What Sinners Love (Sinners of Hawthorne University 3)

I jolt awake, fear from too many years ago pumping through my veins. It takes me a second to orient myself in the unfamiliar room, and my heart slams inside my rib cage as I suck in several deep breaths. The dream keeps swimming in my mind, still raw and fresh.

It’s not real. It’s not real.

But it was real. All those years ago, it was real. Waking up in that bunker again after Reagan dragged me there was real too. The dreams may not be real now, but they once were. A long time ago, they were the reality I had no choice but to face, the horror that haunted my childhood.

Fisting my hair close to the roots, I tug on it until it stings, using the bite of pain to calm my mind.

In the dream, you were a little girl, Sophie. Helpless. Small. Little.

I couldn’t fight back, because I physically couldn’t fight back. Alan and Cliff were always stronger than me, the fear was always stronger than me. But that’s not true anymore—or at least, it doesn’t have to be. Now, I’m a grown fucking woman who can put up a hell of a fight, and as long as I have an ounce of strength left in me, that’s what I’ll do.

I won’t let Alan or Cliff fuck with me again. I won’t let them take even more than they’ve already taken from me.

Barely conscious, I fling my legs over the side of the bed and make my way through the murky darkness out of my room. As much as I hate to do it, I need to try to capture the images from the dream before they fade away completely, disappearing back into my subconscious.

The guys set up an art studio in a room I think was meant to be an office, and I make my way through the dark house to that room.

Even though I want to forget the

memories, want to bury them deep, I know they’re important. If I can latch on to the right memory, maybe I can come up with definitive proof of what Alan did to me.

Inside the studio, I don’t even flick on the lights. The blinds are open, giving me just enough illumination to paint by. And maybe it’s better to paint in shadows when the subjects of my paintings are all shadows themselves.

The paints are already there, the empty canvas set up on the easel, ready for me to paint. Blindly reaching for colors, I let my muscle memory and instincts take over as I wet my brush and begin to paint.

With every stroke of my brush over the canvas, new memories and images flood to the surface, but I can’t make sense of them—not rationally. If I try to actually think about them, grasp on to them and analyze them consciously, they float away. I have to paint them, have to put them into a tangible form before I can step back and consider them.

I paint for a while, chewing on my lower lip as my hand lays down quick strokes. As I work, my heart rate slowly begins to come down, falling into a steady rhythm by the time I set down my paintbrush and look at my creation.

It’s nothing.

Just a murky mess of shadows and colors, a lot like the paintings I was doing before the art show a couple months ago. Maybe this one represents a particular corner of the bunker that holds something important, but until I put together more pieces inside my head, I’ll never know for sure.

Letting out a deep sigh, I brush my thumb against a place where the paint hasn’t quite blended in, not caring that it leaves a smear on my skin. I like the way the wet paint feels as it dries and cracks in the creases of my skin, the way it becomes part of me before I wash it off. It’s like the feeling you get after having sex—that sweaty, sated, feeling when you’re not quite ready to go clean up, when you’re not ready to let go of the equally sweaty body still pressed against yours.

I know I won’t be able to paint anything else tonight, but I also know I can’t go back to bed yet.

So instead, I find myself staring at the painting I just did, sitting in the quiet room that’s been turned into an art studio for me. A whole room in this beautiful place, dedicated completely to my painting. Not just a section of my own bedroom, a corner in the living room, a makeshift workplace that has to be moved or cleaned up anytime you want to sit down and eat dinner or chill, but a room just for my art.

It’s something I always wanted but never thought I’d get to have.

Despite the shit, despite the fear, despite the fight against Cliff and Alan, part of me feels so fucking lucky.

The Sinners set up this studio for me, and they did it without me even asking. They did it because they care about me.

The sound of footsteps in the hallway makes me look up, and a moment later, Elias’s sleepy form appears in the doorway.

“Hey. Painting again?” he asks, running a hand through his tousled hair.

“Yeah.” I nod, absently rubbing the paint on my thumb deeper into my skin. “I figured I’d try to get some stuff down, in case the new memories that’ve been jarred loose give me anything useful.”

“That’s a good idea.”

He crosses the distance between us, coming to stand behind me and looking over my shoulder at the painting. It means nothing to me, and probably even less to him, but that doesn’t stop us from looking for clues, for anything that might be hidden behind the murky mess of colors.

He shifts his position a little until he’s by my side, and I find myself glancing over at him. He’s shirtless, his bare torso illuminated in the moonlight, sweatpants hanging low on his hips. He’s toned and tight in all the right places, perfect lines of muscle and power that give me the sudden urge to pick up one of my brushes and dip it in color before dragging it across his torso.

“Hey. My face is up here, Blue.” His voice is light, but when I drag my gaze up to meet his, I see heat in his eyes.