The Dark in Her Veins (Divine Villains #1)

1

—The Prophet’s Modern Translation of the Holy Book

Like most sinners, I do my best work at night.

The outskirts of Valestadt are dark as I swing myself onto the balcony of Malte Pietersen’s sprawling three-story home.

Huffing out a breath, I peer through the balustrade to survey the manicured garden below.

Stout trees shiver in the wind, silhouetted by the glow of the moon.

I hunch my shoulders and pull my hood closer to my face.

Something about the silence has cold threading along my bones.

Or maybe I’m just paranoid. Eyes narrowed, I track an unmarked car that speeds past, hubcaps gleaming beneath the incandescent streetlights.

Regiment agents. I’d recognize the slick black vehicles with their bulbous fenders anywhere, and I don’t relax until they’re out of sight.

It’s an unnecessary instinct, really: The Regiment poses little threat so long as I can rely on its Prophet to wrangle me out of trouble.

Still, Gabriel’s displeasure if I’m caught will be far worse a punishment.

Pietersen’s house is quiet. Set back from the main street, it was almost too easy to grapple my way up the ivy-encrusted brick.

I adjust my gloves and peer through the glass doors, trying to see past the moon’s silver reflection.

Outlines of furniture are visible in the sparsely decorated parlor beyond, but the room is definitely empty.

Impatience sours my throat as I jam my pick into the keyhole.

When I feel the back of the lock, I yank it out again, turning my tension wrench.

A number of the pins fall into place. Rich as he is, Pietersen ought to have invested in better security measures, but I know how the Regiment feels about modern technology.

I pick the remaining pins with quick efficiency, holding my breath as I turn the handle.

It gives, just as I knew it would, and I step into the deadly quiet room.

The air smells like lemon oil polish and new furniture. It feels suffocatingly still after being on the balcony, and I thank the devil when the wooden floorboards don’t creak beneath my feet. With a final glance over my shoulder, I begin a slow creep to the hallway, squinting as my eyes adjust.

I’ve barely made it clear of the parlor when I draw to a halt, every muscle in my body tensing. A warm glow emanates from the room adjacent, the door open just enough for me to hear the rapid tap-a-tap of a typewriter over the frantic slam of my own heartbeat.

Pietersen. It has to be.

You are a ghost, Talin, Gabriel reminds me ahead of every new assignment. My sinners are never seen, never heard, until the moment they strike.

Normally I don’t need the reminder. Resent it, even.

But Pietersen is different from my regular marks.

He’s an ex-Regiment agent with one hell of a chip on his shoulder, and this isn’t a simple reconnaissance job.

I’m not here to blackmail or make threats on Gabriel’s behalf.

Pietersen is dangerous, and he burned every possibility of a second chance the moment he walked away from the Regiment with years’ worth of information.

Not the kind of information you can steal back, either, but the kind that exists only in his head. It makes him a threat. A liability.

That’s where I come in.

Once you work for the Regiment, you don’t simply switch careers.

You know too much about the less-than-official activities of Sundbourg’s leaders, which means you’re locked in for life.

I often wonder—with increasing apathy—whether that applies to me.

I have little to do with the Regiment itself, but the Prophet requires the same kind of unwavering loyalty and compliance.

I’m not particularly loyal to anyone. I never have been. But I’m one hell of a good liar when it suits me, and that’s sort of the same thing. Now, three years on, I’ve sinned more on Gabriel’s behalf than most people have sinned in their entire lives.

I kind of hate us both for it.

I steel myself as I nudge the door farther open.

The soft light of an emeralite lamp spills across what can only be an office, bookshelves lining the room’s perimeter.

Between them a mahogany desk faces the window overlooking the side garden, and I give a silent sigh of relief that I didn’t approach from that direction.

Because Pietersen sits at that desk now, shoulders stooped, the incessant clicking of his typewriter made strident in the dim.

Even sitting, he’s obviously a tall man, but what I can see of him doesn’t strike me as particularly dangerous.

His shoulders are narrow, his sandy hair shot through with gray.

His neck is thin. When he turns his head slightly, I can see that he wears glasses.

He looks more like a Regiment scholar than a former agent, given that the latter tend to be more physically imposing.

When the Regiment wrested control of Sundbourg a century ago, their goal was to replace the political elite and exchange progress for a reversion to traditional values.

As such, factory workers, millwrights, and coal yard laborers were among those offered new employment as Regiment agents.

The trend held for a while, but now intelligence—not to mention ruthlessness—is in higher demand than physical prowess. Pietersen is living proof of that.

Though not for much longer.

Hovering on the threshold, I feel like the ghost I’m meant to be.

A specter in the night. My hands are clammy, but my grip on my gun is secure.

In moments like these, I’m acutely aware that I’m precisely the monster my family believed I was.

As I stare at Malte Pietersen’s back, I can almost feel my mother’s cold fingers on my skin.

Hear the unerring alto of her voice as she recites passages from the holy book, pleading for her eldest daughter’s deliverance.

For a moment I’m sitting on the edge of a too-small bed, white shift pooling around my ankles, silently praying for the opposite.

I’d known even then that holy things were not for girls like me.

My mouth thins at the memory, bile rising in my throat. Fury is a second heartbeat within me, coiled against my ribs like a vital organ. It’s the only constant in my life—except, of course, the knowledge that my death is looming. And that when it comes, it’ll be slow and brutal.

In a way, Malte Pietersen is lucky. I’m a practiced shot, my aim unerring. He’ll have scarcely a breath’s worth of suffering. I’ll make it quick.

And I do.

He bleeds profusely but dies swiftly. Head wounds are like that.

He never knew I was here and didn’t feel a moment’s panic.

Nonetheless, a weight drops into my stomach as I watch his blood spread across the wooden floor, reflecting the light in shattered increments.

I await the suffocating pressure of regret.

The sickening scrape of horror, or for guilt to hit like a physical blow.

But as always, there’s nothing. Nothing but the whispered judgment of the wind battering the window and the screech of tires in the distance.

In death, Pietersen looks calm. He’s slumped back in his chair, head lolling to the side as it bleeds. His eyes are partially open. The human body is too fragile, I reflect as I close them. Too soft.

I step away from the blood, heart pounding as I use one gloved hand to yank up the sleeve of my leather jacket.

The skin of my arm is mottled with reddish-purple splotches that seem darker every time I dare to inspect them.

Grimacing, I shove my sleeve up farther.

The leather is uncomfortably tight around my bicep, but I can see the marks creeping up my inner arm, camouflaging the slight jut of my basilic vein.

I release a shaky breath. The Bloodrot has spread, just as I feared. There’s a reason violence is the deadliest sin. I knew murdering Pietersen would have an effect, but this…

A woman’s voice jolts me back to awareness.

“Malte?” The sound seems to carry up from the ground level. “Malte!” A dead man’s name hurled again and again; the sobering blow I was waiting for.

A baby begins to cry, and suddenly I find it hard to draw breath.

The unmistakable tap of footsteps sounds in the nearby stairwell as the baby’s wails grow shrill and piercing.

Pietersen’s wife and child, undoubtedly.

He had a fucking baby. I rarely stick around long enough to learn anything about those I kill on Gabriel’s behalf, but now the knowledge is inescapable.

Gabriel had to know about Pietersen’s family—that they would be at home—and he sent me anyway.

I clench my fists, fury spreading through my tainted veins.

I’m ruining other people’s lives while simultaneously ruining my own.

Every kill, every sin, ensures that death will come for me all the sooner, claws at the ready.

I don’t know why I’m still hesitating. If Pietersen’s wife catches me here, I’ll have to kill her too.

You are a ghost.

I press my lips together, thoughts whirling. There’s no way of getting back to the balcony without being spotted. I can only see one other option.

I fire a single shot through the window, then duck away from the glass that sprays Pietersen’s body. Wincing at the crunch, I leap onto the desk and kick at the remaining shards until there’s a jagged opening large enough to fit through.

The last thing I hear as I launch myself out the window is a woman’s bloodcurdling scream.

I hit the ground with a grunt and a graceless roll, every bone in my body protesting at the impact.

It’s not the first time I’ve leaped from such a height, but I’ve never been particularly good at sticking a landing.

Fingers scrabbling in the grass, I push myself to stand and tear across the yard, the air above me punctuated by gunshots.

It would appear Pietersen’s grief-stricken wife knows how to use a firearm.

Good for her, I think grimly, then reconsider as a bullet embeds itself in the ground beside me. I hiss a curse and launch into a sprint, not bothering to vary my path. The sliver of moon offers little illumination, so it’s dark enough that the woman has to be firing blindly.

The main road is mercifully close. I take a sharp turn the moment my boots hit pavement, flattening against the nearest building.

My chest heaves as I fight for breath, and my back is damp with sweat.

A quick scan of my clothing indicates that at least I avoided Pietersen’s blood.

The only evidence of my botched task is the bits of glass in my hair, and I shake them loose as best I can.

I need to get out of here. It’s not that I didn’t expect someone to find Pietersen’s body—I just didn’t plan on it being so soon.

Usually I’m long gone by the time someone notices my mark is dead.

Any moment now, Regiment vehicles will come skidding into the neighborhood, and Gabriel will have to pretend he doesn’t know a single goddamned thing about it.

He won’t be happy when I tell him about Pietersen’s wife. When you’re hired to sin for the Prophet, you don’t disappoint him.

Once I recover my breath, I take off at a rapid jog.

Soon the wealthy residential area gives way to the incandescent lamps and paved streets of the downtown core.

Relief courses through me as I inhale damp air.

In Sundbourg’s capital city of Valestadt, everything exists in monochrome, with each intermittent burst of watery light casting the concrete buildings around it into shadowed ambiguity.

It’s easy to blend in, and I become a phantom in a street where nobody will spare me a second look.

I keep my chin down as I pass a row of closed shops, awnings shuddering in the breeze.

My parents used to bring my sister and me here when we were young, and the memory has my chest clenching painfully.

We had loved spending a day in the heart of the capital, riding the train past the abandoned factories of the Outskirts until we spotted the cluster of government buildings in the distance.

But that was long ago, before my parents dragged our family to a remote community and did away with all traces of modern life.

I remember that day with excruciating clarity. It was the day my mother and father became unrecognizable versions of themselves. The day I’d thought with an eerie, horrible detachment: I suppose I don’t love them anymore.

Even after three years, I still don’t know how to deal with the commotion of a place like Valestadt. I’m not accustomed to the noise. To the crowds of people who would shy from me if they knew the truth.

Not that I have much use for other people. My entire existence revolves around Gabriel. It’s a sad existence, but what other options do I have? He’ll never let me go. I know too much, and he likewise knows each and every one of the terrible things I’ve done.

The moon has retreated into the clouds by the time I reach Gabriel’s home.

The absurdly grand building takes up half a city block, surrounded on all sides by a pointed cast-iron fence to conceal it from passersby.

If the Regiment is a modern kingdom, then Gabriel is the current king.

His entire property is imposing in an unwelcoming way.

This is only compounded by the Regiment agents who greet me at the gate, gray uniforms pristine and mouths unsmiling.

“Name?” the largest of the four agents asks as I approach.

“Talin Keller. Still.” It irks me, how committed they are to pretending they don’t recognize my face.

Gabriel’s personal security detail knows everything about him, which means they know what I do for the Prophet.

In fact, sworn to secrecy as they are, they’re the only Regiment agents who would recognize me at all.

The man makes a show of checking his notes. For what, I have no idea. It’s not like I have—or need—credentials. A heartbeat later he nods, adjusting his visored cap. “Go ahead.”

With that, I pass through the gate and into the Prophet’s home. The current head of the Regiment, the country’s salvation, and the most famous person in Sundbourg, my employer is powerful in every way that matters. To me, he’s all that matters.

And I’m desperate to be free of him.