Famished by Meghan O'Flynn (most popular novels txt) 📖

No out, no help, no hope. Robert’s will to fight had disappeared the first day he’d begged his attorney to believe him.

“I’m not sure what to tell you,” the troll of a man had said. “The evidence is pretty compelling. You don’t have one single alibi. Pleading guilty should at least make the process easier on you.”

“I didn’t do anything!” He’d had to clasp his hands together to avoid grabbing his attorney and shaking the shit out of him.

“You did enough to kill any sympathy a jury might have had.” The lawyer had tapped his foot, obviously eager to be dismissed and on to a case he had a chance of winning.

“But I didn’t kill anyone! How can that not matter?” It was more critical than a lifelong prison sentence. It was a matter of eternity, of salvation versus writhing on a blistering bed of coals.

If I can’t get out soon, I will never see her again.

If I stay in here, I am doomed to Hell.

The lawyer had merely shrugged his meaty shoulders. “Consider pleading guilty. It’s your best bet.” Because you’re bad, Robert. His innocence was irrelevant. Any attorney he hired would see his depravity and seek to punish him.

That had been the beginning of the end. Each day his panic was replaced by a hopelessness that wound itself around his chest, growing tighter and tighter as days turned to nights and back to days again. His face itched from the dark hair that crawled across his lower jaw. There was no mirror in his cell, but he knew his eyes looked like hollow orbs, blank and eerily unexpressive as if the life had been sucked right out of him.

And it had.

He left his food tray on the floor of his cell, untouched. He spent his days sitting silently on the cot, searching the cinderblock wall for some answer to his plight, refusing to speak to another soul.

But he listened. He had always listened. And the more he ignored the world that had forsaken him, the louder the voices became.

And into the gates of Hell, the sinners of the world shall pass. A woman from his father’s church whispered the words into his ear, her beautiful blond locks shimmering against his cheek, awakening the lust in his belly.

Those whose hearts are pure are temples of the Holy Spirit. He saw Mindy Jacobs writhing underneath him, her eyes vacant, St. Lucy’s words crackling from her lips with the hiss of hellfire.

He stood in the dark and pulled the sheet from his bed.

Only the chaste man and the chaste woman are capable of true love. And it was the girl in the field, her scrawny hip bones sharp under his hands as he threw her over a hay bale and forced himself into her, her insides rupturing, his thighs covered in her blood.

He looped the sheet around the pipe in the ceiling and tied a smaller loop close enough that his feet would not touch the ground when it was time.

And your sins will follow you, casting you down away from those who sought the love of Jesus Christ, your immortal soul to be punished, writhing in agony for all eternity, for the sins of the flesh you cannot escape. Hannah came to him now, his Hannah, smiling as he climbed the bars to the top of the cell. He gripped the pipe with one hand and slid his head through the knotted cotton.

Do not be afraid; our fate cannot be taken from us. All of them chorused in unison, each lustful apparition, pleased with his penance as they’d never been pleased before. He deserved this. Always had. He closed his eyes and released himself into the abyss. Tightness seared his throat, and he lurched, his feverish fingers clawing at the noose as his feet kicked air. A rush of blood blistered his face as his airway constricted—demons preparing him for the heat of eternity.

He opened his eyes. Below him, his father smiled knowingly as Robert swung from the hanging tree in front of his childhood home, a final sunset blazing red in the distance like the blood that had been spilled there long before his time. The crimson orb sank silently into darkness. Above him, pinpricks of light twinkled into existence and swelled until he was blinded by