Even putting all of those reasons aside, Gideon would have had to die, simply for becoming a goddamn FBI agent who had apparently been searching for Eden since the day he escaped.

Pastor cleared his throat gently. “You seem agitated, DJ. Are you not healed enough to take this excursion?”

“I’m fine,” DJ snapped, then blew out a breath at the unamused look on Pastor’s face. It was never a good idea to make Pastor angry. “I’m sorry. It does hurt, but we need supplies.”

And I have loose ends to snip.

He needed to find Gideon and put him down like the dog he was. He needed to find Mercy and make her suffer the way she should have suffered thirteen years ago.

And then he’d find Amos Terrill, Eden’s former carpenter and Gideon and Mercy’s stepfather. The month before, that bastard had smuggled himself and his young daughter out of Eden in the back of DJ’s pickup truck. Which Amos had then stolen. Asshole.

Hopefully he’d find Amos in a graveyard somewhere, because one of DJ’s bullets had struck the man in the throat. He’d need to die eventually, because he’d found Gideon and Mercy and had probably updated them on everything about Eden since they had left. For that, if he was still alive, he’d pay.

And then I’ll come back, force Pastor to give me those damn account numbers once and for all. He’d stayed in the same toxic pattern, serving Pastor for far too long. He hadn’t realized how much time had passed until he’d been shot.

Nothing like a near-death experience to reset one’s priorities.

“It’s all right,” Pastor said evenly, making it clear that DJ’s outburst wasn’t all right. The fucker. “Will you locate little Abigail? She may have been taken into the foster care system.”

Because he’d told Pastor that he’d killed and buried Amos after finding him hiding in the back of his pickup when he’d stopped in the next town. He hadn’t mentioned Abigail at all. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was because she was a child and he hadn’t considered her a threat. Pastor had assumed she’d escaped.

“I’ll try,” he said.

Pastor’s lips pursed, a sign of his displeasure. “She’ll tell someone about us. Luckily she’s so young that no one will believe her, and luckily she’s the only one to have gotten away.”

For a career criminal, Pastor was damn gullible. He actually believed that all the escapees had been rounded up over the past few years. To be fair, DJ had used surrogate bodies, like his father had before him. When the escapee couldn’t be found, he found a random person—usually homeless or a runaway—about the same size and coloring, then killed them, mutilating the body so that it couldn’t be identified.

Pastor believed that no one had ever escaped Eden.

Pastor was an idiot.

“Luckily,” DJ agreed. “I’ll get the supplies, scout out a new location, and search for Abigail Terrill. Is there anything you’d like to add?”