Page 35 of The Sin

“Leave the girl alone,” he drawled. “You’re scaring her.”

“Little mice who wander into Blood Throat territory should be scared.” Black eyes’ voice pitched high into a freakish sing-song, “Very, very scared.”

“Blood Throat territory?” This had just gone from bad to hell. “I didn’t—I’m sorry.”

My mouth was as dry as sandpaper. I swallowed dry grit and dust and tried again. “I was told… I thought the Packing District starts north of the church.”

“Blood Throat territory starts where I say it starts, and today I say it starts here.”

Yellow stripe, or Hux, pushed away from the wall and sauntered closer. His blue eyes assessed me from the side, sized me up—or maybe he was just trying to determine if it would take one bite or two to swallow me whole.

My heart was pounding so hard, it was a train crashing into my chest, again and again. I had to concentrate on keeping my knees locked, terrified they really would buckle out from under me and then I’d end up hanging myself in black eyes’ finger brace.

“This is boring as fuck.” Hux’s gaze cut away from me. “Enough.”

He turned and walked off, disappeared into the alley.

Black eyes leered at me a moment more. Then, with a manic laugh, the brace around my throat fell away and he strolled off, after Hux, without sparing me another glance over his shoulder.

What the freaking hell?

I mean, I didn’t want them to come back.

But what was that?

13

My feelings about The Smoke were bordering on ambiguous. I wasn’t quite there, this place still left a monstrous shadow on every thought I had about it, but I’d ventured into the bowels of the beast and returned unscathed.

Well, relatively unscathed. I didn’t want to run into a Blood Throat anytime soon again—or ever. But I was still here to tell the tale, and there were aspects to The Smoke that weren’t all Blood Throats and pure horror.

Conscious of the fact that I had the only key to the apartment, I returned to wait for Roman. When it approached six in the evening with no sign of him, I started to get worried.

Not about Roman.

About dinner.

The electrics went off at seven, then we’d be in the dark…well, in the candlelight. One of the many downsides about this place that played on my mind as I hunted through the cabinets for a cutting board and chef knife. I found a polished stone slab and a bread knife, which did the job for dicing the vegetables for a tomato based pasta sauce.

From what I knew of Roman, the dismal state of affairs in this kitchen had more to do with him than the shortages in The Smoke, but there were shortages here.

Shortages of everything.

Electrics. Greenery. Space. Time.

The portable heater was still plugged in for charging, but I didn’t dare turn it on even though the chill inside the apartment tickled through my hoodie. I preferred to save the charge for later tonight when the temperatures plummeted. That wasn’t the kind of choice I’d ever had to make in Capra.

There was only the single hot plate built into the countertop. A drawer beneath yielded a battered tin pan.

Working with the limited ingredients I’d bought in the market and a blob of butter from the tiny fridge, I fried the onions, mixed in the tomatoes and herbs, and added a pinch of mixed salt and pepper from a hemp pouch that had possibly been standing there since before the plague. The speckled grains were so clumped together, I literally had to carve off that pinch. That was on me, though. I knew what Roman was like in the domestication department, and I’d passed by a couple of general food shops during the day. I should have stocked up on some basic supplies.

I was watching over the simmering sauce when knuckles rapped at the door. My breath caught, and I rolled my eyes at myself. It wouldn’t be Jenna, or the Guard come to haul me back to Capra and into rehab. Of course it wouldn’t.

It wasn’t.

I opened the door for Roman and hurried back to attend to my sauce. “There are children here.”

Not the best greeting in the world, but that’s where my mind went the moment I saw him. All the things he’d always known, and all the things I’d misbelieved.

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