The Sinner Hunting System-Chapter 61: Hell on Earth

"Director, are you alright?"

The moment Charva left the room, Evelyn looked at the bed.

She hesitated for a long moment, then carefully removed the metal hair clip from Sasha’s hair and tucked it into a tear in her old clothing, a hole that had opened naturally into a small hidden pocket, just wide enough.

She checked the doorway. The witch was gone.

She went to Golana first, steadying her before she could fall.

Golana pressed her hand against her burning cheek, eyes vacant, speaking to no one.

"She asked for a large pot. And she wants Sasha. Does she intend to..."

The thought reached its conclusion before the words did.

She grabbed the wall and retched, her body trying to expel something that wasn’t there.

Several heaves produced only a small amount of stomach acid. She hadn’t eaten in two days. There was nothing left.

She slid down the wall and sat on the floor, both hands over her face, as helpless as any of the children she’d spent years trying to protect.

"Goddess, why must I face this..." 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

Raphael watched without speaking. His hands had closed into fists at some point without him noticing. He breathed slowly and deliberately and held the feeling where it was.

At least now he understood. And he had found the first thread.

The hair clip.

---

The scene broke and rebuilt around a different room, small, tucked into a quiet corner of the monastery, clearly unused for some time.

A fire burned under a large iron pot, the flames low and steady, the contents giving off a sharp herbal smell that spread through the enclosed space.

Sister Maria held Evelyn’s hand and looked at Charva with undisguised unease.

"Why must she be here? She’s a child. She shouldn’t have to witness something like this."

Charva glanced at Evelyn with the brief, sideways attention of someone noting an item of interest.

"Because she’s different. The specifics are none of your concern."

She produced a small vial and held it out.

"Give her this. Think of it as a sedative, it suppresses all emotional responses and delays them, compresses them for release years from now. It will prevent her from being overwhelmed by what happens next."

A slight pause. "The cost is that when the emotions finally surface, she will have no memory of the days before it. But that may be a kindness."

Maria took the vial and looked at Golana.

The director nodded once, barely.

Maria swallowed whatever she had wanted to say and gave it to Evelyn.

Evelyn drank it without hesitation. Her eyes went briefly unfocused.

Then she settled into a stillness that was wrong in a specific way, not calm, but empty.

The fear of the witch, the grief for Sasha, the anxiety about everything that had been building for months, all of it smoothed away, leaving a surface with nothing moving beneath it.

"This is..."

Maria pressed her lips together and said nothing more.

Charva looked at Evelyn with quiet satisfaction, then turned away and said something under her breath, low enough that the two women behind her caught none of it.

Raphael, standing among them as an observer from another time entirely, heard every word.

"An unawakened witch, found in a place like this. I wonder what kind of despair, what kind of emotional extremity, will finally bring her into herself. I’m looking forward to finding out."

He turned the words over.

"So a witch isn’t complete at birth. There’s an awakening, a threshold, like Manson, carrying the werewolf bloodline dormant until something broke him open."

Evelyn glanced up at him.

Their awareness met across the distance of years, two consciousnesses in the same memory, from entirely different directions. The girl held the look for a moment.

Then she turned back to the room without expression, and the other people around her went on without ever registering his presence.

"You’re here, aren’t you. At least some part of you is." He exhaled. "Is this why you’ve closed yourself off, Evelyn?"

She didn’t answer. He didn’t expect her to, not yet.

He turned his attention back to Charva.

She had finished her preparations. She looked at Sasha the way someone looks at material they are about to work with, moved her to the table, and closed her eyes.

Golana and Maria closed their own eyes. They kept them closed.

Only Evelyn watched, her newly emptied expression reflecting everything without registering any of it.

In those pale green eyes, just beginning to carry their color, the entire sequence played out.

Charva’s movements efficient and completely without hesitation, the work of someone who had done this before and approached it as technique. Methodical. Thorough.

A hand came free from the table and hit the floor. Blood reached Evelyn’s cheek, still carrying traces of warmth.

Raphael was an observer, incorporeal, and even so the wrongness of it pressed against him with real weight.

He’d processed violent crime scenes in the Black Gloves years, had seen what people did to each other in the worst circumstances.

This was different. This had the quality of routine. That was what made it worse.

The process lasted several minutes.

When Charva had taken what she needed, she pushed the remainder aside with her foot, the same gesture someone uses when moving debris out of the way, and turned to the pot.

Everything she’d collected went in together with the existing herbs.

The liquid in the pot thickened rapidly. The smell that had been filling the room shifted, the sharpness of the herbs giving way to something stranger, layered, almost pleasant in a way that made the pleasantness itself feel wrong.

Something floral, something clean, something warm.

It cooled faster than it should have and settled into a pale cream, the color and consistency of an ordinary cosmetic product.

Charva dipped one finger in and applied a small amount to the back of her hand.

The skin there changed, the lines softening, the texture tightening, the visible markers of middle age retreating until the hand looked two decades younger.

"Excellent. The nobility will pay well for this. Any of them."

She decanted it into a small jar, sealed it, and put it away. Then she addressed the two women who were still standing with their eyes firmly shut.

"You can look now."

They opened their eyes.

The scene in front of them took a moment to process.

Both of them went down, Golana first, then Maria, their bodies making the decision before their minds caught up, the malnutrition making the shock more than they could absorb upright.

The room held only Evelyn still standing, and Charva, and the silence between them.

"I’m going to kill you."

Evelyn said it quietly, without inflection, the way she might state any simple fact.

Charva looked at her with something that was almost appreciation.

"I’ll be waiting, little witch."