Page 10 of Deviant

“I… um… didn’t see you there,” I say weakly in the form of a greeting.

With his dark eyes set on me, he doesn’t say a word in reply, preferring to place his cigarette in between his lush, full lips and take a long-ass drag. My heart rate accelerates just a fraction as his penetrating glare continues to stare right through me while he expels puffs of grey smoke into the air, polluting its quality with its wondrous carcinogenic toxins.

Though Elias refuses to utter even a syllable, limiting himself to just staring at me, it’s the little tick in his jaw that tells me he’s annoyed by my presence.

Nothing new there.

I’ve been a constant fixture at the Larsen home since infancy, yet one person has never made any effort to make me feel at home here.

And that has always been Elias.

I understood it at first… his blatant annoyance toward me.

And though I found his foreboding persona oddly intriguing, I always kept a wide berth between us whenever possible.

Not that it was too difficult a thing to do.

After all, he was five years older than Nora and I and had very little patience for the childish games his younger sister and I got up to when we were young. As the years passed and we became teenagers, the fact that I started dating his younger brother, Aidan, didn’t win me any brownie points either.

For as long as I’ve known them, Elias and Aidan have always seemed to be at each other’s throats about one thing or another. Now that I was romantically linked to the bane of his existence, his distaste and irritation for me grew.

But lately, I’ve felt his previous animosity toward me has changed into outright hate since Nora’s death.

I can see it so clearly in his eyes.

How they burn with loathsomeness.

The abhorrence in his dark, blackish-blue orbs.

It’s like his gaze can’t hide how he blames me for Nora’s death.

Which he should.

They all should.

Yet, Elias is the only person who never bought the coroner’s report of how his little sister died or how the sheriff’s department ruled her death as an accidental suicide by overdose.

He didn’t buy it for a minute.

That alone made me like Elias even more.

He knew Nora would have never killed herself, let alone to drugs.

Not in a million years.

It saddened me how Aidan and her mom were so quick to accept it, though.

It’s like they didn’t even know her.

Not really.

Not like I did.

Not like Elias did.

And because he knew her so well, he also knew exactly where to place the blame for her untimely death.

It’s there… the truth of my greatest sin… glaring back at me in his black stare.

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