Chapter 2

The annulment was public and humiliating. The news painted me as a rustic embarrassment she was wise to discard. I went back to our ancestral land, a deep hollow in the Appalachian mountains. My kin, the 1,512 members of my clan, gathered around me. They offered quiet comfort, their faces etched with shared grief and a deep, simmering anger.

We were Hollow Keepers. We tended the earth, and we guided the dead. We were a closed community, a world unto ourselves. A world Sabrina and Andrew couldn't tolerate.

A few weeks later, Andrew Fuller made a public statement. He complained about the "creepy" and "unseemly" community living in the mountains near his new getaway property. He called our home an "eyesore."

Sabrina acted quickly.

A falsified environmental report appeared, claiming our land was a source of toxic contamination. The state invoked eminent domain. It was all legal, all official.

Then came the raid.

It wasn't a law enforcement operation. It was a massacre.

State police, heavily armed and acting on Andrew' s private orders, swarmed our hollow. They came at dawn. They didn't issue warnings. They didn't make arrests.

They just started shooting.

They killed everyone. The old men on their porches. The women in their kitchens. The children in their beds. They shot my uncle as he tried to shield his wife. They shot my young cousin, a girl of six, as she ran for the woods. They went from house to house, executing my family, from the elders to the newborn infants.

I was away, in the high ridges, performing a ritual for my parents' spirits. I heard the gunfire echoing through the valley. I ran, my heart pounding in my chest, but I was too late.

By the time I got back, there was only silence. And bodies.

1,512 bodies. My entire world, slaughtered.

I was the only one left. The last of the Hollow Keepers. I walked through the blood-soaked grass, past the homes riddled with bullet holes. I saw faces I had known my whole life, now still and lifeless.

The state police were gone. Their official report called it a "law enforcement operation against a dangerous cult." They said the cult members opened fire first. It was a lie. We had no weapons to fight an army.

I was alone. The sole survivor of a genocide, orchestrated by my own wife and her billionaire lover. The grief was a physical weight, crushing me into the earth. But beneath the grief, something else began to grow. A cold, hard resolve.

They had taken everything. Now, I would take it all back.