. Nothing. But Sinclair and his cronies? The shit they're doing is beyond religious morals. It’s straight up criminal.”
He selects a video file. It’s grainy, but I can make out a group of teenagers unloading a truck.
“The Youth Warriors program that Sinclair made me the face of is indoctrinating teens for unpaid labor and drug smuggling, all while convincing these kids they’re fighting some holy war against the non-believers. And it’s not just here. It’s across the fucking nation. My old teammate from middle school, Ashby, reached out to me about two months after you left and… yeah, it’s bad. So we started working together and eventually got enough proof to get the FBI involved.”
He continues showing me file after file of evidence backing his story. Boxes of ‘cleaning supplies’ filled with GHB, some kind of pink powder substance, pills and who the fuck knows what else. Teens sleeping on the dirty floor of the chapel, recorded meetings about distribution, spreadsheets tracking money laundering— the list is endless. By the time he’s done going through it all, my eyes burn from staring at the screen for hours.
“So you’ve been working undercover to take down Sinclair and his empire of bad dudes?”
He reclines against the cushions, hands falling in his lap.
“Pretty much.”
I tuck my foot under my ass and twist to face him. “Why haven’t you told Andrea any of this? You know she’s trying to take him down, too.”
He shrugs. “I’ve tried. At first, Sinclair forbade me from speaking to her, but then he asked me to recruit her back into the church, so I used that as an excuse to talk to her… except, as you can see, she won’t give me a chance to explain myself.”
I chew the inside of my cheek. “And me? You could’ve sent me a letter in code or something.”
“No, I couldn’t,” he sighs, staring at my hand. His finger twitches. “I wanted to. Fuck, I was so close to buying a plane ticket just to see you, but it would’ve put you in danger. He didn’t know where Declan sent you, so if I contacted you… It would’ve led him straight to you.”
I pick at the green polish on my middle finger. “Then why is it ok to tell me now?”
The corner of his lips lifts. “Because they’re closing in.”
