Page 65 of She will Always be Mine

Despite the emotions running high between us as I glare at him, an ache forms in my chest that this is the end of our brotherhood. I bury that feeling while we are locked in a staring match.

“You so much as look in her direction, I will skin you alive and put you into the bloody ground,” I warn him, my voice low with aggression while I somehow find the strength to not hit him again. “Brother or not.”

Spitting blood on the ground, he cleans his mouth with the back of his arm and staggers back on his feet. I watch the cocky grin vanish from his face and darkness descends on his sharp features while he makes no attempt to come after me.

The look in his eyes tells me he knows our bond that was teetering on the edge has finally fallen.

“You can keep fighting the world as much as you desire, brother, but there will always be someone tearing you two apart,” he warns, and then adds cryptically, “even if she comes back one day, she won’t be the same girl you fell in love with.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

NYRA

Love makes us all do fucked-up things.

The kind of deeds we can never come back from.

Sins that we commit over again and again,

Until they irrevocably break our soul.

Or in my case… Sell my soul.

My first sin was falling for Riaan.

The second was betraying him.

And now I can’t turn back from both.

I’m forever burdened with invisible scars that will never heal,

Or wounds that will never seal.

The small hope I kept giving myself,

Has slowly vanished before my eyes.

Making darkness my new home.

My fingers pause writing as I hear footsteps outside my bedroom door. I quickly close my diary and put it back in the bookshelf just as there’s a knock on my door and it swings open with a soft click.

“Hey,bacha,” says my dad sweetly. My surprised gaze collide with his warm ones, not expecting him back from the office so early. It’s only afternoon.

“Hi, Dad,” I reply. “You’re home early.”

“Thought I’ll take half a day off to spend time with my favorite daughter.”

“Don’t say that in front of Priyanka.”

He laughs and then winks. “It can be our little secret.”

The smile vanishes from my face in a flash.

Secrets are what has landed me here in the first place.

Somehow, they have become my worst enemy and nightmare wrapped in a deadly bow. Any more of them and they might just kill me.

I’ve come to realize it’s not the people that are dangerous but the web of lies and innocent secrets we wove ourselves, that push us into a dark void of our own making.

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