Read Sinner for Free Online Page A

with a teaspoon, and stepped lightly across the tile floor toward the living room, warming her hands with the steaming porcelain cup.
    Eight p.m. She could either watch the latest episode of The Thirty, which she recorded weekly, or settle for a bit of Net surfing before curling up in bed with the latest Frakes novel, Birthright , which had to be the best of the vampire series so far.
    Thinking of the book, she stopped halfway to the love seat in the middle of her living room. Maybe she should just skip the Net and head to bed. Nothing was worse than reading too late and falling asleep two or three pages into a novel. It had taken her a month to read a novel in fits and starts last year—some vampire-romance book that wasn’t very interesting, but that was beside the point. She vowed never to read in such short spurts again.
    No, she would surf first and see if anyone had left her any messages while she was at it. She eased into the large leather seat and tapped the built-in controller on the right arm. A five-foot screen on the wall brightened.
    Loading . . .
    Her mind tripped back to the review at the plant. She still wasn’t entirely sure what had happened. The world was running scared from lawsuits, and her employers had seen her aggressive reaction as a sure sign of her intent.
    Had they really doubled her salary? Or had she misunderstood that part? Either way, she hardly cared as long as they left her alone, which they were. For now.
    She had a near perfect job.
    She had her sweet mint tea.
    She had the Net.
    It was indeed good to be alive.
    Truth be told, she couldn’t remember ever feeling so content as she did now. It had taken years of hard work and hundreds of hours of counseling, but she was finally coming to grips with her demons. So to speak.
    She’d repressed large chunks of her memory in an effort to survive a tortured past in a monastery, her therapist had concluded. Dissociative amnesia resulting from traumatic events. This was why she’d with-drawn from normal living in favor of the protected environment she’d built for herself.
    Billy.
    A smile tempted her lips. She did remember her first love. More of a crush, maybe.
    The screen waited, homepage loaded. Square windows into her customized on-demand world displayed slots for Entertainment,News, Friends, Services , and Other .
    She quickly checked to see if any messages had come from Susan, a Net friend whom she’d met only once in person but a thousand times on the screen. The only person other than her therapist who knew everything about Darcy. No messages.
    The only noteworthy news was a story about a lynching in Kansas City, the third such lynching in three states. Race related. You’d think the world would have learned by now that race had nothing to do with anything. She had no patience for such stories.
    No need to order groceries. She spun through the menus, running through a mental checklist of loose ends and options. This screen was her world in a box. A nice, easy world that accommodated her love of vampires and heroes and saber-toothed villains capped in black. Fictional bad guys, mythical monsters. Safe fantasy.
    Finding nothing that drew her attention, Darcy got stuck on a half-hour comedy show that she found only vaguely humorous, Three’s Company, a new show that made fun of one Hindu, one Muslim, and one Christian who shared an apartment in Manhattan.
    She found anything religious unsettling; anything to do with priests deeply disturbing. But the writers of this show leveled some of the most audacious religious slurs imaginable with a humorous boldness that she found at times irresistible, if a bit embarrassing. Particularly when it came to Christians, or, as the show sometimes characterized them using the most offensive of all religious slurs, blood—
    Darcy cut the thought short. However wounded she might be over her own run-in with the church, she wouldn’t stoop to such bigoted