Page 31 of Two Sides of Sin

I slowly slid my hand up her stomach, the friction of my palm harsh against her goose-bumped skin, and pinched her nipple between my thumb and forefinger. She let out a sharp gasp into my hand, her back arching, her wetness a slick brand on my fingertips that matched the heavy, pulsing ache in my own jeans.

I leaned in until my lips were brushing the shell of her ear, my voice dropping into a lethal crawl.

“Don’t be careless, little bird,” I growled, the vibration of my words enough to make her shiver. “Never make the mistake of thinking I’m him. My brother might be the one who writes you poems, but I’m the one who’s going to write your end.”

I tightened my grip on her, my shadow swallowing her whole.

“He’s the dream, June. I’m the nightmare. And when the time comes, there will be no mistaking who is who. You’ll be screaming my name, and only mine.”

Chapter 24

June

My first week at the diner felt like someone had finally cracked a window in a room that had been sealed for years.

I’ve met two girls, Cheryl and Cindy. They’re waitresses too, both around my age and living right on the edge of town, blissfully unaware of the shadows that follow me. They’re loud, they laugh at everything from broken coffee pots to bad tips, and most importantly, they don’t look at me with that heavy, cryptic weight that everyone in the twins’ orbit does. To them, I’m just June—the new girl who’s good at multitasking and has a bit of a mysterious vibe. They’ve invited me out for drinks after our shifts a few times, and for the first time in my life, I felt like a normal girl my age.

The ache in my chest from Julian is still there, of course. It’s like a phantom limb; I reach for the memory of his hand on my waist and find nothing but empty, biting air. But I’ve learned to push it down, deep into a corner of my soul I’ve boarded up, until it’s nothing more than a manageable throb. I tell myself I’m healing, even if the wound feels like it could rip open at any moment.

But then there is the other thing—the memory of last night that I’m still trying to convince myself was just a really fucked-up hallucination born out of exhaustion. I don’t know if it was a dream or a nightmare, but either way, it’s no good. It’s very bad, actually. I woke up to find Julian’s twin—his meaner mirror image, but for those predatory, mismatched eyes, standing over me in the dark, touching me in my sleep. And the worst part, the part that makes the bile rise in my throat and my face flush with heat, is that I liked it.

I should feel sick at the thought of Julian ever finding out, but as I stare at my reflection in the cracked diner mirror, a bitter defiance takes hold. What was I supposed to do? Should I even care? He was the one who kept pushing me away, leaving me to rot in the silence of Nana’s house. I’m lonely, and I won’t lie—I’m deeply ashamed at how easily I gave in to Cain after years of protesting my hate for him. My mind is a confused mess, caught between the memories of the man who promised me the world and the one who showed up to claim me.

Things were going perfectly at work, except for Julian’s frequent drop-ins. He’s made it a habit to show up during my busiest rushes, sliding into a corner booth and just watches me. He just sits there like a beautiful, silent gargoyle, his presence an invisible rope around my neck. At first, it made me so angry I wanted to throw a pot of scalding coffee at his head just to see him break that perfect mask. Now, I’ve found a better way to hurt him.

I refuse his table.

Every time he sits down, I walk right past him, treating him like a piece of the furniture. I send Cindy or Cheryl to take his order, watching from the safety of the kitchen window as his jaw twitches. I can see the fury in his eyes, a dark, simmering rage he tries to mask. I know him well enough to see the way his pulse jumps in his neck when I laugh at someone else’s joke. But he made this choice. He wanted distance? He got an ocean. He can live with the silence he created.

His arms, once clean-skinned, were now marked with fresh, dark lines. I stopped for a second too long, my eyes landing on his right forearm. My heart did a brutal somersault. There, etched into his skin in stark, charcoal-style ink, was the wilted rose I’d doodled on a napkin during a rainy afternoon at the manor three years ago. I remember him taking that napkin from me, tucking it into his pocket with a quiet smile. I’d thought he threw it away.

Beside it, wrapping around his wrist, were the lines of poetry I used to whisper to him when we were kids. Higher up was the crow I’d sketched in the margin of his Poe collection. My stomach turned over. He’d turned his body into a map of us—a map of the girl he’d told wasn’t a luxury he could afford. It was the ultimate contradiction; he was wearing my soul on his skin while refusing to hold my hand.

I felt a hot, stinging surge of tears and blinked them back. Why would you do that? I wanted to scream at him. But I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of knowing he’d gotten a reaction out of me, or that I’d even noticed them. I tightened my jaw, adjusted my tray, and walked right past him without a word.

The bell above the door chimed, a bright, silver sound that cut through the midday rush. I was mid-wipe on a sticky counter when I felt Cheryl and Cindy both nudge my arms, their eyes widening in a way that usually meant a high roller or a disaster had just walked in.

“Oh my god, look,” Cindy whispered, her voice practically vibrating.

I turned around, expecting to see Julian again, or maybe Cain’s predatory car idling at the curb like a shark in the shallows. Instead, I saw a guy who made me forget how to breathe for a second. He wasn’t like Julian; he didn’t look like he was carrying the weight of an ancient curse or a blood-soaked legacy. He moved with an easy, effortless grace, his jacket slung over one shoulder as if the world belonged to him. When he looked up, his eyes were framed by the thickest eyelashes I’d ever seen on a man, and he caught my gaze with a crooked, confident smile that made me blush instantly. It wasn’t a calculation; it was just a boy looking at a girl. It felt… normal.

“Who is that?” I asked, turning back to the girls as my face heated up like a furnace.

“That’s Billy,” Cheryl said, her voice dropping into a doting sigh. “He’s been out of town for a few months. He’s trouble, June, but the best kind of trouble. The kind that takes you on a motorcycle ride and has you home at sunrise.”

The service bell dinged, pulling us out of our collective haze. We all scrambled back to work, but as I turned to head for the kitchen, I caught sight of Julian’s booth. He wasn’t looking at his coffee anymore. He was staring at Billy with a deathly, murderous glare that would have made a weaker man crumble into the floorboards. His knuckles were white where they gripped the edge of the diner table, and the air around him seemed to darken—a physical manifestation of the jealousy he had no right to feel. It was the look of a man watching someone touch his most prized possession, despite having thrown it away himself.

A small, wicked thought bloomed in my mind, sharp and exhilarating. Julian had spent six months playing with my heart, keeping me on a leash of “cold protection” while telling me we couldn’t be together. Maybe it was time to show him that I wasn’t just a bird in his cage; I was a girl who could fly away with someone else.

I walked past Julian’s booth, my head held high and my heart hammering a frantic anxious beat. I didn’t acknowledge him, I never did anymore, but I made sure to put a little extra swing in my hips, knowing his eyes were burning into my body all the way until I pushed through the swinging doors of the kitchen. If Julian wanted to watch me so badly, I was going to give him a front-row seat to me moving on.

Inside, the air was thick with the smell of onion rings and industrial degreaser. Perched on a stainless-steel shelf, a small, grease splattered radio was fighting against the hum of the overhead vents, churning out the heavy, melodic synth of Alice Cooper’s “Poison.”

Cheryl and Cindy were right on my heels, waiting for their orders and immediately launching back into their gossip without missing a beat.

“What’s the go with the tattooed, hot, creepy dude?” Cindy asked, nodding towards the window that looked out into the dining room where Julian sat like a storm cloud in a bright room. “He’s always here, June. Always staring at you. It’s starting to get weird. Do you need us to call the cops? He isn’t a stalker, is he?”

I looked through the glass just as the chorus swelled, Alice Cooper’s raspy snarl filling the kitchen: “I wanna kiss you, but I want it too much… I wanna taste you, but your lips are venomous poison.”