Page 2 of Our Sins in Blood (Coven of Sin 1)

Except for Dr. Sharpe, but obviously, he didn’t count.

I liked pretty much all romance sub-genres, but the supernatural men in paranormal romances fascinated me the most. There was something sexy about shifters. Wolves and dragons were my favorite. I liked vampires too, but Mom seemed to avoid bringing me many of those.

“Vampires are Satan’s creatures,” she’d admonish me whenever I asked for a particular title I’d find in the back matter in one of my werewolf novels and would instead bring me yet another werewolf romance. Which was fine. Bad boys, bullies, heroes with hearts of gold, anti-heroes, hell, even villains. I liked them all because my lonely ass needed the company, even if none of them were real.

“Goodnight, honey. Don’t stay up too late,” Mom said, the old stairs to our historic Massachusetts home creaking as she went back downstairs.

“Fine,” I called down to her, though it was a lie. I loved staying up late. Nighttime was when everything went dark in the house, all the noises from the street outside that seemed to bleed into my room died down, and my imagination came alive.

I stayed up well into the night reading and drifted to sleep next to my door with my book still in hand, dreaming about the worlds in my books and the characters within them.

But I was foisted from my dreams with a sound that jerked me awake. My eyes flew open, and I froze as I listened. I’d always had exceptional hearing. I could even make out the steady rush of Mom’s breathing in the room next to mine.

So I knew the creak I heard wasn’t coming from her.

Creak.

My heart pulsed loudly as I realized someone, or something, was coming up the stairs.

Chapter two

"Hello, Ruby"

Myheartpoundedhardin my chest.

Creak.

Another step closer by whoever was in the house. A stranger! A burglar? My heart began to pick up pace as my mind splintered with panic. What if they hurt my mom?

Creak.

With every step, my heart rate accelerated. For healthy people, that was normal. For me, it could be lethal. This home invader could be the death of me before he even found out I was here.

“Bloody hell,”I whispered, a phrase I’d picked up from Harry Potter. Was this really how I was going to die? By being scared to death?

That was no fun. No way. I couldn’t go out like this. If I was going to die, it would be because I finally managed to sneak out of here and maybe stole my mom’s car keys and got into a street race or robbed a bank with the entirety of the Quincy Police Force shouting on a megaphone ‘We have you surrounded.’ Or maybe have an orgy with the main male cast of Supernatural. Going out with a bang, literally.

If I was going to die young, it had to be doing something adventurous. Even if it was something that normal people wouldn’t find a super unique death. Compared to the rest of my snooze fest of a life, at least it would besomething. Something that would be the one interesting thing to have ever happened to me in my short, sad life.

My stupid, pathetic, weak heart. Why did I have to be built like this? Maybe reincarnation was real. Maybe I’d done something horrible in a past life to earn this karmic payback.

My weak body didn’t match the way I felt inside. I wanted adrenaline. I wanted to be shocked and surprised and thrilled and maybe even a little bad, without worrying about my heart just crapping out on me.

Creak.

Whoever was coming up the steps, they were getting closer. With each step, my heart lurched almost as if it were in sync with the intruder’s footsteps.

What did they want? Why were they here? Mom worked at an assisted living facility. She wasn’t rich. We had nothing. She was a single mom who went to church and work. That was basically it, so it wasn’t like she had enemies.

But what about my dad? I’d never known him. Mom never talked about him, not even once. I had stopped asking about him a long time ago. Sometimes I fantasized about him being some billionaire and how he’d come for me and take me to some huge mansion where there were no bars on the windows and no flaps on my door to slip food in.

But that was just fantasy, right?

Because in reality, if he did come for me, would I forgive him for abandoning my mom and me? If it meant rescuing me from this princess-themed bedroom from hell, maybe.

The guy coming up the stairs was probably just a nobody burglar. He would leave when he found nothing worth stealing. That’s what I told myself, again and again as my heart pounded harder and harder. I held my breath as another creak met my ear.

My mom had come up and down those stairs so many times I’d come to know the groans and moan of each antique step. So I knew he was standing on the very last step before my door.

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