Page 1 of Our Sins in Blood (Coven of Sin 1)

Chapter one

A Bump in the Night

EversinceIcouldremember, I’d been a prisoner.

When most people thought about prison, they probably imagined steel bars and orange uniforms. They didn’t think of a little girl’s room with painted pink walls and stuffed unicorns arranged on a frilly pink bedspread in a three-bedroom suburban home in Quincy, Massachusetts.

But it’d been my prison for twenty-three years.

It wasn’t anybody’s fault that I was a prisoner in my mother’s house. I didn’t believe in God, so I couldn’t blame him for giving me a weak heart. But some days I’d pretend I still believed in a higher power just so I could have someone to blame, someone to get angry at.

Because it wasn’t my mom’s fault that I was sick.

Now that I was older, I’d moved past a lot of the resentment I had for her when I was a teenager. Puberty’s a bitch behind bars. But I get it. She’s just trying to protect me.

Were the bars on the window and the half dozen locks on the door necessary? Maybe if I was she-hulk or something. I understood where her paranoia was coming from. The slightest startle, a bump in the night, a trip, even a scary movie could make my heart rate skyrocket, and then I would fall down dead, and it would all be over.

According to my doctor, I had the worst case of Tachycardia he’d ever seen. If my heart rate rose too high, it could result in a stroke, cardiac arrest, or death.

Not that dying seemed like that bad of an alternative most days. In my darkest and weakest moments, I’d tried to sneak out because experiencing even just one night of the outside world seemed more exciting than rotting inside these pink walls of hell for the rest of my life.

But, after a few failed escape attempts, the bars on the window and the locks on the door were installed.

“‘For your own good,”’ Mom always said.For your own good.

Those words once made my blood boil every time I thought about them. Sometimes they still made me mad. She was just trying to protect me, I remind myself. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that she’s trying to keep me away from the rest of the world, not trying to keep the rest of the world away from me.

It wasn’t fair.

I’d been condemned to this life in prison for as far back as I could remember. And it didn’t matter if my walls were pink or that I had a comfortable twin bed and TV with cable and movies and hundreds of books lined up on my bookcases, filling an entire wall. The distractions had never been enough to make me forget that I was still a prisoner. Nothing could make me forget the bars, the locks, or the flap on the door where Mom passed my meals on a plastic tray.

Being homeschooled had been the best distraction from it all. I loved to study, to learn about the world outside of my walls. But now that was done and over with. With every year that passed inside this room, it got harder and harder not to get caught up in my own mind; a prison within a prison.

Maybe I wanted to die after all.

Such a dark thought. But hey, it’s one I’d had a lot. Who in my position wouldn’t? There were only so many times I could reread the same books. Only so many times I could watch the same shitty re-runs on TV.

Mom typically brought me new books and magazines every month, but I blew through those in a few days. Boredom was killing me. At least, I wished it was.

Dying had to come with some benefits, right? Mom said Hell was real, and all the bad people were there. At least bad people were interesting. Even if my personal purgatory was these pink walls, the screams of my next-door neighbors getting tortured in their own hell would at least remind me I wasn’t alone.

The metal flap at the bottom of my bedroom door swung open, the creak of its hinges announcing dinner.

“Hope you’re hungry, honey,” Mom’s muffled voice sounded from the other side of the door. “I made meatloaf.”

It was a stupid thing to say. She knew I was always hungry. Always starving. But no amount of meatloaf, my favorite dish, could curb my hunger.

My bedroom and the bathroom attached to it were my whole world. So when the dark-haired man with pale skin and beady eyes came to visit, it was like Christmas. Dr. Sharpe was never much of a talker, but at least he was a flesh and blood person. Other than him, Ineverhad visitors. Even my mom never came into my room.

Dr. Sharpe wasn’t exactly big on small talk, but he’d always been informative on my condition. According to him, my hunger was a common side effect of Tachycardia. I’m not sure how an insatiable hunger relates to a weak heart, but hey, I’m not the doctor.

A tray pushed through the flap, bearing several generous slabs of fragrant meat, a glass of cranberry juice, mashed potatoes, and beside the plate a new romance novel.

“You got me the sequel to the series I’ve been reading!”

I scrambled off my bed and reached for the book, then settled down with my back against the door, shoveling mounds of potatoes into my mouth with one hand and holding my book open with the other.

I freakinglovedwerewolf romance. I’d basically been in love with all the men in pretty much every romance book Mom had brought me because I knew they were the only men in my life that I would ever have.

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