Page 31 of Sinful

“I… all right, fine. I suppose I do agree with you,” she admitted in a hushed tone. “I’ve just never heard anyone say it out loud like that.”

“I bet they’re all thinking it, though. Anaïs is obviously a piece of work.” I leaned my head closer to hers. “She’s clearly jealous of you too. It was practically oozing out of her.”

Rose’s cheeks flushed again, and she turned back to face the street. “We should go this way,” she said, gesturing toward a narrow alley. “It’s much quicker.”

It didn’t matter to me that she’d changed the subject without a proper response. We were already building a rapport. Sharing little secrets and laughing together. I didn’t need to take it too far, because then I’d seem pushy and false, and she might start to suspect something about my motives.

Five minutes later, we arrived at the house she shared with her father. She opened the door and guided me down a narrow staircase to a room tucked away beneath the ground floor. The space was cluttered yet organized, with brushes, palettes, and half-finished canvases strewn about.

“As you can see, this is my studio,” Rose said, eyes glimmering with happiness as she glanced around the space. “Papa was nice enough to let me have the whole room to myself. Most people just use it for storage in their own houses.”

“This looks great,” I said, staring down at an almost-finished landscape.

I wasn’t just buttering her up when I said she was talented. It was the truth, evident in every single picture in this room. Her depictions of the surrounding forests and mountains werehauntingly vivid, and her portraits were almost photographic in their detail.

“Thank you.” She stooped to open a drawer beneath a sturdy wooden table, revealing a collection of paintings that seemed to be her imaginings of the outside world—bustling cities, towering skyscrapers, and expansive skylines.

As she thumbed through them, I felt as if I were catching glimpses inside her mind, of her longing for a world beyond the Covenant’s confines. Finally, she pulled out a stack of canvases that had been carefully covered, as if they hid secrets too precious to share.

“This is what I wanted to show you,” she said, unrolling them on the table.

Each painting was a portrait of me, my visage split by a grotesque semblance of a skull covering one side of my face.

“Holy shit,” I muttered, brows rising as I took it all in. She’d managed to capture my likeness perfectly on the side that showed my real face.

“I had a vision of you a long time ago,” she said, staring at me. Shadows flickered on her face from the singular lantern that lit up the room. “I’ve been painting you ever since.”

“With this half-skull thing?” I asked, brows furrowing as if I didn’t already know why she’d depicted me in such a manner.

“That’s how you appeared to me in the first vision, and I’ve been seeing you like that ever since,” she said. “Sometimes I even imagined your name was Sebastian, despite the fact that we’d never met before. Can you believe that?”

Yes.

She must have heard my mother screaming for me and my father on the night Augustus and Jean-Pierre abducted her. Long after that, her subconscious had correctly connected the young boy she saw in the window that night with the man she saw in the woods years later, aided by her fantastic creativetalents which enabled her brain to associate certain details of my younger face with my current features.

I didn’t tell her any of that, of course. It suited my plan far more effectively to let her believe that the universe had shown her clues about my existence long before we ever met. As if it was fate that we’d come together one day.

“How strange,” I said, slowly shaking my head. “Perhaps it’s a sign that we were supposed to meet.”

Rose kept staring at me, chin raised high. “I used to think the Entity was warning me about you. Telling me that you were a malevolent spirit,” she said. “Or perhaps he was simply letting me know that you were coming. So tell me, Sebastian. What are you?”

“Are you asking if I’m a dark spirit?”

“Yes.” Her eyes were still fixed on me. All the wine she drank earlier had obviously emboldened her. “So… are you?”

“Of course not.”

“Then how do you explain this?” she said, gesturing toward the paintings. “Why did you appear to me looking as if death itself had touched you?”

“I think I can explain. But it’s a long story, so it might take a while.” I looked pointedly at the singular stool by the table. “Is there somewhere we can both sit?”

She chewed on the inside of her cheek for a few seconds. Then she nodded. “We can go down to the river. It’s nice there at night.”

“You trust me enough to be alone with me down there, even though you aren’t sure if I’m an evil spirit or not?” I cocked my head. “Wouldn’t you feel safer heading back to the feast, with everyone else around to save you if need be?”

“I can actually trust youmoredown by the river,” she said. “Dark spirits cannot linger by flowing water, so it will be rather revealing to see you there.”

Well, fuck, all right then.

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