11. Cain
Cain
The silence of our house was a relief after the suffocating sentimentality of the evening.
Upstairs, Julian had retreated to his sanctuary, no doubt to trace the phantom shape of June’s smile in the dark or weep over the Polaroids of her he keeps tucked away like holy relics.
He was always the dreamer, the one who wanted to believe that the cage could be made of velvet and poetry.
I was the destroyer. I was the one who understood that a cage, no matter how gilded, required a grip that never faltered and control at its core.
I stepped into my office and locked the door with a soft, final click.
The sound echoed in the high-ceilinged room, a period at the end of a sentence.
I knew Julian wouldn’t be impressed with what I was about to do.
I could almost feel his silent judgment through the floorboards—those weary, moralistic sighs he gave whenever I reminded him of the cold reality of our existence.
He would call this a betrayal, taking things too far.
He would talk about how we should be “nurturing her spirit” and “giving her time to heal.”
I didn’t care. Julian was starting to forget the point of all this, drifting into the fog of his own longing and delusion.
He was becoming soft, distracted by the way she smelled of vanilla, and grief.
I would have to remind him soon—remind him of the ritual, the pact, the blood, and the years we have spent preparing for this specific harvest.
Lately, June has been a brat. There is no other word for it.
She’s been giving me the cold shoulder, moving through the house like a ghost that refuses to be seen.
Her silence is a weapon she wields with a new, irritating brand of teenage arrogance.
It was starting to fucking piss me off. The way she flinches when my shadow crosses hers, the way she deliberately leaves a room the moment I enter—it was a level of defiance I hadn’t authorised.
But the more she pushes, the more she tries to claw her way out from under my thumb, the more I crave to break her back into place.
Every time she rolls her eyes or turns her back on me, a primal, untamed need to break her spirit flares in my gut.
I find my mind drifting to darker corners, imagining exactly how I’d enforce her obedience.
I’ve spent more than one night staring at the ceiling, fantasising about having her handcuffed and helpless.
I want her bound to my bed, every limb pinned and secured until she has no choice but to look at me.
I want her defenceless at my mercy, where her only job is to exist for my satisfaction.
She thinks she’s winning by ignoring me, but all she’s doing is making me want to prove that in this house, I am the only one who dictates.
One of these days, she’s going to push me too far, and she’ll realise that being a ghost is much safer than being the core of my undivided attention.
But it was her eyes that truly galled me.
When she looks at Julian, her eyes are wide, luminous things—soft doe eyes, liquid with a misplaced, desperate adoration.
She looks at him as if he is the sun, the only thing keeping her from freezing to death in the wake of her cousin’s passing.
But the moment those eyes land on me, the shutters slam shut.
The light is extinguished, replaced by a cold dread.
It’s something dark and addictive that stands in total opposition to the warmth she offers my brother.
It pisses me off because it was a territory I had not yet conquered.
It made my blood simmer with a need to reach out and tilt her chin up until she had no choice but to see me.
One day, I would make her look up at me with those same doe eyes.
I would own that gaze, that softness, even if I had to pin her down and force her to acknowledge who really held her leash.
I daydream about the moment that fear finally breaks, replaced by the same heavy-lidded worship she wastes on Julian.
I want to see her eyes go hazy with a different kind of heat while she’s bound beneath me, her pulse hammering against my fingertips.
I will own every flicker of light in those eyes, or I will snuff it out myself.
I’ll wait until her very last breath if I have to, just to ensure that the last thing she ever sees is the man who finally broke her.
Sitting behind the heavy mahogany desk, I reached into my jacket and pulled out the stack of white envelopes. They felt flimsy in my hands, frail paper vessels carrying the weight of her pathetic ambitions. These were her “escapes.” Her tickets to a world that doesn’t exist.
I took a silver letter opener from my desk, the blade catching the dim lamplight like a sliver of the moon, and began to work.
Rip. Rip. Rip.
I spread the contents across the table. Transcripts. Letters of recommendation from teachers who thought they were helping a “bright young girl.” Her personal essays.
I read them slowly, my eyes tracking her hopes and dreams. She is brilliant; I have always known that.
Julian and I had curated her education ourselves, after all.
Her prose was elegant, her arguments well practiced and her desire for a life in the city pulsing through every sentence.
She speaks of “growth,” of “discovery,” of leaving the “limitations of a small town” behind.
She is smart, yes, but she was fundamentally naive. She thought the world outside this zip code—the urban cesspits, the crowded lecture halls—would be kinder to her than we were. She thought she could just walk away from years of planning.
“Life is cruel, June,” I whispered to the empty, shadowed room.
She had seen that cruelty recently, hadn’t she?
The sudden loss of her precious Annie. The way the world could shift beneath her feet and swallow everything she loved.
I wasn’t committing an act of malice. It was merely an act of preservation.
We didn’t spend all these years keeping her at arm’s reach, sheltering her from the rot of her addict parents and the mundane filth of her surroundings, just to throw her into a pit of snakes that would ruin her for the cause.
If she hungered for knowledge, we would provide it.
Julian could be her muse, her teacher, her private mentor in the dark.
He would fill her head with poetry and Poe and art until she forgot the names of the Universities she had pinned her desperate hopes on.
We would be her entire world, the beginning and the end of her horizon, until she never had to wonder if she was “enough” for anyone else. She would never need anyone else.
Time is running out. We cannot afford the luxury of her “self-discovery.”
I pulled open the bottom drawer of my desk. It was heavy, reinforced with steel, and required a key I kept on a chain against me at all times. I dropped the mangled remains of her applications—the torn essays, the ruined dreams, the ink-smudged hopes—into the dark, hungry void of the drawer.
I slid it shut and turned the lock. The “click” was the sound of a coffin lid closing.
She won’t leave this town. Not today, not in the summer, not ever. She will stay within the perimeter of our lives until her last breath is drawn. And even then, I have no intention of letting her go.
Julian wants her to love him. I simply want her to be.
I’d rather have her body buried in the cool, rich soil of my own backyard where I can walk over her every morning, feeling the vibration of her silence beneath my boots and knowing exactly where she is—than have her living a life I cannot control.
Ownership is unwavering. Love is a variable.
Possession is a constant. Freedom is a myth.
I leaned back, the silence of the house finally feeling earned, feeling holy. Tomorrow, I would tell her the post office was crowded, that the rain had delayed the mail, but that her letters were safely on their way. And she, in her sweet, tired, broken trust, will believe me.
She will look at me with that dread, and I will smile, knowing that every day she stays is another day she becomes more ours and less herself.