Page 7 of Temptation
What mattered was the fact that I didn’t feel cold anymore. I felt warm all over, my heart pumping fast, like when I’d run around with my friends, but better.
“I’m gonna hug you now,” she warned me, before her hands wrapped around my middle, holding me close to her.
I placed my hands around her, dragging my fingers through her silky hair, and looked up at my father. I had questions, so many of them, but the look on his face told me that it was better not to ask.
“You need to keep her safe, Dylan. She’s yours now. And one day when you’re older, she’s gonna be more than your sister.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like Mom and me. You two are going to be just like this, forever together.”
Forever together sounded so good. If I had her, I could have light. I had an angel in my life now, and I would do anything to keep her away from the sicknesses of this world.
2
SKYLAR
Now
I’d spentcountless nights imagining what my life would look like if only I were born somewhere else, to some other family, with some other parents, in some other town. I’d spent hours dreaming of a life where I could be free. Where the only rules I would have to follow were the ones I would set for myself, not the ones my father made in order to control me.
Somewhere on the coast where the sun always shone, and the seagulls decorated the skies. Somewhere where the Blackwood name wasn’t known and Judah Blackwood didn’t hold all the reins in his hands.
Somewhere far away from this God forsaken town.
The words were stuck in my throat and the buzzing sound in my ears wasn’t strong enough to tune out the cacophony of voices chanting in a foreign language. I couldn’t move my eyes from him—from my brother.
My brother, who used to be my savior, was the monster all along. Seeing him here now, in that cape that haunted my dreams, holding the golden mask in his hand… It made me sick.
My lips trembled and my hands shook. I wasn’t sure if it was from fear or resignation that coursed through my body. He was going to kill me.
“Why?” I almost whispered, looking into the pair of blue eyes that once held all the answers and all the love. “Why, Dylan?”
He took a step forward and I took one backward, and like dancing the tango, he kept advancing toward me in the rhythm of their chanting, while I kept going back, keeping the distance between the two of us.
“Why, what?” he asked and suddenly stopped, looking larger than life. His blond hair was in disarray, and the wickedness I couldn’t see before swam behind those blue depths in his eyes.
Monsters.
All of them were monsters.
My blood ran cold when he pulled out a dagger from beneath his cape, turning it from side to side, letting it shine underneath the candles and overhead lights. How was it possible that the hands that held me and put Band-Aids on my knees when I was a kid were the same hands capable of murder, and who knew what else?
I knew that there was no explanation. There was no reason for this, but as he stood in front of me, more a stranger than my brother, I knew that I was completely and utterly screwed. I looked to my left than to my right into the river of people who wore masks similar to his, hoping, praying that one of them would step out and help me.
Hoping that one of them had enough humanity left to save me.
But nobody moved.
The blank expressions on the masks they wore chilled the blood in my veins. As my heart thundered in my chest, beating furiously against my ribs, I took two more steps backward when Dylan looked up, locking his eyes with mine.
“Are you planning on running away, Little One?” His lips turned up into a poisonous smile, but he remained standing in the same spot. “Because trust me, no matter where you go, no matter where you run, I will always find you.”
I looked down at my feet, at the dark smudges all over my skin and the trails of blood from where I cut myself, and I hated that this would be the last thing I would ever see. I hated that the sea of strangers would be the last thing I would remember.
“Don’t run from me,” he murmured, loud enough only for me to hear. My head shook from side to side, disbelief coating my insides, but I couldn’t move.
I couldn’t fucking move and he was standing there, holding the same dagger like that night.
