Page 27 of Demons & Damnation

“Please,” Sam said, rolling her eyes in exasperation. “I may be blonde, but I’m not that stupid. Quite clearly that handprint is not yours. It’s half the size for a start, never mind the fact that it’s the wrong way round for it to be your left hand.”

“Since when did you turn into Miss Marple? It’s nothing, leave it be.”

Sam opened her mouth to argue back but then thought better of it. A sly smirk crossed her pink lips as she decided to hit him another way. Her heart pounding and her palms sweaty, she was purely calling his bluff, but she felt ninety percent certain she was right.

“I know about you and Kyla,” she said.

Dylan stopped dead. He drew himself up to his full height and glared down at her. “Excuse me?”

Sam folded her arms over her chest and jutted her chin out in nothing but complete defiance. “You heard me.”

Dylan quirked an eyebrow up. “You’re delusional.”

“That’s not a no.”

Dylan ran through his options quickly. He could continue to lie to his sister and battle on with Kyla alone, or he could confess everything and have Sam on side to help Kyla when he wasn’t here.

As the light bulb flicked on in his head, he realised that was his answer to convincing Kyla to be with him. She was scared about being alone when he was gone, but with Sam on side, everything would fall into place perfectly, like a seamless jigsaw puzzle.

Dylan let out a sigh. “How long have you known?”

Sam grinned at him. “I suspected. I called your bluff. My, my, soldier boy, you wouldn’t hold up well under torture, would you?”

Biting his tongue and refusing to be drawn into another sibling argument, he ignored her last comment and rephrased his question. “How long have you suspected?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “I started suspecting the last time you were back. You and her were MIA at the same time more than once. Then the way she looked at you today...your early morning arrival, her being late for breakfast...all seemed a little too convenient.”

“I see,” he replied, a muscle in his neck twitching. “And how exactly do you feel about that?”

Sam took a black leather bar stool out from the side of the kitchen island and sat down on it. “I told Kyla earlier how I felt about that. I want nothing more than for the pair of you to be happy, even if that means putting up with the grossness of you two being a thing, but she can’t give you what you want, Dylan. That’s the end of it.”

Dylan walked around to the other side of the island and bent over, resting his forearms on the oak top, meeting his sister at eye level. “That’s the end of your opinion, yes. That’s not the end of me and her.”

Sam narrowed her eyes at him. “I’m going to gloss over the fact that the pair of you have been lying to me for at least six months. That’s another conversation. You have a responsibility to this family, Dylan, you’ve known about that from day one. Kyla cannot help you uphold that responsibility. Whatever this is going on with you two is completely pointless and will only end in heartbreak. It’s best to cut it off now before it becomes anything more.” Sam inclined her head towards her brother’s cheek. “That from her?”

Dylan pressed his lips together but said nothing.

“Dylan...what did you do? Do I need to be worried about her?”

Letting a long breath out, Dylan prepared himself to be yelled at by a second woman in the space of two hours. “Look, you don’t need to know the ins and out of me and Kyla. It’s been nothing but sex from the beginning. We both agreed NSA. It was just a...a fling. We both found each other hot and decided to screw it out but, well, here we are this far down the line.”

“And? I know there’s more.”

“And I want more. I told her today that I want more. I asked her to commit to me, to trust me, to turn to me when she needs someone.”

Sam let out a groan and buried her face in her hands. “You’re a fucking moron,” she said, lifting her head. “And that’s when you got that?” she asked, looking at the fading mark on his cheek.

“More or less.”

“More or less? What do you mean by that?” Sam jumped off the stool, her heart pounding as a million possibilities of Kyla’s delicate state of mind ran through her thoughts like a carousel on hyper speed. “Is she ok?”

“She’s fine. She’s sleeping. I think...I think she kind of had a bit of a PTSD episode earlier. I put her in the bath, and all was fine. Then she came downstairs, and we revisited our previous chat and she just had a complete and utter meltdown. She beat me.” He stood up and lifted his shirt to reveal fading red marks across his upper torso. “But I think she’s fine now. She got it all out and I put her to bed.”

“Oh my God,” Sam said, running her hands through her hair. “You don’t even realise the damage you’ve done, do you? You absolute blundering buffoon.”

Dylan frowned. “What am I missing here? I figured by now she’d be wanting some stability and some sense of normality. She knows me, you, our family, we get on well, there’s no nasty surprises in the bedroom department either.” He shrugged his shoulders. “What am I not getting?”

Sam cocked her head to one side as she racked her brains trying to think of an appropriate analogy to use on her simple brother to make him understand. “Do you remember when you were little? When you were scared of pigeons and clowns?”

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