Page 76 of Two Sides of Sin

“I have to stay away, Sage. Because when I’m near you, my hands forget they’re supposed to stay at my sides,” he whispered, the words torn out of him like a broken confession.

The night went dead silent, and the air between us practically caught fire.

Chapter 48

Julian

The words hung in the quiet night air, a turbulent, bleeding truth I hadn’t meant to let out of its cage.

I braced myself. I waited for the natural human instinct of self-preservation to kick in. I waited for her eyes to widen with confusion, for her to take a step back up those crumbling stone stairs and retreat behind the safety of a locked door.

It was what she should do. It was what any sane person would do when someone tells them, they cannot be trusted.

But Sage didn’t step back.

She took a sharp breath, her chest rising under her fitted top, and she stepped down. Her shoe hit the damp pavement. Then she took another step.

My heart, a dead and useless organ in my chest, seized. Stop, I commanded her silently, my hands curling so tightly into fists inside my pockets that the fabric threatened to tear. Run away from me, Sage. Please.

But she kept coming, erasing the safe distance I had deliberately put between us. She stopped right in front of me, so close I could feel the intoxicating heat of her living, breathing body. With my heightened senses, the proximity was undeniable torture. I could smell the charcoal dust on her fingers from drawing, the sweet vanilla on her throat, and the underlying, chaotic spike of her adrenaline and pheromones.

She tilted her head back to look up at me. I towered over her, casting her in my shadow, but she didn’t flinch. There wasn’t a single ounce of fear in those captivating ocean-blue eyes. Only a fierce, reckless defiance that was so painfully, beautifully familiar it almost brought me to my knees.

“You don’t get to decide what I can and cannot handle,” she spat out.

“And you don’t get to make sweeping declarations about being toxic just to scare me off.”

“Sage—” I warned.

I tried to take a step back, to retreat into the dark where I belonged, but my body refused to obey. The gravitational pull of her soul was too profound.

“No,” she interrupted, her chin lifting stubbornly. She didn’t retreat. “You don’t get to protect me from yourself. I’ve spent my entire life feeling overlooked, Julian. People ignoring me, looking right through me. I’m not going to let you walk away because you think you’re bad for me. I’m not afraid of you.”

I closed my eyes, a broken sound escaping my chest.

She had no idea. She had no idea what she was standing in front of. She didn’t know about the Manor, or the blood, or the fact that I had spent the last century committing atrocities in the dark just to burn the time until she returned.

“You should be,” I whispered.

I opened my eyes and looked down at her and pulled my hands out of my pockets, the need to touch her becoming overwhelming.

She deserved better than you, Julian. She deserves a second chance.

I didn’t trust myself enough to touch her, instead, I lifted my hand up, my knuckles grazing the very edge of her sketchbook where she held it against her chest.

“You have no idea what you’re doing,”

“You don’t know the things I’ve done. You don’t know what I am. If you knew what I was thinking about doing to you right now, if you knew exactly what goes through my head every time I look at you… you wouldn’t be standing here. You would run.”

Under the weight of my gaze, you could tell she was terrified of the gravity between us, I could see it in the rigid line of her shoulders, yet she remained anchored to the earth, entirely caught in my orbit.

“I’m not running,” Sage whispered, her breath ghosting warmly across my jaw. Her fingers tightened around her sketchbook. “So stop warning me, Julian. If you’re so dangerous… prove it.”

The last civilised piece of me finally broke.

The sketchbook hit the pavement with a soft thud. I didn’t even notice I had knocked it out of her hands. In a fraction of a second, I closed the distance between us, my hands shooting out to grip her waist. I spun her around, pressing her back against the rough stone wall of the barracks annex.

I didn’t do it gently, but I didn’t hurt her either. I just needed her pinned. I needed to feel the solid, undeniable reality of her body against mine.