A Taste of Your Sin

🌑 Prologue A Taste of Your Sin Some people were born under lucky stars, kissed on the forehead by fate before they took their first breath. She was not one of them. Her earliest memories tasted of stale whiskey and cigarette smoke, her father’s rough hands pulling her away from the front door while her mother turned up the volume on the television to drown out her cries. Love was something she learned to stop expecting—a currency she could never afford. So she traded in silence instead. Silence kept her alive. When she turned fifteen, they sold her to a man with a gold watch and a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. She ran away before he could finish what her father started. For years after, she drifted through the city like a ghost—unseen, unwanted, unbroken in the only way that mattered. She still had her name. She still had her rage. Tonight, she was scrubbing tables in a back-alley café when she saw him for the first time. He stepped through the doorway like he owned the air itself. Dark hair, pale eyes, a suit that didn’t wrinkle even in the rain. He looked too young to be dangerous—until he lifted his gaze to the man at the counter and the entire room went still. She recognized that look. She’d seen it in her father’s eyes when he decided she wasn’t worth saving. It was the look of a man who had already decided the value of a life. Later, she would wonder why he turned his attention to her. Why he watched her hands shake as she gathered dirty cups, why he waited until she passed his table to speak. “Miss,” he said softly, as if they were the only two people left in the world. “You have blood on your wrist.” It was the tiniest cut—she hadn’t even noticed. But he had. And somehow, that was worse than if he’d ignored her entirely. She looked up, ready to lie, ready to vanish back into the shadows that had always hidden her. But something in his expression stopped her. He didn’t look at her like she was broken. He looked at her like he knew exactly how she had been shattered—and he wasn’t afraid to touch the pieces. She didn’t know his name yet. She didn’t know he would become her ruin, her savior, her sin. But she would. God help her, she would.