14. Cain
Cain
The headlights of my car cut through the thick, clinging fog of the driveway.
I was exhausted, but it was a caffeine-and-bourbon kind of tired that made my eyes and throat burn.
The four fingers of neat liquor I’d downed at the bar in town hadn’t even begun to dull the edge of the restlessness clawing at my insides.
It was a phantom itch—a persistent thrum in my blood reminding me that the clock was ticking and the air around us was getting thin.
I killed the engine, and the silence of the grounds rushed in to meet me, heavy and suffocating.
I stepped out into the biting night air, the leather of my jacket creaking as I adjusted the collar against the wind.
The house was a dark, looming silhouette against the purple of the sky, save for a single, amber glow spilling from my office window.
My pulse quickened—not with fear, but with an instinctive annoyance.
Julian was supposed to be in his own wing, deep in thought over whatever romantic tragedy he’d manufactured with June at the beach today.
He’d been playing the part of the devoted, tragic saviour for so long I wondered if he’d started to believe his own lies.
I walked through the front door, the heavy oak thudding shut with a finality that echoed through the foyer. The silence inside was different; it was alive, vibrating with the energy of a storm about to break. I didn’t bother taking off my coat. I just followed the light.
I pushed open the door to my office.
The room was thick with a tension so palpable it felt like walking into water.
Julian was sitting in my chair, his frame hunched over the desk like a man mourning over an open casket.
The middle drawer was hanging open, the mahogany splintered where he’d mangled the lock.
Spread out across the desktop, under the unforgiving glare of the desk lamp, were June’s applications.
Julian didn’t look up. His hands were clenched into fists, pinned directly on top of her opened envelopes. He looked like he was trying to hold the very fabric of reality together with his fingers.
“You didn’t send them,” he whispered.
“I decided it wasn’t necessary,” I said coolly. I stepped inside and closed the door.
In a flash of movement too fast for a human eye to track, Julian was across the room.
He slammed me against the heavy oak door, his forearm crushing against my windpipe with the force of an iron bar.
I grunted, the world blurring into a kaleidoscope of grey and amber as he shoved me back again, then drove his fist into my jaw.
A sickening crack echoed in the small room.
I stumbled back, the taste of blood filling my mouth instantly.
But the pain was a secondary concern; the adrenaline hit my system like a crack of lightning.
As he lunged again, a snarl of rage twisting his perfect features—a mirror of my own—I ducked.
I caught him in the abdomen with my shoulder, driving him back into the bookshelf.
The wood groaned under our combined weight, heavy leather-bound books sliding off the shelves like falling bodies.
We were a mirror image of violence. Every strike I threw, he anticipated with the telepathy of a twin. Every hold he tried to lock, I broke with a clinical, practiced efficiency. It was like fighting my own shadow, only my shadow was weeping with a fury I found utterly pathetic.
“You’re a fucking piece of shit!” Julian roared. He shoved me off and swung a heavy brass lamp from the end table. I dodged, the metal whistling past my ear and shattering a windowpane behind me.
The cold night air rushed in, smelling of wet earth and salty air, but it did nothing to cool the room or the rage in Julian’s eyes.
Julian grabbed me by the throat, pinning me against the wall again.
His eyes were bloodshot, shimmering with a rage that bordered on genuine hysteria.
“She worked for months on these! She cried over these! You didn’t just steal her future, Cain—you ripped the heart out of her and put it in a drawer! ”
I laughed, though the sound was wet, bubbling through the blood rapidly pooling in my mouth.
I grabbed his wrists, digging my thumbs into the nerves until his grip faltered.
We stood there, inches apart, both of us wearing matching split lips that bled onto our collars, branding us both with the weight of our twin transgressions.
“And you watched her do it!” I spat, the blood from my mouth spraying onto his cheek.
“You watched her hope for a future she can never have, Julian! You sat there in the garden, reading her verses about ‘Nows’ and ‘Forevers,’ knowing damn well her ‘Forever’ ends the second she turns twenty-one. Don’t act like your hands are clean just because I’m the one who will hold the knife. ”
Julian’s chest heaved, his shirt torn at the collar.
He wiped a smear of blood from his own split lip with the back of his hand, looking at the crimson stain with a mix of horror and fascination.
“I’m done, Cain. I’m fucking done. I don’t know how much longer I can keep playing this sick, twisted fucking game.
Every time I look at her, I feel like I’m burying her alive. It’s sick. We are sick.”
I watched him, finding a perverse sense of amusement in his spiral. He was actually catching feelings for a girl he was fated to execute.
“You’re the one who’s sick, brother,” I said, my voice dropping into a calm, predatory tone.
“You want to talk about cruelty? Look at what you do to her every day. You fill her head with dreams of art schools and cities she will never see. You give her hope for jobs she’ll never get the chance to apply for, let alone study for.
Does that make you feel better? Does giving her a few months of pretend happiness wash the blood off your conscience? ”
I stepped closer, stepping over the glass of a shattered vase.
“I might be a monster, Julian, but I’m an honest one. I don’t pretend she has a choice. I don’t feed her lies so I can sleep better at night. You’re the one who’s truly torturing her—dragging out the agony by making her fall in love with a world that’s going to be ripped away from her.”
I saw the flinch. I had hit the mark. Julian’s protectiveness was born from vanity, a desperate need to cast himself as the hero in a story where he was actually the primary villain.
“I see the way you look at her,” I continued, leaning in until our foreheads almost touched. “I’ve seen those eyes since we were children. You think I don’t know? But you lie to yourself.”
My mouth inches from his ear, my voice a poisonous whisper.
“Picture it. Picture her at some University far away in a city we can’t control.
Picture some stranger’s hands on that skin.
Fucking her while she whispers their name.
Picture some guy who doesn’t know her making her feel good in all those places you spend your nights dreaming about.
You think he’ll cherish her? Or will he just be the first of many to take what we’ve spent years protecting? ”
Julians face went rigid, his features freezing as if he’d been turned to stone.
The fight drained out of him in a single, shivering breath, replaced by a cold, paralysing jealousy that turned his eyes a flat, obsidian black.
I watched the image I’d planted work through his veins like venom. It was the only way to break him—to remind him that if she was free, she wasn’t his. Julian could tolerate her death, eventually, but he could not tolerate her belonging to someone else.
He looked down at the crumpled essays on the desk. Her dreams. Her words. Her soul. He watched the crumpled pages with total indifference, offering neither to smooth out the creases nor to carry them to the post office.
The “Saint” was gone, replaced by a man who realised that a cage was the only way to keep what he loved.
He went deathly quiet. The fire in his eyes pivoted, the burning heat turning instantly inwards before expanding to weaponise against the rest of the world—against anyone who might dare to touch what was ours.
“Fuck,” Julian whispered, his voice hollow and defeated, a grimace of harsh reality crossing his face. “If she ever finds out you did this… she’ll never talk to either of us again.”
“She won’t find out,” I said, straightening my collar and checking my reflection in the darkened window.
My face was a wreck—a blossoming bruise on my jaw and a black eye that would take days to heal.
“Because you’re going to help me make sure she never wants to leave.
We give her everything she wants. We make her world so small and so perfect that she forgets there’s anything beyond the gates. ”
Julian didn’t say another word. He turned and walked out of the office, his footsteps heavy and defeated.
I stood alone among the ruins of my office, the bitter, metallic tang of blood still on my tongue.
I looked down at the applications. One essay caught my eye—a piece she’d written about “The Freedom of the Blank Canvas.” I laughed and tossed it into the fireplace.
I watched as the flames licked at the elegant words of a girl who thought she was the artist, rather than the paint.
I might be the villain of our story, but at least I knew which side of the bars I was on.