62. Julian #2
Sage was giggling uncontrollably as she ran across the living room, throwing the latches on the massive glass doors and shoving them wide open. The crisp, freezing air of the forest immediately rushed in, sucking the smoke out into the night.
I killed the alarm with a jab of the towel, plunging the house back into the smooth, crackling sound of Billie Holiday, who was still singing faithfully from the living room.
I leaned my hands against the counter, coughing slightly, looking over at the girl standing in the open doorway. The wind was whipping her hair around her face, her eyes dancing with bright, unshakable amusement.
For the first time in a hundred years, the crushing weight of my existence felt light. We had burned dinner, the house smelled like charred meat, but Cain was still out there, somewhere.
We ended up eating sitting cross legged on the plush, oversized sofa in the living room, picking at the salvaged, slightly charred centres of the steaks and a hastily thrown together salad.
By all human standards, the dinner was a complete disaster. The house still faintly smelled of smoke, the forest wind was still whipping through the open glass doors, and my meticulously planned evening had literally gone up in flames.
But as I sat there watching Sage smile, her cheeks flushed with the sheer relief of finally feeling safe, I couldn’t have been happier if I tried.
She took another sip of her wine, pulling her knees to her chest as she turned her body fully towards me. The ambient light of the room caught the beautiful, relaxed softening of her features.
“You know,” she murmured, resting her chin on her knee, a playful, tipsy glint in her dark eyes. “I was just thinking… for someone who just flew across the globe to rescue me from my own paranoia, I don’t actually know that much about you.”
I took a slow sip from my glass, masking the sudden spike of caution in my chest. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything,” she said simply. “I know you’re extremely good looking. I know you’re insanely protective. And just insane in general I’m pretty sure, But… where did you grow up? Do you have any family? What did you do before the military?”
I leaned back against the cushions, smoothly slipping into the carefully constructed, bulletproof web of white lies I had spent decades perfecting.
“I grew up moving around a lot,” I rumbled, keeping my voice steady and light. “Quiet family. Small towns. I joined the military because I needed structure. I needed to keep moving, see the world, keep my hands busy.”
Keep my hands from ripping the world apart, I added silently.
She listened intently, enthralled by the fabricated, painfully normal human history I fed her.
It was a brutal necessity. If I told her the truth—that I was born over a hundred years ago, that my wealth came from a blood-soaked aristocracy, and that I had spent the last century hunting and killing to outrun the ghost of her and my twin brother—her fragile, beautiful mind would shatter.
“And what about now?” she asked, tilting her head. “What are your plans? With the military… with life in general?”
A dark, quiet laugh rumbled deep in my chest.
She had no idea. She was looking at me, asking about my future, oblivious to the fact that she was the plan.
She was the unequivocal endgame. Every war I had fought in, every estate I had built, every single breath I had taken for the last hundred years had just been a pathetic attempt to fill the time until her soul returned to the earth.
“I’m done with the military,” I told her, my eyes locking onto hers, letting a fraction of my obsessive devotion bleed through. “My deployment is over. I’ve spent enough time fighting. It’s time to stay in one place. Focus on what’s in front of me.”
A soft, genuine smile spread across her lips, but before she could answer, a delicate, exhausted yawn escaped her.
“Alright,” I murmured, reaching out to gently brush a dark wave of hair behind her ear. “That’s my cue. You need to get some sleep, Sage. It’s been a massive day for you.”
She laughed softly, her eyes drooping slightly from the wine and the adrenaline crash.
“You have way more on your plate right now than I do.” She leaned her head back against the sofa, her gaze softening into something incredibly vulnerable and sweet.
“But… thank you. Seriously. Thank you for being here, and taking care of me. Even if it turns out my mind is just playing tricks.”
It’s not your mind, angel, I thought, the dark, lethal reality of my brother lurking just outside our bubble.
It’s the devil.
But I didn’t say a word to ruin the peace she had finally found.
Instead, the heavy, crackling tension that the smoke alarm had so rudely interrupted began to seep back into the space between us.
Sage didn’t move away. Her eyes darkened, tracking the line of my throat as I swallowed. Slowly she reached over and set her lip stick smeared wine glass onto the coffee table.
She turned back to me, the tipsy, intoxicating confidence radiating off her skin. She shifted her weight, climbing clumsily over the cushions until she was straddling my lap.
My breath caught in my chest. My hands instantly found her waist, gripping her hips to steady her as her soft, warm weight settled perfectly against me. She looked down at me, her hair falling like a dark curtain around our faces, isolating us from the rest of the world.
"I must admit," she whispered, a lazy, dangerous smile playing on her lips as her small, delicate fingers cupped my jaw, "I didn’t realise I had a thing for military men.
But seeing you in that uniform... covered in blood?
" She leaned closer, her thumbs lightly tracing the rough stubble on my cheeks.
"It was one of the sexiest things I’ve ever seen. "
I tightened my grip on her hips, tilting my head slightly into her touch. "Is that right?"
"There’s just something so sexy about a man who is so strong..." She trailed off, her blue eyes dropping to my mouth before locking back onto mine. "...a man who can kill you with his bare hands, but chooses not too."
I stared at her, my face settling into an unreadable mask.
"Does it ever bother you?" she asked warily, her voice dropping into a breathless, curious lull. "Killing people?"
"No," I answered flatly. No hesitation. No regret. Just the cold, hard truth of what I was.
She swallowed, her chest rising and falling against mine. "Is it hard? To break someone’s neck?"
I let my hand slide slowly up from her waist, my palm grazing her ribs, her collarbone, until my large fingers wrapped firmly around the delicate line of her throat.
I didn't squeeze hard, but I made sure she felt the weight of my strength.
I leaned in, my breath hot against her lips, a dark, teasing smirk cutting through my cold expression.
"With one flick of my hand, you could be dead right now," I whispered, my thumb resting right over her wildly skipping pulse. "You’d be dead before your brain even had time to register what happened."
She let out a shaky breath, her eyes blowing wide and dark with desire at my statement. She leaned into my grip.
And then, she kissed me.
It wasn’t frantic like the kiss on the campus quad. It was slow, deliberate, and demanding. I let out a rough groan, my hand sliding from her neck to her back to pull her hard against my chest, losing myself in the girl who had finally, miraculously, come home to me.
The tipsy softness of her kiss lasted exactly one second before the starving, feral beast inside me broke its chains.
I let out a low, lustful growl that vibrated against our lips. My hands clamped down on her ass, my fingers biting into her soft skin.
Sage whimpered into my mouth, her hands instantly sliding from my jaw to tangle in the short hair at the nape of my neck.
She arched against me, the soft friction of her pussy grinding down into my lap, making my cock twitch with desperation.
I had waited a century for this. A century of starvation and slaughter, all burning down to this one moment—her tethered soul dragged kicking and screaming back into my palms, and my cock driving deep inside her where it belonged.
I broke the kiss just long enough to drag my lips down her jaw, my teeth grazing the wildly beating pulse at her throat.
“Julian,” she half moaned, her voice a broken, breathless sound as she looked up at me with pleading, wide eyes—a silent, desperate prayer for me to end the distance between us.
Her fingers were trembling as she reached down, fumbling frantically with the heavy buckle of my belt, her movements clumsy in her haste to have me. “Please.”
I didn’t need to be told twice.
Gently but irresistibly, I caught her fumbling wrists in one hand, pinning them together as I shifted our weight. In one heavy, deliberate motion, I rolled us off the cushions and down onto the rug.
Sage let out a breathless, startled laugh that turned into a soft giggle as she hit the floor, her long hair fanning out around her.
I hovered over her, my frame completely eclipsing her beneath me.
She looked up at me, eyes bright with tipsy, intoxicating mischief, expecting me to rip her clothes away.
Instead, I reached down to my forearm sheath and drew a heavy throwing knife.
The sharp hiss of metal sliding against leather made her giggle catch in her throat. Her eyes locked onto the razor-sharp edge gleaming in the dim light, her smile widening into something thrilling and reckless.
"Julian," she breathed, a breathless, giddy smile curving her lips as she stared up at the blade. "What are you doing?"
"You said it yourself, sweetheart," I rumbled, my voice a low, lethal vibration as I brought the flat of the steel down to her collarbone.
The metal was freezing against her flushed skin, making her shiver and giggle again, the sound entirely submissive.
"You like a man who can kill you, but chooses not to. "