Page 7 of Sinful

Acid rose in my throat as the memories flashed in my mind for the millionth time, and I jerked my gaze away from the table. I’d thought about tossing it out over the years, or burning it on a bonfire, but something had always held me back. The same thing that brought me back to this place over and over again.

I turned away and followed my father, who was heading for the kitchen.

“Montreal aside, I also wanted to check out the updates you’ve made on the place,” he said. He slowly turned a full circle and let out a low whistle. “You were right. The remodel was a fantastic idea. There’s so much more light in here now.”

I gave him a tight smile and nodded. In reality, the kitchen remodel was merely a cover story to account for all the time I’d spent up here in recent years, along with the necessity of having contractors and construction workers on the property for so long.

“You want a coffee?” I asked, gesturing toward the espresso machine. “Or do you have to head off now?”

“I can stay for a drink,” Dad replied, glancing at his phone. “But I have to be going within the hour. It’s raining later, and you know what these roads are like in bad weather.”

I tilted my head toward him as the machine whirred. “Why didn’t you just fly?”

He smiled and lifted his palms in mock surrender. “All right, all right. Your obvious suspicions are correct. I came here with an ulterior motive,” he said. The smile faded. “I came to ask you once again if you’ll cancel this… thisplanof yours.”

My lips thinned. “Nope. Appreciate the concern, though.”

He sighed and slumped into a chair by the dining table. “Do you really think those savages will let you through the gate?” he asked.

“They let Mom in, didn’t they?” I said, raising a brow.

The Covenant’s short-lived acceptance of my mother’s ecological anthropology research project had been a major coup for her career. She was one of the only outsiders they’d ever allowed to stay in the village, making her a total hero in the anthropology and sociology department at Columbia.

Her research had mostly focused on the sect’s use of plants in their day-to-day life, but she’d also observed and noted their general cultural practices. Most of her notes had been lost after her death, but enough remained to give the world a general picture of their ways and history.

She’d described them as following a ‘magico-religious doctrine’ that seemed to be an unlikely blend of paganism, occultism, and Christianity. That doctrine had stemmed from the beliefs of the original members, who arrived in North America long before the United States were founded.

Many of those founding members were so-called witches who’d fled Europe to escape persecution and death sentences. Others were French Catholics who’d shipped themselves to the new world in hope of a better life for themselves and their children. They were originally citizens of New France, which had once owned territories all over Canada and the States. At some point they’d abandoned those Acadians to create their own little world in what was now known as the High Peaks Wilderness in upstate New York.

Some other early members were English settlers who’d defected from the British-owned territories of North America to join the tiny new offshoot colony, bringing the English language that the Covenant would eventually adopt to better communicate with the outside world when necessary.

The result of all that history was what we saw today: a reclusive religious group living in the vast, untamed wilderness, practicing so-called magic and carrying out ritualized murders in the name of their revered deity.

My mother’s curiosity about them had won her much acclaim in academic circles, but it had also sealed her fate.

Dad narrowed his eyes at me. “Even if they do let you in, what the hell do you think is going to happen? You think they’ll just admit the truth to you?”

“I told you, I have a plan.”

“Christ,” he muttered, scraping a hand through his thinning hair. “This is my fault, really. I didn’t talk about it enough when you were young. You needed that. You needed to know—”

“Dad, no.” I cut him off and placed the steaming coffee mug in front of him. “You were fine. I knew everything there was to know about it by the time I was in junior high, anyway. I saw the news. Read all the bullshit theories online. Some assholes even made a fucking B movie about what happened to her. Remember? Horror in the High Peaks?”

Dad looked exasperated. “Then why on earth are you going up there? What do you think you’re going to find out that we don’t already know?”

“There’s always something. A person who wants to talk after holding a secret in for so many years. Or a trophy someone kept from the killing.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Twenty years, Seb.Twenty years.And they’ve still never been able to pin it on those cultist freaks. How many times did the police and FBI raid their little compound?”

“Four.”

“And they found nothing to connect them to what happened to your mother. You know this.” Dad leaned back, eyes narrowing as he stared at me across the table. “And it wasn’tjust them. Do you have any idea how many private investigators I hired over the years? They all came up empty too. Not to mention the average solve rate on a case that’s been cold for two decades. You know what that is?”

“I know it’s low, yeah.”

“Then what the fuck are you doing?” he barked, slamming his hand on the table. “Other than pointlessly putting yourself in a huge amount of danger?”

Danger hadn’t bothered me in a long time. Not since I was eight years old and had my first brush with death, courtesy of the Covenant. From that moment on, fear and I became strangers, and rage-fueled adrenaline became my constant companion.

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