Page 1 of The Sinner's Bargain

CHAPTER ONE

THORAN

“Not many come to me to die anymore,” I mused, mostly to myself but partially to the invader in my home. “I suppose I should thank you.”

The cold metal of my gun weighed heavily in the steady grip of my palm. It anchored me to that moment. To what I was about to do.

I could have stood there forever, a demon of vengeance casting judgment on those stupid enough to try and take what was mine.

The rose — my fucking rose — lay in tatters in the grass. The scattered petals gleamed like silver droplets of fallen blood beneath a pregnant moon.

Fucker!

The sight of them, crushed and destroyed, reignited my rage. My hunger for the sniveling bastard’s life as payment.

My fingers tightened around the ridged handle of my weapon.

“I didn’t mean to. Please. I didn’t,” he kept whining in between jagged sobs. Most of his pleading was muffled by the soggy dirt beneath my boots where I had his skull pinned. It was useless of him to play on my sympathies.

I had none.

I killed him.

Just one shot into the back of his skull, quieting his weeping.

His restless shuffling.

His life.

His body slumped and lay motionless at my feet surrounded by the violated remains of my garden. I couldn’t see the river of blood contaminating the grounds, but its stench wafted into the silence, twining with the heavy perfume of gunpowder.

That was regretful.

I should have moved him off the property first, away from the structure of stone and glass, and hallways that collected souls. But what was done was done and could not be undone.

“Let the swamp have him.”

I didn’t look to see Cyrus there in the shadows, nor was the command necessary; the marsh was where all my unwanted guests found themselves.

Willing or not.

The many souls haunting the halls of Lacroix House watched my return with their blank, dead eyes from the unwashed windows. Their hatred slithered down the nape of my neck and traced glacial fingers along the ridges of my spine.

I ignored them.

It was the only way to safeguard what was left of my sanity. Unlike my father who had followed the ghost of my mother into the swamps never to return, I would not be so weak. I wasn’t afraid of the whispers in the dark, the pools of endless night spilling down faded wallpaper to soak into the rot in the floorboards, the figures always just out of sight.

Lacroix House kept its secrets and its dead close. One day, I would be part of the restless, but until then, it was my burden, my curse, and the dead didn’t scare me.

Dust tangled around my wide strides through the corridor. I left tracks in the filth, adding a fresh set to the months, maybe years of neglect.

Mom would have been horrified to see her beautiful home a cobweb away from being considered condemned.

Abigail Lacroix had loved the monstrosity. Had basked in its Renaissance façade and wide, French windows. She had poured sweat and blood into the gardens, a devoted mother doting on a beloved child. She had given everything to undo what my grandfather had done, to destroy the shell of our curse. She had ignored the warnings, the rules of survival by feeding the house as my grandmother had and my great grandmother, and every woman who had ever set foot within its walls, including the five I had sacrificed.

And like all those who had come before, the manor ate.

It consumed her and devoured her soul.

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