Page 74 of Two Sides of Sin

“If I had that kind of magic, I’d use it to get us an air conditioner,” I laughed, shaking my head.

“Fair point,” Noah chuckled. Then, his gaze shifted past my shoulder towards the entrance of the tent. His grin widened into something too smug. “Ah. Speaking of the mad man himself.”

The laughter died in my throat.

I turned around just as Julian stepped through the canvas flaps. He brought the heavy, suffocating gravity of a storm front in with him. He was in his full tactical gear, minus the helmet, his dark hair slightly messy from the heat.

He looked entirely too good.

But it was his face that made my heart stutter. He looked completely disheveled. The dark circles under his eyes were profound, and he was staring at me with a raw, bleeding anguish that told me he had been standing right outside the tent. He had heard every word we both said.

“Come to scowl at the inventory, Jules?” Noah called out cheerfully, oblivious to the suffocating tension. “Or did you just miss my radiant personality already?”

Julian ignored him completely. His eyes stayed locked onto me, tracking over my body. The muscle in his sharp jaw feathered—a microscopic tick that I was quickly learning meant he was fighting for control of his mind.

“Command needs the manifest,” Julian said, his voice low, sounding exhausted.

“It’s right here,” I said, my voice betraying me by coming out a little breathless.

I turned back to the crates to grab the clipboard I had set down earlier, but my elbow clipped a small cardboard box of charcoal pencils. It tipped over the edge, spilling a dozen of them across the dusty tarp floor.

“Oh, shoot,” I muttered.

I crouched down, dropping to one knee to gather them up. As I reached out, the hem of my white crop top shifted, exposing the skin of my lower ribs and waist on my right side.

I didn’t think anything of it until I felt the air in the tent suddenly shift.

It was a physical drop in temperature. I froze, my fingers wrapping around one of the pencils, and glanced over my shoulder.

Julian had stopped dead in his tracks. His eyes were locked with a terrifying, laser-like focus on the exposed skin of my ribs.

Right where a very small, delicate tattoo was inked in fine cursive lettering.

“Nevermore.”

I had gotten it impulsively when I was eighteen. On the surface, it was an homage to my lifelong obsession with Edgar Allan Poe and the melancholic, gothic poetry I used to bury myself in to escape my lonely childhood. But deep down, I couldn’t explain why I really needed it inked on my skin—I just kept having these vivid, recurring dreams of a dark forest, a terrifyingly beautiful man, and the harsh cry of a crow. The word had felt like a brand I was already carrying on the inside, so I put it on the outside.

Julian looked like he had just been shot at point-blank range.

The icy, military vault he had locked himself in yesterday shattered into a million pieces. His chest rose and fell in uneven breaths. The look on his face was a devastating cocktail of angst, profound confusion, and a dark, simmering frustration that looked like it was going to tear him apart from the inside out. He stared at the word on my skin as if it were a direct message written specifically to mock him.

“Jules?” Noah asked, his teasing tone fading into genuine concern. “Hey, man. You good?”

Julian didn’t answer. His hands, resting at his sides, curled into tight, trembling fists. He dragged his gaze up from my ribs to meet my eyes, the intensity burning in his stare pinned me to the floor. He looked at me like I was a puzzle he was desperately trying to put together, but the pieces were coated in glass and making his hands bleed.

For three torturous seconds, the air in the tent was sucked into the vacuum of his stare. I stopped breathing. I waited for him to say something—to ask about the tattoo, to make a sarcastic comment, anything….

Instead, the muscle in his jaw twitched one last time. The devastating vulnerability in his eyes slammed shut behind an impenetrable, icy wall, once again.

Without a single word, he turned on his heel and walked straight back out of the tent.

The canvas flaps swung wildly in his wake, leaving a heavy, stunned silence behind him.

I stayed frozen on one knee for a moment, a charcoal pencil still gripped tightly in my fingers. Then, the shock began to recede, rapidly replaced by a hot, prickling wave of pure irritation.

I stood up, aggressively yanking the hem of my crop top down, and threw the pencil back into the cardboard box.

“What the hell is his problem?” I commanded, the frustration bleeding into my voice.