Page 106 of Two Sides of Sin

“Shhh,” I whispered into the phone, my voice a smooth, icy drawl.

“She is perfectly safe, brother,” My eyes locked onto her terrified, paralysed gaze. “I’m taking excellent care of her.”

I leaned down, my lips brushing the shell of Sages ear. She couldn’t flinch. She couldn’t turn away. She just had to lie there and feel my breath against her skin.

Julian let out an inaudible shout of obscenities and threats on the other end of the line as the realisation hit.

I smiled, pressing my thumb gently against her bottom lip.

“Goodnight, Julian,” I said mockingly.

I tapped the red button, ending the call, and dropped the phone onto the nightstand, leaving my twin to drown in the silence of his failure while I stayed in bed with the girl he loves.

Chapter 59

Julian

The line went dead.

She is perfectly safe, brother. I’m taking excellent care of her… Goodnight, Julian.

The heavy, military-grade plastic of the satellite phone groaned in my hand. A second later, it shattered. Shards of black plastic and sparking wires dug deep into my palm, drawing thick, dark blood, but I didn’t feel a single ounce of pain.

I couldn’t feel anything except the sudden, apocalyptic roar of the beast I had spent a lifetime keeping chained inside my chest.

“Cain,” I breathed, the name ripping out of my throat as a feral snarl.

My vision tunnelled, the edges bleeding into a deep, untamed predatory rage. He was in her room. He was sitting on her bed. The suffocating terror of knowing exactly what my brother was capable of doing to her hit me like a punch in the stomach, threatening to drop me to my knees.

I am going to tear his head from his fucking shoulders.

The carefully constructed, disciplined human facade I had worn for this entire deployment disintegrated. I didn’t care about the military. I didn’t care about the chain of command, the treason, or the consequences. I had spent a hundred years running from my past to keep her safe, and Cain had just ripped the doors wide open.

I dropped the mangled remains of the phone onto the concrete floor.

I grabbed my tactical vest, my sidearm, and a combat knife, strapping them over my black t-shirt. Every single muscle in my body was tense and vibrating with a lethal, world-ending fury.

I kicked the heavy metal door of the barracks open so hard it dented against the exterior stone wall, the sound echoing like a gunshot across the quiet, mist-shrouded courtyard.

“Blackburn!”

A voice barked from the shadows near the motor pool. Sergeant Miller, a massive, heavily built man who strictly adhered to protocol, stepped into my path, his hand resting cautiously on his holstered weapon.

“Blackburn, what the hell was that? Where do you think you’re going?”

I didn’t even slow down, I don’t have time for this shit.

“Out of my way, Sergeant,”

“You are confined to the sector until the withdrawal orders are finalised,” he warned, stepping squarely in front of me, squaring his shoulders. “I need you to stand down and⁠—”

I closed the distance between us before he could finish the sentence, before he could even blink.

My hand shot out, wrapping around his thick throat. I lifted the deadly trained soldier effortlessly off the pavement with a single arm, slamming his back against the stone pillar of the cloisters with bone-fracturing force.

Miller choked, his eyes rolling wide in shock and horror. He grappled desperately at my arm, his boots kicking empty air, but my grip was like a bear trap.

I stepped fully into the pale wash of the security floodlights, and let the sadist to the surface.