Marked By Two

A Saviour's Sin

​Cassian’s POV

​My vision was a chaos of swirling, violent colors, focused entirely on the girl in the center of the storm. Aria. She looked so small in that silk robe, so breakable against the backdrop of this cold stone estate, and yet she was the only thing holding my fractured mind together. Without her, I was just a beast in a suit, drowning myself in bourbon and bad blood.

​I didn't think anymore. I couldn't. I just moved.

​I stumbled toward them, my boots heavy and loud on the rug.

"Get away from her, Noah," I growled, the words turning into a promise of violence. I reached out, my hand grasping for her, pulling at the silk of her robe with a desperate, immoral hunger I couldn't control. I wanted to rip her away from him, to claim the space he was occupying, to prove she was mine even if I had to break her to do it.

​"Cassian, stop. You're drunk," Noah said, his voice dropping into that commanding Alpha tone that usually made me see red. He stepped between us, his palm flat against my chest to shove me back, his expression one of icy, disappointed superiority.

​"Don't touch me!" I roared, the bourbon in my veins giving me a sudden, explosive wave of strength.

​I swung at him with everything I had. My fist caught him square in the jaw with a sharp crack. Noah’s head snapped back, his eyes flashing with a momentary shock, but he didn't fall. He was an Alpha, just like me, and he didn't know how to yield.

​He lunged, tackling me around the waist, and we hit the floor in a tangle of limbs and suppressed rage. We weren't brothers at that moment; in truth, we had never really been brothers. We were two predators, teeth bared and claws out, fighting over the same kill.

The air in the room grew thick with the scent of our aggression and our blood.

​"Stop it! Both of you, stop!" Aria’s voice was a frantic, piercing scream. She threw herself between us, her small hands pushing at our shoulders, trying to pry our locked, sweating bodies apart. She was crying out for peace in a house that only understood war.

​In the chaos, a stray elbow, mine or Noah's, I couldn't tell in my drunken haze, caught her hard in the temple. Aria let out a sharp, choked gasp, the sound of a bird whose wing had just been snapped. Her eyes rolled back into her head, and she slumped to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut.

​The sound of our struggle had already done its work. The bedroom door burst open, and a flood of guards and panicked maids spilled into the room, led by the head of security.

Elena was right behind them, her face pale in the dim light, her eyes darting between the three of us with a look of confusion that quickly turned into irritation.

​"Out! All of you, out!" Noah barked. He stood up immediately, smoothing his shirt with trembling hands, his Alpha authority snapping back into place even as a dark bead of blood trickled from his split lip. "It’s nothing. A misunderstanding. Dismissed!"

​The staff scrambled back, terrified by the raw violence radiating from him. I stayed on the floor, my head throbbing in time with my heartbeat, crawling toward Aria’s motionless body on my hands and knees. My world had narrowed down to the pale curve of her shoulder.

​"Take him to his quarters," Noah ordered, pointing a finger at me as two guards moved in. "Lock the door if you have to. He isn't to leave until he's sober."

​"No... Aria..." I groaned, but the guards were already pulling me up, dragging my heavy, uncooperative body toward the door. I struggled against their grasp, kicking and snarling. I wasn't even ashamed anymore, an Alpha being dragged away by his own subordinates like a common drunk.

All that mattered was the girl on the floor.

​In the chaos of that moment, the air in the room suddenly turned cold, then impossibly hot. Aria began to shake. It started as a faint tremor in her hands, but within seconds, her entire body was convulsing, her heels drumming a rhythm against the rug.

Her skin turned a terrifying, feverish red, and a faint, violet mist began to rise from her pores, curling into the air like smoke. She was burning up, but it didn't look like any normal fever. It looked like she was being consumed from the inside out.

​Noah froze, his face turning a ghostly white. He reached for her, his fingers trembling, but he pulled back as the heat scorched the air between them. "Aria? Aria!"

​"No! What did you do to her?" I yelled, pulling away from the guards with a sudden, surprising surge of strength. I ran toward the lifeless body on the floor, desperate to hold her, to save her. But the moment my skin came in contact with hers, I flinched back with a cry.

​It was like touching a furnace. My palm hissed, the heat searing my skin instantly.

​"Move, you fool! You're letting her heart stop!"

​Elena pushed past Noah, dropping to her knees beside Aria. Unlike us, she didn't seem afraid of the heat. She placed her hands firmly over Aria's heart and forehead, her own eyes beginning to glow with a strange, pulsing silvery light.

That was when the memory hit me through the fog of bourbon, Elena had been a gifted healer of her pack once, long before she became the woman who haunted my nightmares.

​Elena began to mutter something under her breath, a low chant in a language that sounded ancient and heavy with power. Her fingers pressed deep into Aria’s burning skin and the violet mist seemed to settle.

​As I was dragged out of the room, my strength failed me. The last thing I saw was the woman I hated, the woman carrying the child I didn't want, leaning over the woman I loved, her power the only thing keeping Aria's soul from slipping into the dark.