Page 19 of Our Sins in Silver (Coven of Sin 3)

Like Catherine, I chanted it to myself over and over in comfort as I endured the scene of my father arched over Sterling, stroking his hair with reverent motions while picking up his evil little hum.

“You live for my pleasure now, my silver spoon,” Thomas Knight muttered to the unconscious priest. “And I’ll killanyonewho tries to take you from me.”

Chapter eight

Caught in the Crossfire

Iwantedthistoend. This was worse than if my dad had visited me in person and tortured me the good old-fashioned way. Cut off my fingers and toes, throw me on the stretching table. Whatever. At least that was straightforward, physical pain. My pain tolerance was on its way to becoming a thing of legend.

But yeah, not so much when it came to watching my mates endure the torment.

My monster was suffering on a primal level I didn’t understand, and it made my insides twist to the point where the tears blurring my vision came as a small mercy.

How long would he drag this out? Was this his game? Why bother lifting one of those decrepit fingers of his when he could just win this war by driving me mentally insane?

A glimmer of hope lifted my chest when the fourth scene ended. Finally, relief. I released the breath I’d been holding and then wheezed as if I’d been sucker-punched in the gut. Another memory was taking shape.

The one I’d been fearing. The one I would have given almost anything not to see.

We were in a ramshackle cabin, probably a few hundred years after Sterling had been turned; some time in the fourteen hundreds judging by the odds and ends sitting around the room.

Sterling lay naked beside my father, curled up in the fetal position with his back turned toward us. In this horrible nightmare, where my eyes were my father’s, I was forced to look wherever he directed his gaze. I was forced to leer at Sterling’s back, who lay as still as a statue on the bed.

No, not like a statue. Like a corpse. Still alive, in a manner of speaking. But Thomas Knight had taken something from him, and by the screaming woman bound to a chair at the far end of the room, he was about to take a lot more.

I looked anywhere that wasn’t the opposite side of the bed or at the hysteric pregnant woman at the other end of the shack. Whatever it took to calm my fraying mind.

“Look at her,” my father spoke to me, but not in the memory. He hissed low in my ear, “I want you to see what happens to those foolish enough to take away what belongs to me.”

Unable to look away, he veered his attention from Sterling to the woman, giving me a good view of the human tied to a chair.

I would have sobbed if I could, seeing her helpless, frantic, and on the edge of madness. She wasn’t heavily pregnant, just enough to discern the swell of her belly. I couldn’t make out her face with the way her head sagged forward so she wouldn’t have to see what transpired across the room.

Her warbled shrieks split the night, ragged and husky like she’d been at it for hours.

“C–calm down, Elizabeth. It’s al–alright. I won’t let him hurt you,” Sterling said in a waif-thin voice.

Something within me withered.

It wasn’t alright at all.

Thomas Knight stole from Sterling. Thieved and pillaged and hurt him in the most barbaric way someone could hurt another person.

I knew he was evil—I had heard this tale. But seeing it with my own two eyes sent a hot knife of hatred piercing deep inside me, running me through until it punctured my very soul. It penetrated me until I felt myself bleeding on the inside, filling me with molten lava and hardening my bones, leaving me stiff and aching.

The vampire king rose from the bed, the groan of wood making me cringe. Sterling squeezed his eyes shut when his shadow passed over him, cast from the fire in the hearth. “Yes, do as your mate says, Elizabeth. You’ll harm his babe if you persist with the tantrum.”

The venomous edge in the king’s voice made the hair on my nape stand. In particular, the hint of a smile when he’d said, “harm his babe.” Sterling caught it too, and it made him stir to life. When the vampire king strode toward Elizabeth, his blazing eyes honed in on the mark marring the soft flesh over her collarbone, Sterling jumped into action. In a beat, he was in front of the hearth, snatching what looked like crude sewing scissors, rusted and heavy, from the mantle.

The priest moved faster than the elder vampire. He got a few cuts in, but none of them landed where he was aiming.

The chest cavity, over the vampire king’s heart, to stake his master dead.

Thomas Knight was stronger than his pet priest, but he wasn’t quicker. Sterling was so close to slamming the rusty blade’s point home, a second away from ending the dark legend ofLuciferi equitis.

But a second was all my asshole of a dad needed to catch my priest’s wrist. The blade’s tip buried half a centimeter deep into his chest.

So close.

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