Bane (Sinners of Saint, #4)

by L.J. Shen

I was about to drag her back to society. She could come alone, or with her demons. I really didn’t fucking care.

“You can’t be afraid of love, my dear. It’s like being afraid of death. It is inevitable.”

Life is about looking at yourself in the mirror without flinching. Five minutes. That’s how long I stared at myself in the mirror just to make sure fucking Snowflake was wrong. And she was. I hardly even blinked.

Faith is a dangerous thing. It drives you to try, and when you try, you fail.”

And for the first time in a long time, her sky wasn’t going to fall.

We weren’t a boy and a girl. We were two lonely, fucked-up souls. It made wanting Bane in my life acceptable. I wanted him to fix me.

Falling in love is when you lose yourself slowly, piece by piece. Infatuation is when you lose yourself all at once. Love is like ivy. It wraps around you, chokes every part of you quietly. It is not patient, or kind, or gentle. It is needy, cunning, and suffocating.

Don’t you get it? We’re the outliers. The rejects. We’re free. Free to do whatever the hell we want, because it won’t matter. We’ll never fit in here, so we don’t have to try. We’re liberated from all this bullshit.” He motioned around us with his hand. “They can’t hurt you if you don’t give them permission to. So don’t.”

The kind of sun that didn’t caress and nourish life, but burned shit to the ground, turning everything to ash.

I am literally a bastard. My sperm donor was married, but not to my mom. Of course, it wasn’t her choice. She was brutally raped by him. And I’m the constant fucking reminder of that. I have his hair. His eyes. His lips. I have his height and his build. I’ve never met him, but I’ve a feeling that if I ever did, I would tear my fucking limbs apart just to make sure I’d never be capable of doing what he did to her. That’s why the tattoos. And the beard. That’s why I’m hiding. I don’t want to be him, understand?”

The truth was, the beard was my armor. I’d started growing it when I started getting paid for sex. Less of my face to look at in the mirror. And for my next trick, ladies and gents, I will become the whore my father pegged my mother to be. Only worse. She didn’t ask for it. For the right price—I will.

“But you’re my bastard.” I tsked. “I’m everyone’s bastard, Jesse, and therein lies the problem.”

“Snow White waited for the prince. You’ll be the one saving yourself in this story.” I blinked at him, thinking about what my dad used to say, his accent thick, almost as strong as his words. “You don’t need a prince, princess. You need a sword.”

“I want your ass. Happy? Want it with the scars. With the fucked-up, tragic story. With every fiber of my body. I want to fuck you, and own you, and bruise you, and save you. But I can’t do any of those things. Why? Because you’d hate me afterwards, and that’s a fact, not a speculation. Mark my words. For reasons I can’t tell you right now, fucking you will break you and ruin me. And I may be a bastard, but I’m not the fucking villain.”

“Sometimes the sun is a liar. Sometimes it’s out, even though it is cold.”

I wondered when the last time he’d been kissed on the knuckles, hugged in the rain, or had been loved the way everyone deserved to be loved.

For the first time in years, I didn’t want to put on my Keds and run from the demons that lurked under my bed at night. For the first time in my life, I let them sleep with us, inside my bed, in my room, knowing that they were just ghosts of my past. That they couldn’t touch me.

I liked being loved.

Maybe love wasn’t about feeling happy and whole. Maybe love was about breaking so the person you cared for would feel a little more whole.

My grief was still so fresh and pristine—I didn’t want anyone tarnishing it with hope.

I dragged my lips down to his neck, whispering, “I love you, Roman ‘Bane’ Protsenko. Not because you take away my loneliness, but because you give me strength.”

I remembered thinking God was crying with me. I remembered thinking God was unfair, because I was already unhappy, and I hadn’t even done anything wrong.

He smelled like a man, not like a boy. Boys smell spicy and sour, with too many hormones and deodorant. Men smell like violence. Bitter, but subtle.

“What if she decides she doesn’t want me at the end of it?” I rubbed my face with my palm. Gail smiled. “Then be happy for her, Roman. That’s the essence of love.”

My only regret is that you drowned in my sins.

Oh, Jesse, it is so easy to manipulate people once they think you’re weak). Maybe that person was you.

It didn’t surprise me one bit when they began to call you Snow White at school. I wondered—and more than once—whether your friends knew the whole truth. That you, too, had a wicked mother that was jealous of your beauty. That you, too, hid away from the world. Just with books instead of dwarfs. That you, too, took a bite of the poisonous apple.

Break the cycle, because there are too many bad men out there who need to be stopped, and the only way to stop them is to be a strong woman. So be one.

Books were my friends, my allies, my voice. They were my weapon of choice in the war which I survived.

I felt like he was filling me with much more than a kiss. With hope and with desire and with the ability to see the world a little brighter.

And I thought that, if this was a fairytale, this is how I’d end the chapter: The princess’ sword was bloody. But she refused to tuck it back in. She wanted to leave a trail of their misery behind her, so they could always find her.

I looked at them, and they looked at me, and all they could see was black, because that’s who I was to them. The darkness. The stain in their history. Not to be removed. Not to be forgotten. I would spread, and conquer, and be remembered, so that other women would not end up like me.

I say “boys,” but chronologically, they should be men. They’d never be men. Men don’t take without asking. Men don’t abuse women. Men. Don’t. Rape.

but it is my soul that feels rich these days.

I hug Gail, and she puts her palm across my heart and whispers into my ear, “I’d have given you a sword, but you already own one.”