Page 46 of Our Sins in Silver (Coven of Sin 3)

“How’s this for a curse, Julian Godfrey?” A burst of warmth exploded through me, filling my core with a red-hot inferno when Sterling’s arms on either side of my head erupted with goosebumps at the sound of his birth name on my tongue.

“I curse you to be irrevocably, hopelessly, indefinitely addicted to the taste of me. You don’t need oxygen to live, but I want your survival dependent on my blood and my blood alone. I want my life force to be your salvation. Forever and always, I want to be your drug.”

Sterling’s lips quirked with a phantom smile. “That’s no curse. That, my dear, is simply a fact. It has been since our time together in the attic.”

I smiled, pulling the dark tendrils of Sterling’s mind toward me, its black mist wrapping around my arms. He reached for me, but I was already falling through the wall, moving into a different section of this memory.

I wanted the priest’s mark so badly, it almost hurt to fucking walk. My thighs were sticky from my arousal, and my body ached for my mate’s brand to the point where it was becoming annoying as fuck to function without a cock between my legs.

I could barely think about anything else.

Still, I pushed on. Even as I put distance between us, I felt myself falling toward him. Until that moment of impact, I wanted to root around his memories a little more and become more familiar with my magic.

Who knew? Maybe it would come in handy with the other guys.

Glancing out a window, I saw a group of nuns pass by. No one could see me except for Sterling, but it felt wrong being naked while I was insistent on denying my body what it desperately needed. It was just rude. So I imagined a nun’s outfit for myself—a habit, I think it was called. It wasn’t tight like the other stuff I usually wore, for obvious reasons, but at least it was black.

I continued with my exploration of the monastery and paused when I came to a door that seemed to have a monk stationed outside to stand guard. That was suspicious. I wasn’t an expert on monks, but from what I’d seen so far, rarely were they just standing around doing fuck all.

Opening the door, the young monk stationed outside the room didn’t so much as flinch. Why would he? He was just a memory. Pushing my way into the room, my heart lifted when I took in all the heaving books and rolls of parchment filling the shelves that lined the large space.

I’d found the library.

It smelled like Sterling. Even all those years ago, he’d had nearly the same scent, leather and parchment, although the notes of the ocean were fainter on his flesh than his present self.

I stopped dead in my tracks when I saw him.

Chapter twenty

Silver Tongued Lies

Sterlingfromthepaststood at the head of the long table positioned in the middle of the room. A handful of monks gathered around him, listening intently to his instruction as he pointed at a stack of parchment that had his notes scrawled all over them. He’d crossed a lot of things out.

For several minutes, I stood admiring his dedication to his craft. “Even thousands of years ago—in a time and place that didn’t even feel like the same planet—Ster stood surrounded by books while barricaded in a library, far from the light.”

Ink stained his hands from where he’d been transcribing text for who knew how long.

I hadn’t gotten the best look at him in the memory of Catherine’s death, so I took my time taking in his blond chin-length hair, which curled at the ends and tickled his earlobes. His amber eyes shone brightly despite the library’s dim lighting, and his skin was tanner than I could have ever imagined, which was saying something because it was clear by the gauntness of his face that he rarely saw daylight.

At first, I stood there, taking my mate in solely for curiosity’s sake. Then, as I picked up on what he was doing, I fell in love with him all over again.

Sterling was altering religious texts, instructing his team of scribes to omit anything offensive, racist, or sexist.

My heart was bursting at its seams for the love of this man.

The most distinguished blasphemer you’d ever meet.

When the memory went static, I ambled out of the room and finally found my way outside.

This particular day captured in time was sunny, and the number of colors leaping from the gardens was borderline assault. There were so many varieties of flowers and vegetables and other foliage, I couldn’t even start to name them. It reminded me of something you’d see in a bougie home-and-garden magazine.

It had to be late summer, based on the warmth in the air. I didn’t even know it could get this hot. Living on the coast of Massachusetts my whole life, I got used to the cold. Especially when living in a two-hundred-year-old colonial with crappy insulation.

The floral scents that laced the air, the glow of the sun on my skin, the hum of the bees in the air—I’d experienced nothing like it before.

Since I’d been freed from my bedroom prison, I’d gone outside loads of times…at night. I’d stood in the sunlight that came in through a window countless times. But this was different. This was...magic.

For a huge, miserable chunk of my life, I’d never been outside because of the lies, the bars, and the locks holding me prisoner.

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