Page 14 of Forbidden Sins

There’s no excuse for sharing a bed with her.

I think I see a flicker of disappointment in her eyes, but she nods. She knows as well as I do that what she wants right now is impossible. “Okay,” she says softly, reaching to tug down thecovers. She slips under them, letting them rest in the dip of her waist, and something about seeing her like this—vulnerable, soft, lying in her bed when I’ve never seen her like this before—sends a flood of conflicting emotions through me at once.

I want to both comfort and ravish her all at once, hold her in my arms and trace every inch of her with my mouth, lie next to her all night and make her moan my name until dawn. The rush of both tenderness and desire is too much, seizing all of the muscles in my body for a moment, my chest clenching and my cock throbbing with the warring feelings that are all entirely wrong.

Everything about this is wrong. There’s nothing innocent about how I feel about her right now, not even in my desire to comfort her.

Clenching my jaw, I reach out, gently stroking a hand over her hair as I will my arousal to recede. “Sleep,” I say gently, and I stand up, twisting my body awkwardly so that I’m mostly turned away from her before I get up, in an effort to keep her from seeing my arousal. I walk to the light switch on the wall, glancing back just once at Estella before I flick it off.

She’s still watching me, her red-rimmed dark eyes fixed on me, and I can feel her grief from here, thickening the air of the room until it’s hard to breathe.

There’s nothing more I can do for her,I tell myself. I can stay here and make sure she’s not alone in the room, but beyond that…

I glance at the armchair that’s going to be my bed for the evening, and the cashmere throw blanket tossed across the back. I look once more at Estella, and this time, her eyes are closed.

I flick the switch and plunge the room into darkness.

6

ESTELLA

It takes me a long time to fall asleep. I hear Sebastian moving through the room to the armchair, the sound of his weight settling into it, the soft rustle of fabric against fabric as he covers himself with the blanket. If it were later in the year, I might still be able to see him a little in the firelight, but it’s summer, and there’s no fire in the fireplace. Anyway, I’ve always been told never to go to sleep with one burning, even if I have broken that rule a few times for the pleasure of falling asleep listening to it crackling.

I wish there were a fire right now,I think foggily as I squeeze my eyes closed, willing sleep to come. It would be easier to pretend that I’m in one of my books—that I’m a princess in a high tower of a castle, having gotten the terrible news that the prince was lost. Sebastian would be my faithful knight, sleeping by the fire to make sure that I’m kept safe, close enough to protect me and far enough from me to protect my innocence.

But none of that is true. I feel like I can’t escape reality right now, like it’s a dark, sucking black hole pulling me down, and no amount of pretense or fantasy can get me out of it. I’m not a princess, not in any real way, and no storybook imagining cansoften the blow of hearing that my brother is dead. Sebastian is my protector, yes, but right now it doesn’t feel like enough that he’s here in the room with me. I want him next to me, his arms around me, holding me. I want to feel his warmth, his body, keeping me close. I want to breathe him in, to be enveloped in him, to lose myself?—

Stop it.The things I’m imagining are impossible. Not just impossible butwrong, overstepping all the boundaries between us that are carefully drawn. Sebastian would lose his job if he did even one of the things I’m imagining.

His breathing is quiet and even, and I wonder if he’s asleep already. If he’s able to quiet his mind so quickly that he could already have fallen asleep.

I’m exhausted, in mind and body, having cried so long and so hard that I feel wrung dry. But still, it takes a long time for me to fall asleep. Every time I think I’ve started to slip into it, I see Luis lying on the floor, his skin pale and waxy, blood surrounding him from dozens of wounds. Knife wounds, bullet holes, his skin bruised from punches…my mind runs over the possibilities, sending fresh tears cascading down my cheeks every time.

I wish I could see him, just so I could know. It feels like it would be easier to know than to imagine.

When sleep does finally come, it’s choppy and restless, full of nightmares of blood and gunshots and screams. In the middle of it all, I think I hear Sebastian’s voice urging me back to sleep, but I can’t be sure. I can’t escape it.

I wake just as exhausted as I was when I fell asleep, to a sunrise too beautiful and bright to exist in a world where my brother doesn’t any longer. Sebastian is asleep in the armchair, the throw blanket tossed over him and tucked under his chin where it rests on his chest. I’ve never seen him asleep before, and the sudden intimacy of the moment strikes me, making me go very still as I look at him.

He looks younger like this, gentler, as if some of the years have been rolled back with his face softened and at peace in sleep. One arm has fallen to the side, draped over the armchair, and the other rests in his lap. His lips are parted, and when he shifts in the chair, a low groan escaping as he adjusts, the throw blanket falls down to his waist.

I have the urge to get up and fix it, to tuck it back where it was before, and it takes everything in me to resist it. I curl my fingers against my palms, lips pressed together as I watch him, my chest aching with the weight of the grief that’s settled over me.How will it ever go away?I wonder as I lie there, the sky slowly lightening outside my window.How will I ever be anything other than an aching wound?

—

It takes two days for us to bury Luis.

My father returns in the morning. I hear the sound of car wheels on gravel outside and pull myself out of bed long enough to look out of the window. When one of the doors opens, I get the smallest glimpse of what’s inside—a sheet draped over a shape in the car, a glimpse of rusted red on the pristine white.

Blood.

My brother’s blood.

I clap my hand over my mouth, stifling a wail as my knees give out. I grab the windowsill to stop myself from falling just as I feel Sebastian’s hands on my waist, one arm going around me as he pulls me back against him. The contact lasts only a moment before he moves me toward the bed, angling me so that I sit down heavily on the edge, and I’m no longer touching him entirely. But for one moment, I felt him pressed against my back,againstallof me, and it jolted me enough that for just that split second, I forgot everything except him.

“I’m sorry,” Sebastian says, and I see a faint flush on his throat. “I shouldn’t have—I wasn’t thinking. I just wanted to keep you from falling.”

I swallow hard, my hands balled into fists on either side of me, pressing into the unmade bed. “How many times are you going to say that?” I ask softly. “That you shouldn’t have. That you’re sorry?”

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