Page 18 of Our Sins in Silver (Coven of Sin 3)

The thought instilled an evil amount of satisfaction inside me.This is great and all, but can we change the channel? I want to see the one where daddy dies by ingesting liquid silver, I thought gleefully. I couldn’t speak the words aloud, but I suspected dear old dad could hear my thoughts just fine. My suspicions were confirmed when he moved us to a different memory.

I shouldn’t have goaded him.

Instant regret hit me like a nuclear explosion as unadulterated horror stabbed at my lungs. Staring through my father’s eyes, I peered down at a woman dressed in a thin, white nightgown. She couldn’t have been a day over twenty.

Whoever she was, she was in trouble. Trouble so deep I doubt she’d escape from her position pinned over a crate beneath the vampire king. She writhed and snarled and thrashed beneath the vampire king as he ripped her dress from her body as if she wore nothing but tissue paper.

No. I didn’t have the stomach to watch this. The endless cycle of torture wore on me, beginning to break me apart. The hairline cracks in my composure were blowing wide open into full-on craters.

My father was about to force himself on this woman, and I couldn’t do anything but think of all the ways I was going to kill him as I watched him pry this poor girl’s thighs apart.

“Don’t touch her!” A familiar voice, with a touch of an accent I didn’t recognize, drew mine and my father’s joint gaze to the corner of the murky room.

Crouched between two shelving units filled to the brim with silver was my priest.

My heartbeat lurched into a gallop as I drank in this young and strange version of my silver prince.

His skin had so much color to it, peachy and healthy. His hair was a dusty-blond that fell in waves around his ears. This had to be before the implementation of the silly haircut monks wore. That, or he was a rebel of a priest even before Thomas Knight and his reign of terror.

His eyes were amber like a glass of whiskey with the sun shining through, turning the smoky liquid golden brown. They blazed with defiance, fire, and everything else I admired about the fallen priest. Heavy bags rimmed his eyes, which told me he probably didn’t sleep much. If this Sterling was anything like the man I knew, he probably spent most of his time buried in books.

“D–don’t touch her, you bastard!”

My chest felt like it was packed tight with cotton balls. I gasped for a breath as Sterling crawled on his hands and knees toward me—toward the vampire king—commanding the attention of the terrified young woman. “Look at me, Catherine. Don’t look at him. Look at me.”

Even with his voice split with fear, the man exuded an alluring disposition that was as commanding as it was soothing. The girl named Catherine jerked her head to look at Sterling.

She held his stare with plain-as-day adoration, while more intensely etched into this girl’s face was pretty much the same expression Lavinia had worn around the eldest Knight prince.

And I was definitely no stranger to the ache Sterling seemed to invoke without ever meaning to.

“Julian, don’t let him hurt me.”

Julian.

Something deep within me twitched and heated. Julian. The name sparked something inside, like a match to kindling.

Catherine chanted his name over and over. His true name given by his mother out of love and not some nickname born of the twisted fate Sterling couldn’t have avoided.

“I’m not going to let him hurt you,” my prince of the past whispered, though it was in a cadence that betrayed the false hope for what it was.

A lie.

It didn’t stop him from saying it again and again, on repeat. It was like he was trying to make them both believe the lie.

“I won’t let him hurt you. Won’t let him hurt you.” Long after the vampire had ripped out Catherine’s throat, leaving the poor girl lifeless, Sterling kept up the chant. It had shifted from an empty promise to the broken mutterings of a man who’d lost everything in a single moment.

My in-brain torture master played the memory through, making me bear witness to the moment he robbed my priest of his entire life. He drained him of his life, bit his wrist, and allowed the man to be filled again with blood—if the vampire king’s ancient life force could be called that. Holding his wrist over Sterling’s gaping mouth, the dark liquid dribbled past his parched lips. They sat there for hours. While Thomas Knight waited for his new progeny to wake, he hummed an ominously cheerful tune to himself.

It was only when the priest was once again conscious that my father picked up a spoon from the floor. With a double take, I realized he was handling silver.

How is that possible?

A second later, I noticed the human hand the vampire king wore like a glove. Cold horror set in as I watched him press the spoon into Sterling’s eyelids, robbing him of his sight forever.

The monk passed out in his new master’s lap after he’d summoned all the strength he had left to answer a single question. My father wanted to know the name of his newest obsession.

Julian Godfrey.

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