My Ex-Husband Inviting Me to His Cult Wedding to Humiliate Me Didn't Expect My Five-Year-Old Triplets to Walk Down the Aisle
The air inside the compound grew thick with desperation. The evening deepened, but the lights in the sanctuary remained on, casting long, unsettling shadows. Gideon paced furiously, shouting orders into a phone, his voice tight with panic. He knew the clock was ticking. He had 24 hours. Now less.
I watched him from across the assembly hall, the land-trust document clutched in my hand. He was cornered. And cornered animals are the most dangerous.
Suddenly, a acrid smell drifted through the air. Not the usual campfire smoke from the distant workers’ dorms, but something sharper, more chemical. Then, the alarm bells began to blare. Not the spiritual ones used for services, but the shrill, piercing sound of a fire alarm.
Panic erupted among the Assembly members. People began to shout, pointing toward the back of the compound.
“Fire!” someone screamed. “The archives are burning!”
My blood ran cold. The administrative archives. That’s where the original trust papers would be. The contracts. The evidence of Gideon’s lies, his embezzlement, his illicit dealings with Viktor Radek.
He was trying to destroy the evidence. Before Rachel’s reports could bring federal agents, before Viktor’s enforcers could arrive.
I rushed to a window, peering out into the deepening twilight. Flames licked at the windows of a sturdy, two-story building near the back of the compound. Thick, black smoke billowed into the night sky, illuminated by the orange glow beneath it.
It was the archive building, undoubtedly. Gideon must have set it himself. His desperation was palpable.
But then, my eyes darted to the building adjacent to the archives. The guest pavilion. The inner guest suites where Eli, Samuel, and Caleb were locked.
The archive building was old, constructed mostly of dry timber. The flames, fueled by the accelerating heat, leaped quickly. A gust of wind, sudden and strong, carried burning embers across the narrow gap between the two structures.
A small section of the guest pavilion’s roof, where the timber framing was exposed, caught fire. Just a spark at first, then a small lick of flame, quickly growing.
No, I thought, my heart seizing in my chest. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t be this reckless.
But the fire didn’t care about Gideon’s intentions. It cared only for fuel. The dry wood, the old carpets, the forgotten documents inside.
The guest pavilion’s windows were dark. The boys were in there. Asleep, I hoped. Unaware.
A new, more frantic wave of alarms joined the first. The smell of smoke intensified, choking, sickening. The sounds of distant sirens, faint but unmistakable, began to cut through the night. Someone had called for help from outside.
Gideon, still holding the phone to his ear, looked out the window. His eyes, for the first time, held a flicker of genuine terror. Not for himself, not for his power, but for the catastrophic scale of what he had unleashed. He must have seen it too: the guest pavilion, now clearly catching fire, its dry timber walls beginning to smoke and char.
He had tried to erase his crimes. Instead, he had set fire to the cage holding my children.
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