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To anyone else, it might look like junk. Scrap wood and tools forgotten by time. But I know better.

He trained me here. That’s what he called it. Training. His voice echoes in my head, soft and sickly sweet: “The Lord disciplines those He loves, Lydia. He breaks them to make them stronger.”

My hands curl into fists. I want to tear them off the walls. Smash them into splinters and burn the pieces until there’s nothing left. But I don’t move. Not yet. Then something catches my eye. Hanging from the wall, half-obscured by shadow, but still unmistakable, is a cross. Not wood, not a symbol of salvation. This one is metal. Cold. Industrial. X-shaped.

A Saint Andrew’s cross.

I didn’t know what it was when I was younger. Back then, it just looked like something they tied people to. And I guess, in a way, that’s exactly what it was. Now I see it for what it truly is: not worship, not redemption, just another tool.

Another perversion. Another lie painted with holy colors. Beside it, leather straps hang limply from rusted nails. A gag. A pair of cuffs. A crop. All neatly arranged. Hung like sacred relics. Left behind like they expected to return. Like this was ever their church.

And then, the bench.

His bench. The one he made. Still solid, still crouched against the wall like it’s waiting for the next offering. My stomach flips as my eyes drift to the dirt beneath it. That patch of ground I’ve tried to forget. But I know what’s buried there.

I pressed myself flat against the wall and watched him come out of the office, carrying her. He was carrying her like she was a sack of nothing over his shoulder. Not like she was his wife, the mother of his child. Like she was a bag of grain. Her hair hung loose, covering her face. Her feet bare.

I scampered after him like a little mouse.

I followed him to the top of the stairs and watched him go down. I stood at the landing of the stairs as I heard the metal of his shovel hit the hard ground, over and over again. I counted every scrape of the dirt until they stopped. I heard his grunts and the sound of something sliding and then a plop. Then I counted again, every toss of the dirt. Then the sound of metal smacking dirt.

He buried her.

I never told anyone that. Who would I tell?

Yes, I knew my mother was under that bench.

And maybe more lies with her.

CHAPTER

THIRTY-SEVEN

The room smells of sweat and mildew, the air thick as I kneel on the cold dirt floor, my Sunday dress pulls tight around me. Levi stands by the bench, his wiry frame bent as he ties the leather straps into knots, humming some hymn low in his throat.

“You’re almost ready now,” he says softly, like he’s doing me a favor.

Behind him, Kerr and Jonah linger, their voices low and measured as they speak to my father. A man’s hands hold the dowel with the gag already threaded through, testing its strength like he might test a tool, while Kerr crouches in front of me, his breath heavy as his rough fingers comb through my hair.

“You’ll be good for him, won’t you, girl?” he whispers, his lips splitting into a smile that never reaches his eyes.

My father says nothing, just stands in the shadows, watching, waiting, until Levi turns and nods.

“It’s time…”

That dirt has waited a long time to be touched. I drop to my knees in front of the bench, my jeans soaking through with cold. I crouch lower, pressing myself to the ground, and crawl beneath it. The ceiling of wood presses down, forcing my shoulders to hunch tight. I’m too big for this space now, but I stay. I look. Because if my gut is right, there must be more.

There’s no way my father would be satisfied with a single shoebox of trophies, not a man like him. Not a man who turned pain into ritual, who cataloged his cruelty like scripture. I run my hands along the ground, fingers sifting through the soil, slow and searching. This spot, right here, is where he keeps his deepest, darkest secret. My mother. If her body is buried beneath this bench, why wouldn’t he bury his treasures alongside her?

He wouldn’t scatter them. Not him. He’d keep them here. With her. With the woman who dared to love something more than him and his God.

Me.

I think of the photos I found beneath the floorboards upstairs, edges curled, faces blank. They weren’t random. They were deliberate. Preserved. A warning in snapshots. But that wasn’t the whole collection. That was just a fragment. A sample. There has to be more.

This wasn’t just a cellar. It was his temple.

A memory stirs, me, small and shaking, lying on my side while they whispered above me. “She won’t tell. She knows better.”