Page 6 of Sin (Salvation #1)

Sin

I watch Cassidy storm off. Every instinct tells me to follow him and beg his forgiveness. Promise him anything, as long as he doesn’t look up at me with those huge, hurt eyes any longer. A sight I’ve seen and been the cause of too many times since I’ve known him.

But it’s better to let him hate me, so I go looking for a strong drink instead.

“Sin,” my father calls out, using the name he gave me from my birth in what he says was in recognition of his only child’s congenital wickedness. “Come to my study.”

I backtrack to my father’s study. My body tenses, as it always does, at the doorway with too many terrible memories. I ignore them and enter the room that I hate with every atom of my being.

There, my father sits behind a huge, shiny mahogany desk that dominates the space.

Behind it is a huge oil portrait of him delivering a sermon.

The rest of the walls are covered in pictures of him with various celebrities and politicians.

None of the pictures include me, Cassidy, or even my stepmonster, Sheila.

The room is decorated in what I like to call “narcissist chic.”

“Sit down,” he orders, not bothering to look up from next week’s sermon that’s strewn across the desk. He has his deacons write them for him, and then he adds his own notes of hate and judgment in the margins.

With a sigh, I slump into the intentionally uncomfortable wingback chair that faces him.

He ignores my presence, one of his favorite power moves.

I hate the surge of helplessness I feel in these moments.

Like I’m still the kid sitting there as the minutes tick by, waiting for what my father liked to call my corrections, where he tried to find new ways to break me.

When he finally looks up at me, I don’t see the face of America’s Pastor as the conservative news channels like to call him. Instead of a middle-aged, boyishly handsome preacher, I only see a monster.

Thank fuck that when I look in the mirror every morning, I don’t see any resemblance to his bland good looks. I inherited my mother’s blue eyes, blond hair, and my maternal grandfather’s features and build.

His eyes do a slow, critical sweep over me, and his ever-present smile transforms into one of a fiery rage. It’s his true face, the one he only ever shows to me. “You walked out in the middle of my sermon,” he accuses.

“I was thirsty,” I slur slightly. Let him think I’m drunk or high. The more he thinks he’s broken me, the less of an enemy he’ll believe me to be. “Figured leaving was better optics than drinking from my flask in the middle of your sermon.”

He shakes his head in disgust. “You are a fiend of Satan,” he chastises me.

He then goes on to call me all of his pet names: The devil’s seed , bastard son of perdition .

Mother-killer . He shouts them at me with the same fire and brimstone he uses on his parishioners as he warns them of the damnation of their eternal souls from his pulpit.

Unlike his flock, who quake at his promises of fiery judgement, I laugh in his face, fully reveling in my given name and holding no hope for my own eternal soul.

After all, I am my father’s son, and it’s his fetid blood flowing through my veins.

A man who calls himself a servant of God, but whose soul is as dark and rotted as carrion.

I embrace my inherited wickedness because it takes evil to destroy evil, and if it’s the last thing I do, I will destroy my father.

He doesn’t see it coming. He thinks that he’s broken me and that I’m only concerned about my next fuck or my next high. He underestimates me—just like he did my mother. That mistake will cost him everything.

“You are on a path to hell and damnation,” he says, finally finishing his verbal abuse dressed up in scripture.

I shrug unconcernedly and put my feet up on his desk. “According to you, I’ve been heading there on a highway with no exit ramps since the day I was born.”

He looks down at the muddy footprint the sole of my Tom Ford boots leaves on one of the pages of his sermon. A line tries to form on his botoxed brow, but instead of showing his anger, it just makes him look constipated. “You were born with a diseased soul.”

“Why don’t you pray for me then, Dad?” I add on the term that I never use except to irritate him.

“You’re beyond the reach of prayers,” he spits out. His eyes are blazing as he leans across the desk. “I told your mother you were born wrong. That the devil lived in you, but she refused to listen.” He shakes his head in a poor imitation of grief. “It cost poor Amelia her life.”

The always shaky control I have over the volcano of fury toward my father is threatening to erupt. “Don’t talk about her,” I warn, my voice losing its false drunken slur and coming out quiet and threatening.

For a second, my father looks at me cautiously.

He should. If he knew how many times I’d contemplated throwing away my carefully laid plans for his downfall in favor of wrapping my hands around his throat and slowly depriving him of breath as I tell him I know what he did to my mother.

My hands shake with the desire to give in to the hate boiling within me.

He watches me for a moment, and then he dismisses his unease. Once again underestimating me. He lets out a long-suffering sigh. “I’m in no mood for your drunken histrionics. I need to speak to you about your brother.”

The mention of Cassidy’s name focuses me. I need to know why he brought him back home. A slither of unease goes through me every time I think about the small pile of misfunctioning albuterol inhalers on Cassidy’s bureau.

Cassidy had said his mother sent them to him.

I doubt Sheila is ever sober enough when she’s not busy playing the perfect preacher’s wife to even remember her son has asthma, let alone be maternal enough to go to the trouble of sending Cassidy a care package of his meds.

That kind of thing would fall under Mrs. Fenton’s job responsibilities, and she reports directly to my father.

I don’t like it at all.

“What about the runt?” I ask, putting every ounce of disdain I can manufacture into my voice. It’s important that my father thinks Cassidy is nothing more than an annoyance to me.

“His dean contacted me last week. He’s finished all of his coursework to graduate early, and between the college classes he’s already taken and those he tested out of, he’ll be able to enter college as a junior.”

I keep the grin off my face at Cassidy’s accomplishments as pride sweeps through me for my brilliant little over achiever. “So?” I challenge in my best don’t-give-a-rat’s-ass tone. “What’s the big deal? We all know he’s a nerd who doesn’t have anything better to do than study.”

“I pulled some strings and enrolled him in Thurston. He’ll be starting the new semester with you on Monday.”

Since Cassidy rejected my bribe, I have to make sure my father changes his mind about Cassidy staying in Nashville. I need to keep Cassidy safe and far away from here. “There’s no fucking way. He can’t stay here.”

Predictably, my father bristles. “It’s my house. I decide who stays here.”

Still off kilter from my father’s revelation, I can’t help but shoot back, “Actually,” I say, giving him my best fuck-you smile, “It’s mine.”

Pure satisfaction runs through me at watching my father’s face puff up and his eyes bulge in response.

Guess Botox can only do so much. He can’t stand the fact that my mother—unknown to him—changed her will shortly before she died and left me her family’s old money fortune and the ancestral house and land that he’s built his church and compound on.

“I’m Cassidy’s legal guardian. He stays where I want him to stay.”

And checkmate. My father wins this game . Until Cassidy turns eighteen, he’s under my father’s rule.

Two months, three weeks, and four days until Cassidy’s birthday.

Once he’s eighteen, I’ll be able to begin to carry out my plans to topple my father and the mega-church he’s created into his own empire of greed and corruption.

The wait seems eternal, but I’ve survived twenty years of him—I can endure the few months that remain between him and his destruction.

Until then, I just have to make sure Cassidy stays safe.

“We made a deal three years ago,” I remind him. “I didn’t want Cassidy living here then, and I sure as hell don’t want him here now. Send the nerd to another college.”

“Deals run out,” my father says like the sheisty bastard he is.

“Of course, I could always decide to send him to my friend Jefferson’s charter school like I wanted to three years ago.” He watches me closely, detailing my every reaction.

Over my dead body. I’ve heard horror stories about what happens at Jefferson House. I know my father, though, and if I object, he’ll be on the phone to Jefferson immediately.

I shrug, “Better than him being here.” I call his bluff.

He pretends to mull it over. “As much as I think Cassidy could use some toughening up, I want him here, and that’s the end of it.”

I swing my legs down from his desk, scattering the rest of his sermon to the floor, and stand up. “We’ll see about that,” I throw out behind me, right before I head out the door.

After the mind-fuck of a meeting with my father, I go to one of the few places on this property where my father hasn’t erased all proof that my mother ever lived.

Maybe because it’s because he can’t swim, but the pool and its accompanying bungalow have been left out of his manic need to renovate and put the Gideon Brandt stamp all over her legacy.

I fill a glass with ice and then pour whiskey in it until it reaches the top, and sit at one of the bar tops that offer a view of the valley below.

The sight doesn’t catch me like it usually does.

Instead of hill greenery and the blood-orange sunset in front of me, large hazel eyes with specks of blue that never fail to take my breath away, and dark messy curls are all I see.

I hadn’t been prepared for Cassidy to come back into my life. Hell, I hadn’t been ready the first time he showed up in my life either.

I’d just turned seventeen and come home from school one afternoon to find my father sitting on the couch next to a beautiful blonde woman whom he introduced as Sheila, and her son, Cassidy, who looked to be a few years younger than me.

He was too thin, had a mop of black, curly hair that covered his eyes, and wore patched, too-big clothes that looked like thrift-store rejects.

I took one look at the expensive designer dress and shoes Sheila wore and then at Cassidy’s shoes, which had quarter-sized holes in the treads, and I hated the woman on the spot.

Before I could even drop my backpack to the ground, my father stood up, locked hands with Sheila, and announced that they’d been married that morning.

By seventeen, there was little my father could do to surprise me, so I took the news like everything else he threw at me—with a shrug of my shoulders and a fuck-you grin.

Cassidy’s reaction was different. At the announcement, I watched him turn chalk white, blink back tears, and then pretend to be happy for his mother, who barely noticed he was in the room.

Then he shyly approached me, offered his hand, and told me he would try to be a good brother to me.

I looked down at his shaking hand and the vulnerable shine in his eyes, and something shifted in me.

Instead of delivering a biting comment meant to cut him to ribbons and walk away, like I did to most of the people who tried to get close to me, I took his hand and welcomed him as my brother.

I couldn’t understand it. The protectiveness I felt for him immediately.

Even now, I can’t put a name to all the confusing feelings I felt that first summer Cassidy came to live with us.

Lust wasn’t part of it—not until years later.

All I knew was that for once, I was almost grateful to my father for getting married and making Cassidy my stepbrother.

It gave me a claim. A binding tether to him that helped explain why, when I looked at him, I was overcome with the need to call Cassidy mine.

At first, I thought my possessiveness over Cassidy was because as my stepbrother, he gave me a family tie I’d never had.

Except for my mother, whom I only had shadowed memories of, I’d never had family I cared about before.

By this last summer, though, calling him stepbrother began to stick in my throat.

That tether between us began to strangle.

It was too tight to fit the way I felt when I began to notice the fullness of his lips, or how I felt when I accidentally brushed past him and felt the softness of his skin.

I think back to last night. As soon as I was sure Cassidy was sleeping, I sneaked back into his room to make sure he didn’t have another attack. I sat and watched his breathing all night.

The open window by his bed let in the moonlight, which acted as a spotlight for his unbelievable beauty, highlighting his pale skin and dark hair, and giving him an aura of purity.

Looking at him like that, lying spread out before me like a gift, I knew my father was right earlier. I was born bad. No good man would want to climb into his stepbrother’s bed, wake him up, and, with every touch, strip away that purity until I’d thoroughly acquainted him with sin.