Page 68 of The Sin

It’s fine, I assured myself.

It’s just an innocent note from some woman called Divinia.

I pulled on a smile as I stuffed the envelope into the front pocket of my hoodie, risking a glance at him.

He didn’t have his baton raised, and he wasn’t reaching for his Taser. He was looking at me, though. A stern, intimidating look intended to put fear into the heart of any foolish girl who was even thinking of doing something wrong. But that wasn’t exactly unusual.

I smiled a little harder and turned my bike around. It took everything I had inside me to cycle lazily down the road again, when every instinct screamed to pedal like a bat out of hell.

Once I was beyond his watchful eyes, my heartbeat finally slowed and my breaths evened out. I felt slightly ridiculous at my rattled nerves. I’d pulled far more dangerous stunts lately than getting stared down by a guard while reading a seemingly innocuous note. But that was the thing. I did those things in spite of them scaring the crap out of me, not because I had a brave, warrior heart.

I parked my bike under a tree so I could bring the note out again for a proper look.

It was definitely a message from the Sisterhood.

It was signed Divinia, but I doubted the name meant anything. Was this Rose demanding my immediate presence? I was pretty sure that’s what earliest convenience translated into. Not at her home, though. She wanted to meet at St. Michaels, as if I’d know where on earth that was.

There were a number of Puritan churches in Capra, all of them named St. something or other. St. Michaels wasn’t in the Legislative District, that much I knew. I took a gamble on the Bohemian Quarter and climbed onto my bicycle again.

21

Istruck it lucky. St. Michaels wasn’t the only church in the Bohemian Quarter, but it was the first one I cycled passed. On the corner of Ross and Pentler, not far from the street Rose lived on.

The church was a limestone building with stained glass windows and a central bell tower rising up above the gabled entrance. Encapsulating the grassy grounds was a low, stacked-stone wall. My gaze flitted around, searching for Rose, and instead found an ice-white blond perched on the wall beneath the overflowing branches of a weeping willow.

Lisa Bickens.

What on earth was she doing here, randomly sitting on a church wall in the Bohemian Quarter?

Her father was the head guard.

Lisa and I tended to rub each other the wrong way, but Mom was friendly with Mrs. Bickens.

Random coincidence?

Or was she my contact?

The Sisterhood loved to work in weird, mysterious ways that were total overkill for the situation. So if I had to guess, I’d say yeah, Rose was perfectly capable of orchestrating some kind of goose chase instead of just showing up here to meet me herself.

Lisa caught my gaze in her cold blue eyes, and held it until I looked away first, but only so I could jump off my bicycle and push it over.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded in a clipped tone.

I shrugged off her attitude. “Apparently I signed up for the tea service rotation. I think my mother might have volunteered me.”

The frost in her eyes melted, only a fraction—nothing to get excited over. “Imagine that, my mother had the same idea. They’ve obviously been talking.”

She rose from the wall, standing a good couple of inches taller than me in long, denim-clad legs and knee-high boots. “Let’s walk.”

Okay? I glanced toward the church, but Lisa was already setting off down Ross Street.

Pushing my bicycle alongside me awkwardly, I hurried to catch up. I had to admit, even though it was Lisa, I was thrilled to finally make contact with a Sister from my own St. Ives cohort.

I desperately wished Jessie was one of us, but then again, even if she were, it wasn’t like we’d be sharing notes over hours and hours of gossipy talk.

That’s not how The Sisterhood worked.

When it came to the Sisters of Capra, my mom’s lips were sealed tighter than a treasure hunter’s crypt. For all I knew, she could be a dormant Sister (according to Rose, that was a thing, Sisters who didn’t have the will, ability or the means to be of active use) or she could be the big honcho—or however our leader styled herself.

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