As time wore on, Peter’s love for Jesus began to brown around the edges. And he started to hate his need. His insatiable hunger for his friend’s affection.

You see? This is proof! the old voices taunted. You are weak and pathetic!

When Peter felt Ruth’s eyes upon him, he lowered his raging gaze into the folds of his tunic. And there it smoldered.

CHAPTER 45

Somewhere within ancient Palestine—33 A.D.

Judas slipped his dagger free of its sheath. He drew it repeatedly over a stone to sharpen the blade. The metal rung each time it hit the air. He thought back to the night Solomon had approached him. “What do you think of our newest shepherd?” he had asked, his gray eyes twinkling.

At first Judas did not understand why Solomon was asking. And, truly, he did not care.

Why should he be interested in a scruffy boy rejected by his father?

But then, days later, he had spotted the young shepherd squatting in the bushes some distance from camp. And he understood.

As the months wore on, Judas’s admiration grew for the plucky girl who could so easily deceive a band of shepherds. In truth, she reminded him of his youngest sister. Delilah. It had been she that he and his cousin, Solomon, had been preparing to escort into The Narrows. And she who had been chosen to become an apprentice to the Sisters of The Way.

For many years the cousins, as Guardians, had faithfully conveyed young women, chosen by Solomon’s mother, to the caves within The Narrows. Despite the considerable risk, all had arrived safely. Until Delilah.

Their plans had been carefully laid. And the Sisters were waiting. But unbeknownst to them, his mother Maya’s beliefs and her association with The Way had been discovered. On the night before their departure, when Judas and his father had gone to pay their respects to Zahra, the murderers struck.

Since that day, Judas had woken every morning with the tang of blood in his mouth and mountainous thoughts of revenge. Of drawing knife across throat. Of ridding the earth of enemies of the Mother and false prophets who spread their misbeliefs while his sister’s voice had been silenced forever.

Solomon had urged him to remember the better part of himself. And to turn the other cheek.

But Judas could not heed such wisdom.

He had thought himself irredeemable and doomed to a life of hateful thoughts. Until she arrived—the brave young shepherdess with green eyes. Whose ways had reminded him so much of his beloved childhood friend Shereen. And he had been buoyed by the idea that the shepherdess might save him. That her grace could rejoin the broken pieces of his soul.

Judas then remembered the night Solomon had revealed the young shepherd’s identity: she was the only child of Shereen’s sister, Yadira. And that she had been chosen by Zahra.