Ted Dekker - The Bride Collector

What happened next drained Brad’s blood from his face. The quiver that had reached Quinton’s extremities intensified. Tears pooled in his eyes, ran down his face. His lips twisted with despair and right there with the seventh favorite’s hand on his belly, Quinton began to cry.

And Paradise cried with him.

But Brad could see no reason for gratitude or relief. He could only see this monster’s guilt being exposed by his own innocent victim, and it made him sick with fear.

“Paradise…” He still didn’t know what to say, because to say the wrong thing could as easily bring about her end as save her. And she wasn’t paying Brad any attention.

“If I’m his favorite, then so are you,” she said. “And he loves them all. Even me. Even you.”

Now the man towering over Paradise came unglued. He broke apart from the inside out. Shaking with his sobs, he began to sag. His hands went limp, spread wide. The gun fell from loosed fingers and he sank slowly to his knees.

Brad could not shout down the warning bells that clanged in his head.

Run, Paradise! Run!

Run because you are right and he knows that you are right and he can’t live with that knowledge. He’s going to snap, he’s going to cut you, he’s going to kill you, Paradise! Run!

Brad’s mouth was parted, but he couldn’t risk undoing what she was doing. He could only beg God for mercy.

Paradise did not run. To Brad’s continued horror, she placed her hand on Quinton Gauld’s shoulder, and he settled back on his haunches, a sobbing, slobbering mess of a man.

It was true, Paradise was the most beautiful woman in the world. She, who stood just a hair over five feet tall and wasn’t too experienced in the fine arts of hygiene, makeup, and fashion, was the most stunning creature God had created.

And Brad knew that the Bride Collector was going to kill her.

QUINTON DIDN’T KNOW what had happened except that he’d been thoroughly violated. The very woman he had violated had returned and with a few simple words peeled back the layers he’d so lovingly wrapped around himself over the years.

He was a man who could not deny the truth, but neither could he accept that truth, not now.

He could only feel its effects and mourn his own pathetic nature, while before him stood the one whom God had granted such a lofty status.

He had been right. She was the most, most, most beautiful! It was no wonder he’d fallen madly in love with her. And he would again, because the man who could not or did not love Paradise needed to be summarily shot and buried in a deep bed of wet concrete.

And when she said that he, too, Quinton Gauld, the man who had violated her, was as loved… The earth had crumbled beneath his feet and hell itself had sucked him deep. It could not be true. To compare him to Paradise was to compare a slug to a peacock, a dove, a bird of paradise.

Yet it was true. He knew it the moment the words came from her mouth.

Then she told him that evil was working in him to make a mockery of them both, and he knew not only that this, too, was true, but that he was powerless to change it.

So then he would have to kill her. She was crying with him and her hand was on his shoulder, and now he had to kill her.

PARADISE TOUCHED THE man the way she imagined a mother might touch another mother’s hateful son who was having a change of heart. She felt no intimacy. He was still a monster.

It had occurred to her as she waited in the ditch that perhaps the killer was dead. Not physically dead, but spiritually and mentally. That, like her, he had died a long time ago when his father had taken his life as a boy.

And when her hand made contact with his chest, she had seen that in many ways she was right, he was dead. Because in that moment her mind had filled with the image of a small boy weeping on his knees as a bearded man twice his height stood over him with a piece of pipe.

Before this night she’d seen only images that the dead had seen, and then only a few times. Although Quinton was not buried, he was indeed dead, because she wasn’t imagining this, was she?

If she ever saw Allison again, Paradise would beg her to explain how this worked; why God allowed her to see these things; what was his power and what was hers.

But for now she only knew that she had to love this man because, although he was pathetic, he was also the mirror image of the ugliness inside of her. The fear and hate that had haunted her for so many years were all wrapped up in this man.

How many times had Allison talked to her about God’s forgiving power? More than she could count. Judge not lest you be judged, she used to say. Love your enemies, mostly the ones who throw you away because they don’t know what they’re doing. Let the light of our Savior shine mercy and forgiveness into your heart. These impossible sayings had only come to full meaning as Paradise waited in the ditch.

If it was true and she was God’s favorite, then so was he. And the only thing that would rescue either of them was to return that favor.

So she’d done what Allison had said God would do. She forgave him. And she let him cry on her shoulder as she embraced the light that freed her from him.

It was like walking down a path of coals into the gaping mouth of hell, and she still didn’t know if she really had, in her heart of hearts, forgiven Quinton.

Then she remembered Brad. Brad was there, on her right.

She blinked, and turned and saw him. And for the first time she saw that he was bleeding.

HE WAS GOING to snap, he was going to break, he was going to explode.

But he didn’t snap. He didn’t break, he didn’t explode.

Paradise let him lay his head against her shoulder and she comforted him as a sister might comfort a weeping brother.

After several long minutes of tension cut by the dreadful sound of sorrow and guilt, Brad first began to consider the possibility that he’d been wrong. Some power greater than any he’d seen had affected them both and was doing what no FBI agent could ever do. Maybe Quinton Gauld, the angel of death, had been undone by the forgiving words of an innocent young woman.

The man looked wretched, sobbing now with head bowed. His hands occasionally clawed at her back, but his fingers were too limp to grasp her shirt or back. His eyes were closed, and flecks of white spittle had settled in the corners of his mouth. White mucus ran from the broken man’s nose. He was a mess, a shriveled-up carcass that used to be a man.

Paradise seemed to accept the same conclusion. She calmed and looked at the miserable man before her, then turned her eyes to Brad, as if remembering him again. Her eyes shifted down to his shin, the one that Quinton had drilled a hole into.

Blood had run from the wound and pooled on the dirt under his calf. He’d forgotten the pain, but it throbbed now to remind him.

When Brad looked back up at Paradise, her eyes were still on his shin and they were wide with horror.

Her mouth parted and she took a step toward him, leaving Quinton. The moment she turned her back on him, something changed.

It was subtle at first, the catching of his breath, the stilling of his sob, as if the cue had been called and then someone yelled, Cut. Brad saw it all, but now he refused to believe it, because if Paradise had failed, then they were both dead.

Paradise started to walk toward him. “Brad…” Her voice swam in empathy. “I came, Brad.”

This was the young, naive Paradise, and he cherished her for it.

The man behind her, however, was not nearly so innocent, and when his eyes opened, when he turned to look at the back of the woman who’d left him on his knees and crossed to the man she loved, Brad knew he was going to kill her.