Page 121 of Sinister

“I just-I just want you to be mine, Petra. As I will be yours. It’s a special thing we have here, don’t you see?” His shoulders have slumped down, and there’s a broken longing on his face that almost, almost, makes my heart ache for him.

I take a shaky breath as a part of my fear morphs into deep sorrow.

Ah, how many sweet dreams had been spun around handsome boys like Sin! How many of those reveries were bitter illusions in the end . . .

“Because love isn’t control, Sin,” I manage to whisper at last, spurred to urgent response by the rapidly darkening expression on his face. “It’s about trust and respect. And you’re destroying that with every demand. Like, this is so beyond normal that I can’t believe you’re not joking right now.”

His silence is deafening as he looks at me in pointed observation. As if he were a scientist and I the insect squirming under his magnifying glass.

In this storm-battered moment, any hope for understanding seems like a distant dream. I realize, with mounting panic, that he has taken hold of my arm, his fingers tightening imperceptibly with each passing second.

“Sin, please,” I whisper, my voice trembling. “Just let me go.”

But he takes a step closer, completely ignoring my words. “Petra, you can’t run from this. From us.”

The hell I can!

The next second, I push at his chest with all my might. “Petra, wha—” Sin cries out as I brace my shoulder against his shoulder and shove once more. He stumbles back and loses his footing, but I don’t stick around to see what he’ll do next.

Instead, I bound up the last flight of stairs before the hallway, and once in the corridor, I keep running—even as I hear Sin follow me close behind, yelling something indistinctive, perhaps a wordless shout of frustration.

“Damnation!” I hear him shout just as I reach the door of my room.

I scamper inside and try to slam the door shut⁠—

“Petra, stop!” Sin cuts in, putting his hand between the door and its frame at just the last moment. And I hate that my hand stops automatically, that I can’t bring the door down crashing on his stupid, slender fingers. “Petra, stop running away from me!” he says in a loud voice, rushing into the room after me.

“Sin, you’re scaring me,” I start saying but already the edges of my vision are blurring, the walls of the room slanting and the ceiling dipping. “Just let me be!”

His face softens for a moment, but the wildness remains—a barely disguised streak of madness. “I won’t hurt you, Petra. I will never hurt you.”

But I’m far away now, and his voice is muffled by a cottony layer that’s settling around all my senses. My vision is blurring now, and my legs shake uncontrollably; at one point, they fail to support me entirely, and I start slipping.

“Please, Sin,” I manage to say before the world turns black. “Please, just leave.”

37

PETRA

21 April 1896

There’s a new letter on my windowsill.

For eleven days now, he’s left one there—every single night without fail.

I opened the first. Then the second.

After that, I stopped reading them. I burned them instead, one after the other, without even breaking the seal.

I know what he wants.

He’s asking me to meet him again. Always the same secret place, somewhere on the university property. Always the same promise: Slip away in the dead of night and be with him once more.

He wrote it in the first two letters, and I’m certain he’s written the same thing in all eleven.

But I haven’t replied. I haven’t even glanced at the others.

How could I?