Page 66 of Sinister

He leads me to a massive wall lined with shelves—hundreds of ancient-looking tomes—and nestled between them, a large section of the wall is devoted entirely to art. One painting in particular dominates the space. It’s enormous, violent, the image it depicts resembling some kind of hell on earth.

He stops in front of it and waits until I’m beside him.

“I’ve met a demon before,” he says suddenly.

My eyes widen, but before I can ask anything, he turns to me.

“You once asked about my name.”

“Is it short for something else? Like Sinclair?” I inquire, my brows furrowed. I’d spent days thinking over our interaction and his name, and I thought he’d said it to shock me—that perhaps it was just a nickname.

He shakes his head. “No. Just Sin.”

“I don’t understand. Why would anyone name someone that?”

“Because that’s what I was to them,” he says simply. “A sin. My sin was being born.”

“What?” I breathe. “What do you mean?”

He turns away, facing the painting again. The absence of his gaze leaves me feeling strangely hollow. I watch his profile, the tightness of his jaw as he draws in a slow, steady breath.

“I never knew my parents,” he begins. “I was abandoned as a baby, left on the steps of an orphanage. They took me in, but that doesn’t mean they wanted me there.”

He pauses, his voice steady but distant.

“My only stroke of luck was that the orphanage was attached to a church. A church not so different from yours, actually. But that luck didn’t last. They couldn’t exactly toss out a child into the streets; it wouldn’t have looked good. Still, that didn’t mean they had to like me. And they made their dislike clear from the start.”

“But why?” I ask. “Why would they treat a child like that?”

“Ah, Petra,” he says with a faint, sad smile. “You’re too sweet. You see, in their eyes, I wasn’t innocent. Every time I happened to be near someone when misfortune struck—a fall, an illness, an accident—they blamed me. They remembered only the bad things, and I became the common thread. The bringer of misfortune.”

He exhales.

“My birth parents, well, they must have seen the same darkness in me, to abandon me like that. They must have known something.”

I stare at him, stunned.

“Still,” he goes on, “because of the orphanage’s reputation, and the need to seem like good Christians, they kept me. Took me in. Raised me. I stayed there until I was old enough to leave and forge my own way in the world.”

“That’s horrible,” I whisper, stepping forward. I reach out, gently placing my hand on his arm.

He flinches, just slightly, but then he relaxes beneath my touch. He glances at me, and in his eyes, I see sadness, yes, but also something deeper. Regret. Shame. And I can’t understand why.

“I’m so sorry, Sin,” I tell him. “You have to know that it wasn’t your fault. You were just a child. Even if bad things happened around you . . . how could anyone blame you for that?”

“And yet they did,” he replies softly.

“I can’t understand people like that,” I murmur. “I don’t want to.”

“That’s because you have a pure heart, Petra. There aren’t many like you in this world.”

“But still. You must know it wasn’t your fault.”

“Was it not?” he asks quietly. “I don’t know. Maybe . . . maybe it was, in part. I was different. Even I can see that now. I didn’t act the way a child was expected to. I kept to myself.”

“Well, of course you did,” I argue. “If they treated you like that—of course you pulled away.”

He shakes his head. “Even before that. Something was . . . off. Something was wrong with me. And maybe they saw it. Maybe even my birth parents saw it.”