Sin's Dark Caress by Tracey O'Hara Page B

afraid.”
    â€œMcManus, you were a thirteen-year-old kid. You witnessed more than any kid should have, you helped nearly a dozen other kids to safety and you were suffering severe burns.” She stroked his hair. “You did more than I could possibly imagine.”
    â€œBut it wasn’t enough.”
    â€œThere was nothing more you could’ve done.”
    He wiped at his damp cheeks, feeling a little stupid. “Fuck me.” It’d been almost a decade since he last cried over the Sisterhood, and the tears surprised him. He drew back and looked at Bianca. She was so close, so soft, and so warm. Her moist eyes were filled with pride, not pity. He wiped away a tear with the pad of his thumb and moved closer. Her lips parted.
    He stopped and pulled back before he did something stupid, and caught what looked like a flash of regret in her eyes.
    Clearing his throat, he looked away. “When I became a cop, I looked into the police records leading up to the fire and found some strange incidents the sisters reported. Spot fires, stones thrown through windows, threats against the sisters and the orphans. But no one would listen. Even the report on the final fire said it was an unfortunate accident caused by a gas leak. But the sisters never used the gas. No one believed us about Sister Morgan either. They said it was just the trauma of everything that happened.”
    â€œThat’s why you became a cop?”
    He nodded. “And I found out that a rival coven corporation was trying to buy the land. They purchased it for a song after the fire and put up a housing development. Nothing I turned up could prove they were involved with what happened to the Sanctum, but I know they were. I know it. Fucking witches.”
    He looked down at his hands, which were no longer shaking. “I became a cop so I could make sure this didn’t happen to anyone else.”
    â€œGood ambition. Impossible, but still a good ambition.” Bianca smiled and the tension went out of him. “You were burned pretty badly.”
    â€œTurned out to be not as bad as they first thought. When I was admitted to the hospital, they diagnosed severe second, third, and fourth degree burns to seventy percent of my body. I healed too quickly for that.”
    â€œWhat about the other children?” she asked.
    â€œBy the time I was discharged, the others had been sent to different foster homes and institutions. Me and Gavin ended up at the Cedar’s Home for Boys.”
    Bianca sucked back her breath. “Oh, McManus, I’m so sorry.”
    He hated thinking of that place. “I was there three years, until just before I was sixteen when I met the cop who saved my life. He and his wife took me in. Gavin was smart and only in Cedar’s for six months. Last I heard, he’s changed his name to Wayne Gray and is some high-flying lawyer type on the West Coast. I lost touch with most of the others. But Isabelle . . .”
    Sweet, brave little Isabelle . . . Her broken body surrounded by candles and other thaumaturgic paraphernalia.
    â€œThat little girl from the newspaper clipping?” she asked.
    He nodded. “When I was fresh out of the police academy, I attended a disturbance call.” The image of her body in that fleabag motel was burnt into his brain forever. “They weren’t witches, just wannabes. When I found her in that room, her innocence had been stolen, her face all swollen and mottled with bruises; her naked body abused, raped, and stabbed over a hundred times.”
    â€œOh, McManus,” she said, squeezing his hand. “I’m so sorry.”
    â€œI saved her once, but I couldn’t save her when she really needed me.”
    The memory of her death reminded him of their latest case. There’d been so much blood. Yet the murder scene of the first eviscerated girl had been surprisingly clean. The coroner surmised she’d been murdered somewhere else