Page 37 of Two Sides of Sin

A sharp spike of guilt pierced my chest at the flash of fear in her eyes, but I couldn't back down. I couldn't afford to be gentle. Not tonight. I stepped into her space, gripping the edges of the sink behind her so she was pinned between my arms, forcing her to see the gravity of what we were standing in.

"I need to know that you understand," I said, my voice dropping to a harsh, fierce whisper that vibrated with panic. "This is serious. This isn't a game. You can’t ever tell anybody. Not a soul. Because if this gets out, I am gone from your life forever. Do you hear me? They will lock me away and you will never see me again."

She stared up at me, momentarily caught off guard, her breath hitching in her throat. The soft, comforting girl from a minute ago was gone, replaced by someone who finally realised exactly what kind of man was standing in her bathroom.

"Promise me," I demanded, my hands tightening on the porcelain until my knuckles turned white. "Promise me, June."

"I promise," she whispered, her voice trembling, her eyes locked onto mine. "I promise, Julian."

A single, silent tear tracked through the dark bruise on her cheek.

“He’s gone,” I reassured her. “He doesn’t exist anymore. He can’t touch you. He can’t even dream of you. He is for the bloodworms now.”

She collapsed against me, burying her face in the crook of my neck. I wrapped my raw, aching arms around her, pulling her flush against my chest. I didn’t care that I was damp with sweat and covered in filth; I just needed to feel the comforting heat of her.

“I missed you,” she sobbed into my skin, her fingers digging into the ink on my arm.

I pulled her back into her bedroom, the morning light now bright enough to show the true extent of our wreckage. I sat on the edge of the bed, and she climbed into my lap, straddling me. The heat between us now was different. It wasn’t just lust; it was a desperate, clawing need for survival.

I looked at her, my heart breaking for the thousandth time. She was beautiful, even with the bruise, even with the split lip. She was my girl, whether she liked it or not. She had been baptised in the blood I’d spilled for her.

“I’m not going anywhere,” I promised, my forehead resting against hers.

“Look at me, June,” I commanded softly.

She looked up, her eyes searching mine. I saw the devotion there—and her sweet, blind trust I had worked so hard to destroy. It was back, but it was tainted now. She loved the killer. She loved the man who had turned his body into a map of her heart and his hands into tools of death.

“I love you,” she whispered, the words a final, death sentence.

I didn’t say it back. I couldn’t. Not yet. Instead, I just pulled her back under the covers, tucking her head under my chin, my blistered hands holding her tight as the world woke up around us—a world that had no idea that a man was missing.

Chapter 28

June

It’s been a few days since the silence of the woods was replaced by the silence of the manor, and I haven’t left Julian’s side for more than a heartbeat. It’s a strange, dizzying whiplash—as if the months of icy rejection and the cold shoulder he gave me in the garden were just a bad dream I finally woke up from. The wall between us was being pulverised, ground into the dirt along with the sack of shit Julian left in the peat bog.

But even as Julian pulls me closer, a new, sharper kind of terror is taking root in my chest. I thought we were finished for good. I thought he’d finally thrown me away like trash, leaving me to rot in the mundane life of a small town diner waitress. But now that he’s back in my life, now that his hands are back on my body, I find myself praying every single second that he never finds out about Cain and I.

I don’t trust Cain. I see him in the hallways, a dark shadow that never quite fades, and every time our eyes meet, I feel the weight of our secret crushing me. He looks at me with a glint in his mismatched eyes—a silent, mocking reminder of the night he stood in my bedroom like a sleep paralysis demon. He knows. He knows he holds the power now, and I swear he loves seeing me suffer, watching me squirm under the suffocating pressure of his gaze while Julian remains blissfully unaware.

But I’m grateful for Julian in a way that’s almost frightening, a devotion that borders on religious. Every time I close my eyes, I see the moonlight glinting off Billy’s eyelashes, that split second of predatory intent, and then the sudden, violent spray of red. I can’t imagine what would have happened if my shadow hadn’t been watching. I haven’t gone back to the diner. I can’t bear to answer Cheryl’s or Cindy’s calls, to explain how Billy vanished into thin air, or why I’m never coming back to that world of pancakes and coffee. Being “normal” was a beautiful dream that turned quickly into a visceral nightmare.

Now, I’m back in the gravity of the Blackburns. Reading in the garden while Julian’s gaze anchors me to the earth, being guarded like a precious, fragile prisoner who never wants to be paroled.

The air in Julian’s bedroom at the manor was thick, heavy with the scent of the cedar wood cologne that always seemed to cling to him. Outside, the dark sky was weeping against the tall, arched windows of the estate, but inside the sanctuary of his four-poster bed, the world felt claustrophobically small.

Julian was lying over me, his broad shoulders blocking out the dim, shadowed architecture of the room, pinning me beneath his familiar, comforting weight. I looked up at him, my fingers tangled in the heavy linen sheets, the ache in my chest finally breaking the silence we’d been hiding behind in these drafty halls.

"Why did you leave me, Julian?" I whispered, my voice straining in the dark.

His expression crumbled, the usual saintly armour he wore melting away into raw, bleeding torment. He looked down at me, his chest rising and falling heavily against mine. "I didn’t want to, June bug," he murmured, his voice a low rumble. "God, I never wanted to. But I thought... I thought I was doing the right thing. To keep you safe from the mess of my life. I'm so sorry."

A hot, unexpected tear slipped down my temple, and Julian instantly caught it, the pad of his thumb wiping the moisture away with a fierce tenderness.

"Every second I wasn't with you, you haunted me, June," he whispered, leaning down until his breath brushed my lips. "I couldn't escape the guilt of letting you go. I betrayed my own soul when I hurt you, and in doing so, I broke both our hearts. I'll never do it again. I'll never leave your side."

When his mouth met mine, the kiss was a desperate, passionate collision of grief and profound devotion. He held the side of my face, his fingers anchoring me as his lips traveled frantically over my jaw, my cheeks, my eyelids, covering me in a tender attack of apologies.