Chapter 175: The Highest Score

I spent the next forty-eight hours inside the study with the door locked and the curtains drawn.

Sleep became optional. Food became something I remembered only when the headache got sharp enough to interfere with the work. The house continued its quiet, respectable rhythm around me: my father’s footsteps in the hallway, the distant sound of a phone call, the soft closing of doors, but none of it touched the room I had claimed. I had stopped answering when he, or the house help, knocked. After the second attempt he stopped knocking.

The Fund kept files on every girl in town.

I already knew that in theory. Seeing the actual structure of it was different. The records were meticulous, almost obsessive. Academic performance. Church attendance. Family reputation. Behavioral notes written in the careful, clinical language of people who believed they were performing a sacred duty. And running through all of it like a quiet spine was the number they cared about most: the Purity Score.

It was not public. It was not discussed in sermons. It existed only inside the system, updated regularly by people whose names never appeared on any program.

The higher the score, the more valuable the girl became to the selection process that took place every year at the Ball. The pattern was consistent enough to feel like policy.

The girl with the highest score was never overlooked. She was watched. She was discussed. And when the elite and the board members made their quiet selections that weekend, she was almost always the first name on the list.

I filtered the current data until only one name remained at the top.

Abigail Thompson.

Eighteen. Recently of age. Perfect attendance. No recorded disciplinary marks. Family still considered clean enough to be useful.

The notes on her were sparse but glowing in that particular way the Fund reserved for girls they had already begun to imagine owning. Highest score in her cohort by a clear margin.

I sat with the name for a long time.

Then I went looking for the man who sat above every other name on the chart.

Pastor Matthew Whitaker.

The deeper I went, the less the official story held together. He had not always been the head. For years he had been something closer to a trusted instrument — useful, visible, carefully controlled.

The Fund preferred their public faces to remain slightly beneath the true decision-makers. A pastor could speak. A pastor could recruit. A pastor could deliver. He was not supposed to rule.

Yet somewhere along the line the balance had shifted.

The records did not explain the shift cleanly. There were gaps. Closed sessions. Sudden changes in board composition. Mentions of an internal conflict that had never been allowed to reach the congregation. What was clear was the outcome: the men who had once treated him as a useful tool now deferred to him. Even the ones who hated him.

Especially the ones who hated him.

My uncle’s name appeared more than once in the older documents, always in opposition, always on the losing side of whatever quiet war had taken place. Harrington Ashford did not lose gracefully.

The language around those meetings was careful, but the resentment was still readable if you knew how to look. He had been forced to submit to a man he considered beneath him. A dog that had somehow turned on its owners and made them heel. There had been war.

I found myself almost impressed.

Almost.

The more I uncovered, the more the shape of Pastor Whitaker changed in my mind. He was not simply the smiling face at the front of the church. He was the one who had climbed high enough to make the original architects answer to him. That kind of ascent did not happen by accident. It required a particular kind of ruthlessness, the sort that understood power better than the men who believed they still held it.

He was the head.

And the only reliable way to kill an animal was to take the head first. The body could still thrash without a limb or two. It could not survive without the brain that directed it.

I leaned back in the chair and stared at the leadership chart until the lines between the names began to feel like a map of pressure points.

Going after him directly would be stupid. Men like him did not fall because someone pointed and shouted. They fell when the ground beneath them was carefully, invisibly removed. I would need access. Proximity. A reason to be in the room when the selections were being made.

The Ball was in two days.

My father had already mentioned, in that stiff, hopeful way of his, that he would be attending. He had not asked if I wanted to join him. He had simply left the information in the air like an invitation I was free to ignore.

I did not ignore it.

I needed to see Abigail Thompson with my own eyes. I needed to watch the way the board members looked at her. I needed to understand exactly how the selection process moved in real time, not just on paper.

And I needed to place myself close enough to Pastor Whitaker that the first real cut could be planned with precision instead of hope.

I closed the files and sat in the dark for a while, listening to the house.

Then I stood, opened the door, and walked down the hallway to my father’s study.

He looked up from his desk, surprised.

“I’ve decided to come with you this weekend,” I said. My voice was calm. Polite. The voice of a son who had finally decided to rejoin the family’s public life. “To the Purity Ball.”

Something like relief crossed his face.

“I’m glad,” he said. “It will be good for people to see you there.”

I nodded once.

I did not tell him the real reason.

I did not tell him that I needed to see the girl with the highest score before the system that had already marked her finished what it had started.

I only stood there in the doorway, already calculating the next move, and let him believe whatever version of the story made him most comfortable.

The Ball was in two days.

Abigail Thompson would be there.

And for the first time in five years, I would be close enough to the head of the machine to begin cutting.