Page 49 of Wicked Believer (Original Sinner #2)
Chapter Forty
Charlotte
“What is this?” I snap, glancing to my right at Greed.
I’ve barely even processed what happened last night. Lucifer’s lockdown. My unplanned jump. Azrael saving me. Lucifer opening the first seal. And now ...
My father standing before me inside our old living room.
But this can’t be real.
It can’t be, because I ...
I recognize this scene.
We’re in the middle of our old house. The one we lived in before my mother’s death. Before my father became so focused, so obsessed with the congregation, the church, so caught up in his own grief and zealotry that he ...
“What is this, Mimi?” I repeat, panic making my breath shallow and quick.
“Lucifer tells me that your powers come out when you’re angry.” Greed glances down at her manicured nails and shrugs unhelpfully. “So, get angry, Charlotte.”
I blanch, my panic reaching an apex. My heart thumps as my father prowls toward me, but then he steps right through me as if I’m made of mist, not even there, heading toward the little girl I now notice cowering underneath the couch behind me.
My stomach drops.
Me.
The little girl is me.
My father was never a kind man. I’d seen him hurt my mother plenty of times before, but never once had he ...
I turn and drop to my knees, vomiting the scone I just ate onto the old shag carpet as the younger version of me starts to scream.
“Too much for your first time then?” Greed says, seemingly undisturbed by the little girl’s—by my pain. “Perhaps something different.”
She snaps her fingers.
Suddenly the carpet beneath me is concrete.
Greed stands near the fence beside me. The playground outside my old youth group building.
I’d been barely a day older than eleven, not even a full preteen, but unlike most of the girls in our congregation, I’d developed early.
Early enough that the older boys from our youth group had thought it would be funny to try and pull down my shirt.
My father had blamed me, of course. No surprise there.
For wearing something so “promiscuous.”
Never mind that it hadn’t been anything more than a standard V-neck “Jesus Loves Me” tee from the previous year’s mission trip. This was the first moment I learned that there were boys, men, who believed they were entitled to my body.
No matter how many times I said no.
“Stop it,” I say to Greed, staggering to my feet and refusing to look toward the crowd of boys now surrounding the younger version of me, heckling and grabbing at her until I wince at the all-too-real memory.
I inspect Greed’s face, and for the first time I know exactly how she came to be the woman I know her to be.
A bitch. A bully. The “selfish” greedy monster.
Because she was once a little girl just like me who craved her Father’s love so desperately, she’d do anything to get it. Hoard any crumb she was given.
And a sister. A little sister whose softness was tortured from her by her more powerful angelic brothers, unempathetic to the sound of her screams, until she was no longer weak.
Until she became hard like them.
Exactly like she’s doing to me.
“Mimi, please.” I close my eyes and wince at the sound of my younger self’s sobbing. “Whatever this is, please stop it.”
“You want me to stop, Charlotte?” I open my eyes again, and she tilts her chin as she steps toward me, her heels clicking against the summer pavement.
“Now that the apocalypse has begun, do you think any of my brothers or my angelic siblings will stop should they or the Righteous or any of Lucifer’s enemies ever get their hands on you? Do you think they will stop?”
She shakes her head at me, her shoulders dropping, and in that moment I can tell that she doesn’t take any pleasure in the task Lucifer has given her.
Torturing someone the way she’s torturing me.
It’s nothing personal, but that won’t stop her from fulfilling her duty either.
To break me. Toughen me until I become hard like she is.
“I will show mercy today and today only.” She snaps her fingers, and we’re back in the penthouse’s sitting room as if we never even left in the first place.
As if it was all an illusion or a dream.
A nightmare of my own creation.
I feel the cold wind from last night whip past me. Feel the burn of it on my face.
“Our enemies will do more to you than your father or any playground bullies ever could, Charlotte. Don’t forget that.” She looks me over from head to toe almost regretfully before she turns away. “That’s the end of your lesson for today.”