Seventeen, not only had she been allowed to wander around every corner of the ground floor on his watch, Wrath had granted her the luxury of a bedroom upstairs. Still she was chained to a metal pipe in a grimy bed that would fit a child, while her diminutive space bore windows that were nailed shut. He heard no complaint from her, despite the mordant remarks at the dinner table, she kept silent.

She had her period late. She noticed it from a change of her underclothes while she had her supper. Two years ago she had the monthly struggle of swathing her pelvic area with rags like a thick loincloth to conceal her bleeding whenever she presented herself in front of him. She would keep her distance cautiously and subtly, fearing he may eventually smell her. It relieved her how Wrath hadn’t questioned her sudden remoteness at those instances.

He may have known all along. There was a time he walked into the bathroom while she immersed herself in a tub, never in a slackened way, but always hunkered and tensed while scrubbing herself gleaming. 

He had that doleful look on his face, as though he was exhausted from a day’s work. She looked up at him, stopped, and gathered her legs. He leaned against the wall and folded his arms, like a bored audience at a spectacle. “What is it?” Sin asked.

Wrath scowled. “Are you enjoying yourself?”

Sin’s head lowered, “I’m sorry. I won’t take another minute.”

Her lowered voice didn’t oblige Wrath to leave her, instead he came closer, crouching down beside the tub. “One thing you’ll have to learn is that despite that we can’t enjoy the taste of food in our mouths,” he went on, “our senses still throb on the presence of a warm-blooded creature thriving in close proximity. I wonder, you’re of age. You’re technically a lady,” Wrath’s head tilted towards her mischievously, then he stretched out a hand, trailed his fingers down her thigh, “were you ever curious? Have you ever touched yourself?”

His fingers trailed further, immersing into the water to reach down between her legs. Sin, compulsively, rose up to the corner of the tub with her legs tightly clenched, her arms folded around her breasts. It failed to unsettle Wrath, instead he glowered at her, watching her confounded and trembling while he sat motionless, bearing the look of a predator irked at the sight of a deer fumbling frantically at the edge of a cliff.

“Dry yourself up,” he directed her, “put on your clothes and wrap yourself up in a way you won’t be bleeding all over the floor.” He stood up, flinging a towel at her as he stepped out.

Sin held her utensils with great apprehension at the dinner table, scraping onto the plate savagely with a serrated knife. Wrath paid no attention to the exasperating brawl between her and the knife, instead he inspected his wineglass in lost contemplation. The whole time they were an extremely contrasted duo saturated in dim candlelight. When Wrath spoke, she slightly shuddered like a twitchy lab rat.

“Have you ever been at war, Sin?” he asked, “people are killing and dying and devouring each other. Women and children, they are plagued with the same fragile limbs and penetrable skin that could just shrivel and decay like everything else.”

He stretched out and folded his arms, bent down to rest his chin on the table. “Humanity. They only decide what is inhumane when they are the ones being violated, and still, that sensation of crushing a life in your hands, that supremacy you feel when one throws himself at your feet begging for his life, what is humane is irrelevant. Every single one of us has that innate desire to be a god. Every single one of us has the desire to be marveled at and adulated. Do you know why? Because we are made in God’s image. It’s entirely inevitable.”

Sin only stared at him, preoccupied herself on taking a slice of her roast. “Do you want to lecture me on how a woman is always disparaged and is meant to be raped and killed for deliberately tearing herself from a man’s control?”

Wrath smiled at her, his eyes widened. “Is that why you always hate being called a catholic? What did your mother say to you? To honor God with your body? To preserve yourself?”

Sin dared not to utter a word, but in uncontainable rage shook her head and pounded the table with her fist.

Wrath, in amusement, lifted his glass in the air, then approached her to lift her chin. “Finish your meal,” he told her, “then join me in the drawing room.”