The Pastor’s Son

Hell is empty and all the devils are here.
William Shakespeare, The Tempest.

William Shakespeare didn’t specify where the devils were hiding, but I knew one of them was the pastor at New Morning Church. I was adopted into his family at ten, not for love, but to be exploited.

The devil had a son, Tarot, and before he’d left home at seventeen never to return, he’d been kind to the scared little girl who’d lost everything. He’d given me something to cling to when living with the devil became too much.

I’d built him up to be my knight, but the man who came crawling back home fifteen years later was a widowed, drug-dealing convict with nothing in his life except the beautiful little girl he now had to be a father to. He was never supposed to be the man I fell in love with.

I let him move in with me because he was my step-brother and Willa’s father, and I loved Willa as if she was my child. No one would fault me for loving an innocent child, but my step-brother? Was our love so wrong that even the devil himself would be appalled if he ever found out?