48. Julian
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.
I needed to know she was real.
Sage let out a sharp, startled gasp, but before she could formulate a word, I brought my hands up to frame her face, my thumbs digging into her cheekbones, and crashed my mouth down onto hers.
It was a savage reclamation, a collision of teeth and tongue that tasted of years of suppressed hunger.
Decades of deprivation, of empty graves and blood-soaked nightmares, poured into the wild desperation with which I took her mouth.
She tasted exactly the same—a dark, intoxicating sweetness that made my blood roar in my ears.
For a terrifying second, I thought I had pushed too far. I waited for her to shove against my chest, to realise she had made a catastrophic mistake daring a man who had forgotten how to be human.
Instead, she melted into me.
A soft, desperate sound slipped from her throat, and her hands flew up, her fingers tangling frantically in my dark hair to pull me even closer. The reality of her kissing me back—of her choosing this, choosing me in this new life—was a chemical explosive in my veins.
“June,” I groaned against her lips, barely an audible whisper, the name slipping out as a broken, muffled prayer.
I deepened the kiss, my tongue sweeping past her parted lips, tasting her, claiming her with a ruthless hunger that had been caged for a lifetime.
My hands dropped from her face, one sliding around to grip the back of her neck to anchor her, while the other dragged down her side.
My palm slid under the hem of her top, my fingers splaying wide across her bare, feverishly hot skin.
My thumb brushed directly over the raised, delicate ink of her nevermore tattoo.
She arched into my touch, her nails scraping lightly down the back of my neck, driving me entirely out of my mind.
I angled her head, my lips trailing aggressively down her jaw to the soft, pulse-beating skin of her neck.
I breathed her in, my hips pressing heavily against hers, entirely ready to drag her into the shadows and claim her again, here and now.
Then, the world exploded around us.
An ear-splitting shriek tore the night apart. The compound’s perimeter alarm.
Simultaneously, the massive, blinding halogen floodlights mounted high on the cathedral’s iron scaffolding blared to life, bathing the ancient stone courtyard in a harsh, glaring white light that sliced through the misty night air.
The conditioning of the last ten years slammed me immediately into action, instantly overriding the dark, starving man of the Manor.
I tore myself away from her, my chest heaving, my lungs burning as if I had just breached the surface of the ocean.
The transition from immortal lover back to lethal soldier was wild and jarring.
I spun around, instinctively putting my massive body between Sage and the open expanse of the cobblestone courtyard, my eyes scanning the blindingly lit darkness for threats.
Over the radio strapped to my chest, the comms exploded with static and shouting.
“Command to all units! Perimeter breach, sector seven! Multiple unidentified hostiles coming through the western plaza!”
“Julian,” Sage gasped, her voice trembling slightly. She was pressed flat against the stone wall of the cloisters, her lips bruised red and swollen from my mouth, her eyes wide with a sudden, jarring fear that had nothing to do with me.
The sight of her like that—thoroughly kissed but terrified, and so vulnerable in this madness—revived a cold, lethality in my blood to protect her.
“Get inside,” I ordered, my voice stripping away every bit of softness.
I reached down, snatched her fallen sketchbook from the pavement, and shoved it into her chest. “Get inside the annex right now. Lock the heavy deadbolt. Turn off the lights, get on the floor away from the windows, and do not open that door for anyone except me or Noah. Do you understand?”
“What’s happening?” she asked, her hands shaking as she clutched the book.
“Sage. Do you understand me?” I barked, the command leaving zero room for argument.
“Yes,” she breathed, nodding quickly. “Yes. I understand.”
“Go.”
I watched her yank the reinforced door open and slip inside. Only when I was certain she was secured did I turn my back to the building. I unholstered my sidearm, the safety clicking off in my hand, and sprinted full-speed into the blinding nightmare of the plaza.
The glare of the security lights turned the swirling fog and dust into a haze of pale ghost-light.
I sprinted into the chaos, the roar of automatic gunfire echoing through the perimeter. My mind, usually a disciplined, tactical vault in the middle of a firefight, was frozen in a single, repetitive loop: Keep her safe. Keep her safe. Keep her safe.
This urban sector had been classified as a safe zone for the last six months, a fragile pocket of peace for the civil asset teams to operate in.
But nothing stayed safe in this world for long.
The world she and I used to know—a world of quiet manors, untouched forests, and slow, predictable decades—was gone.
The modern era was a devastating, crumbling war land.
Wars over borders, over resources, over nothing at all.
There was danger around every single stone corner, and she was right in the middle of it.
I hated it. I hated that her fragile, mortal body was in the crosshairs of a conflict she had nothing to do with. But I couldn’t command a grown woman to stop doing the only job that made her feel alive.
I rounded the corner of the cathedral's main plaza, passing the guarded transport trucks, and slammed directly into the mayhem.
The shooters moving through the grounds were masked, heavily armoured, and advancing in disciplined tactical formations. Mercenaries. Highly trained and heavily armed.
I slipped into the blind spot of the first mercenary navigating the scaffolding, grabbing the back of his tactical helmet and the base of his chin.
A sickening crack severed his spinal cord before he even registered I was there.
I let his body drop silently onto the cold asphalt and moved to the next.
It was a slaughter. I was a ghost made of steel and rage, moving faster than humanly possible among the soaring Gothic pillars.
I crushed a windpipe with a strike of my forearm, drove a combat knife through the Kevlar-weave of another man’s ribs, and used a third as a human shield against a burst of rifle fire before breaking his neck.
Blood soaked my gloves. It splattered across my face, hot and metallic, feeding the dark, feral thing inside me that Cain had created.
“Noah, report!” I barked into my comms, ripping a rifle from a dead man’s hands. Static. “Noah, give me your position!”
Nothing.
A cold spike of dread pierced through the adrenaline. I cut a fast path through the plaza, leaving a trail of broken bodies in my wake, until I reached the edge of the western perimeter near the steps of the cathedral.
That was where I found him.
Noah was on the ground, his back pressed against the shredded tires of an abandoned transport truck.
His helmet was tossed to the side, his face slick with blood.
He was struggling to raise his sidearm with a trembling hand, but a masked mercenary kicked the weapon away, levelling a heavy assault rifle directly at Noah’s chest. Two more hostiles flanked him, laughing.
I hit the first one like a freight train, driving my shoulder into his chest with enough immortal force to shatter his ribs instantly. He flew back, crashing hard into the side of the truck.
The second man raised his weapon, but I was already inside his guard. I grabbed the barrel of his rifle, shoving it upwards as it fired harmlessly into the sky, and drove my combat knife straight up under the rim of his helmet, burying it deep, to the hilt in his jaw.
I ripped the blade out, spinning to face the third man, the one who had been standing over Noah. I lunged, grabbing him by the throat, fully intending to rip his head from his shoulders.
But in my blind rage, I missed the fourth man stepping out from the shadows.
I felt the sudden bite of cold steel dragging unforgivingly across the front of my throat.
The cut was deep. The assassin’s blade severed my windpipe and sliced clean through my carotid artery. The sound of the arterial spray was a wet, hissing rush in my ears. Thick, boiling hot blood exploded down the front of my tactical vest.
My grip on the mercenary’s throat failed. I dropped to my knees on the cold stones, clutching my ruined neck, choking on my own blood.
Through my blurring vision, I saw Noah. He was half-conscious, his eyes wide and glassy with shock as he watched the blood pour from my throat. He was watching me die.
The assassin stepped past my kneeling body, casually flipping the bloody combat knife in his hand, and walked towards Noah to finish the job.
No. The immortal fire in my veins roared to life, a dark, alchemical furiousness that refused to let me stay in the dust. It burned like acid. The severed arteries reattached, the torn cartilage of my windpipe fusing together, the flesh stitching itself closed in a matter of seconds.
The assassin raised his knife over Noah.
I stood up.
My throat was now coated in my own blood, my shirt soaked black, but the wound was gone. I reached out and clamped my bloody hand around the back of the assassin’s neck.
The man froze, a choked sound of confusion escaping him. He tried to turn his head, but I didn’t let him. With a brutal, merciless twist of my wrists, I snapped his neck and threw his lifeless body onto the pavement.
The area fell dead silent, apart from the blaring siren in the distance.
I stood over the bodies, my chest heaving, the taste of my own blood heavy on my tongue. I wiped the thickest part of the gore from my throat, smearing it across my jaw, leaving my skin stained but completely, intact.
I dropped to my knees beside Noah. He was incredibly pale, his eyes fluttering, struggling to focus on my face. His gaze drifted hazily to my blood-soaked neck, a confused, broken sound leaving his lips.
“I’ve got you,” I reassured him, my voice slightly hoarse from the freshly healed vocal cords. I shoved my arms under his shoulders and knees, lifting his dead weight effortlessly against my chest. “Stay awake, Noah. Stay with me.”
“Jules…” he mumbled, his head rolling against my shoulder, his bloody fingers weakly gripping my vest. “Your neck… I saw…”
“You’re hallucinating, brother. Blood loss,” I lied, my voice a steady and calm as I broke into a run toward the medical tent. “Just keep your eyes open.”