Page 100 of A Taste like Sin

Someone worse than a monster.

Idon’t know how I’ve made it back to Damien’s without breaking apart. Screaming. Instead, I’m

dead silent during the ascent to his suite. Numb. With my thoughts in turmoil, I enter the foyer and

find a note waiting for me on the end table instead of the man himself.

I’ll meet you there tonight,it reads.Do wear the dress.

His dress: a beautiful, mocking confection of a betrayal too cruel to fathom. A strangled sound creeps

from my throat and I’m on my knees, my eyes streaming. Somehow, I manage to smother any sound

against my palm and stand. On trembling legs, I enter my scarlet room. Here, I pull my new dress on,

but I don’t even recognize the stranger staring back at me from the mirror’s surface.

Her hollow eyes stare blankly ahead, no less soulless than one of Sampson’s eerie paintings. All I

need is a sea of flowers to drown in and the irony would be complete.

When I enter the hall hours later, Julio is there to usher me into a waiting car, and I arrive at the gala

to find a crowd hounding the few patrons brave enough to enter the building through the throng.

“We can go around, miss,” Julio suggests, but I shake my head and push the door on my end open.

Every year, the Wellington family throws the event at the same mansion on the outskirts of the city.

The modern design serves as the perfect backdrop to the mixture of old money and hopeful delegates

arriving by the carful.

It’s the perfect setting to face my past.

A perfect setting to accept the truth: I was only ever of use to anyone as one thing.

A token. A pawn. A piece in a game.

“Juliana!” a reporter shouts, startling me back to the present. “Is it true that your father’s health is in

stable condition?”

“Allow me,” a man cuts in.

I turn and find someone looming behind me, cutting a striking figure in a tailored black suit.

“May I?” He takes my arm and guides me forward.

Despite the crush of reporters, we enter the venue unmolested. In the foyer, Harrison helps me out of

my coat and tosses it to a nearby attendant.

“I’m surprised you came,” he says, raking his gaze over me. “Rumor has it that you weren’t

particularly fond of your father’s return to politics in the first place. And this event… Gerald

Wellington was a man even your father despised, though he was more than willing to take his money.”