18. Julian
Julian
The air was a biting cold that calcified the moisture in my lungs with every intake, but I welcomed the burn.
It was the only thing that felt honest in a life built on lies.
The sun hadn’t begun to bleed into the horizon yet, leaving the world trapped in a heavy clouded gloom that blurred the lines between the starkness of the trees and the oppressive dawn.
My sneakers slapped against the frost-slicked pavement in a punishing cadence, a death march I was leading myself on.
I was pushing my body until I felt like I was going to vomit and my heart was going to explode in my chest, trying to outrun the thoughts that had been circling my head like vultures for a week.
It had been seven days since the carnival. Seven days since I’d pinned June against the vibrating metal of a Ferris wheel carriage and let the hunger I’d been suppressing for years finally win.
It was a catastrophic mistake. Not because I regretted the way she tasted, like honey, salt, and impending ruin, or the way she’d come apart in my hands, her sweet moans lost to the wind high above the neon lights.
I would do that a thousand times more, in a thousand different lifetimes, and still hunger for a thousand more.
No, it was a mistake because it had ignited a fire that was currently consuming every fibre of my being.
Before the carnival, I was a poet in a garden, a man who could convince himself that watching from a distance was enough.
Now, I was a starving man who had finally been given a drop of water, only to realise the well was deep, dark, and poisoned.
Every time I closed my eyes, I felt the phantom silk of her skin against my bruised knuckles.
Every time she walked into a room, my body went on high alert, my senses narrowing until she was the only thing in focus—a bright light in the centre of my darkened peripheral vision.
She was a walking overdose, and I was losing my tolerance at a terrifying rate.
She’d been trying to have “the talk” every day since.
I saw it in the way she hovered near me in the library, the scent of her vanilla perfume clashing with the smell of old parchment and leather.
I saw it in the way she watched me with those wide, searching eyes, the ones that seemed to see right through my carefully constructed mask and into the rotting timber of my soul.
“What are we, Julian? Where is this going?”
I didn’t have the answers she wanted. I had the truth, but the truth was a death sentence, and I wasn’t ready to pull the trigger. It took everything in me not to drop whatever I was doing, the ledgers, the poetry, the lies, and fuck her until she forgot her own name, let alone her questions.
She’d been testing the perimeter, too. She wasn’t the same girl who had looked at me with simple, childhood adoration.
Now, there was a sharp, knowing edge to her: a lingering touch on my thigh that lasted a second too long, a suggestive, heavy lidded look over the rim of a teacup.
We’ve messed around in the shadows a couple of times since, fragments of intimacy snatched in the dim corners or late at night when the house felt like an empty tomb, but the lines between right and wrong were so blurred now I couldn’t tell where the horizon ended and the ocean began.
I was drowning in her, and the worst part was, I was the one who had jumped into the water.
What I felt for her wasn’t just guilt. It wasn’t just some twisted sense of obligation to the girl I’d watched grow from a fragile child into a devastating masterpiece.
It was visceral. It was a terrifying, all consuming affection built on years of shared secrets and a friendship that had been my only anchor in a very dark world.
Blind trust, I thought, my heavy sprint quickening until my breath came in haggard, burning gasps.
That’s what she had. A trust she wouldn’t have if she knew who we really were.
Who I really was. If she knew that while I was kissing her cheek, I was also helping Cain burn the letters that were her only ticket to freedom.
If she knew the scale of what we had planned for her twenty-first birthday, the harvest we had been preparing her for since the day she met us.
We were her shepherds, and she was the lamb, and the date for the slaughter was already marked on the calendar in blood that wouldn’t fade.
Some days, the weight of the lies felt so heavy I thought it would be easier to just stop running. To let the darkness take me, to tell her everything and let her hate me before I had to destroy her. But I couldn’t do that to Cain.
You don’t get much closer to a person than sharing a womb for nine months.
We were two halves of the same broken soul, a binary star system held together by gravity and a blood-soaked history.
Every scar, every trauma, we’d experienced them all side by side.
My loyalty to him was a fundamental part of my DNA, a sequence I couldn’t rewrite even if I wanted to.
I knew that loyalty was leading us towards a cliff, but I couldn’t let go of his hand.
My faith in him was blind, and I knew, deep down, it would only end in ruin for all of us.
I hadn’t spoken to him since our blowout in the office.
I wasn’t in any rush to hear his voice, to see that knowing, triumphant smirk that said I told you so.
As much as I loved him, I hated him with a temperance that made my blood boil.
He was a hurricane. He moved through the world never caring who got caught in the wreckage as long as the Blackburn name stayed of status and the Ritual stayed intact.
He didn’t see a girl; he saw a vessel. And right now, the fact that I saw more was making me a liability.
By the time I made it back to the manor, my muscles were screaming and my mind was a chaotic mess.
I let myself in through the side door, moving like a shadow through the silent, echoing halls.
The manor felt colder than the outside air, as if the stones themselves were leaching the warmth from my body.
I stripped off my sweat soaked clothing, leaving them in a heap on the marble floor, and stepped into the shower.
I cranked the handle until the water was a punishing, ice cold spray that felt like thousands of tiny needles piercing my skin.
I needed it to hurt. I needed the temperature to shock my system back into some semblance of rationality, to freeze the images of June’s smile out of my head.
I stood there for a long time, the cold water drumming against my back, turning my skin blue and my thoughts into static.
I was torn. Every fibre of my being wanted to find her, to drag her back into that dark, safe space we’d occupied at the carnival and never let her leave.
But I knew better. Every day I spent letting her fall deeper in love, every hour I spent feeding her hope, I was just making the final outcome more agonising.
How could I keep doing this? How could I look into her eyes and see that burgeoning devotion, knowing that I was eventually going to rip her heart out?
The Ritual required a heart. A pure one.
And I was the one making sure it beat only for us, a gardener tending to a flower just so he could watch it wilt.
A wave of dizziness hit me, so sudden and sharp that the tiled walls seemed to tilt and spin.
My knees gave way, and I dropped to the floor of the shower, the cold spray now beating down on my head, mixing with the sting of my own frustration.
I sat there in the dark, my head buried in my hands, my breath faulting in a way I would never let Cain see.
I had to stop. I had to figure out a way to end the intimacy before it became an anchor that drowned us both. I needed to take a step back, to build the wall again, to make things easier for everyone.
A sharp pain shot through my chest at the mere thought of it, a phantom heart attack.
I imagined her face when I gave her the talk, not the one she wanted, but the one she deserved.
I tried to think of a way to explain the distance without shattering her, but I knew it was impossible.
To save her soul from the corruption of our world, I had to break her heart in this one.
I was going to be the villain in her story, just like Cain always said I would be. I would be her protector who became a predator. Even if I was ripping my own heart out in the process, I had to do it. This was my karma. This was the price for wanting something I had no right to keep.
I stood up slowly, the water still icy, and looked at my hands. They were the same hands that had held her on the Ferris wheel, the same hands that had traced the line of her throat. Now, they felt like the hands of her hangman.