Page 76 of Sticks & Serpents

Cooper.

My older brother stood before me like a fortress. He looked like he’d stepped out of some gritty action film—tall and rugged with scars etched across his face. A fucking cowboy wrapped in an aura of hard-won wisdom. The kind of guy who seemed both intimidating and somehow at ease in chaos.

His grip was solid, firm—but not aggressive. He had always been stronger than me, but right now he wasn’t trying to hurt me. Not yet.

“What the hell is going on, Damien?” His voice was calm and measured, but his eyes bore into mine—watching, studying, assessing the storm brewing inside me.

I breathed heavily, fists clenching at my sides as adrenaline pumped through my body. The urge to fight surged back again; it would be so easy to throw my brother off me and go after our mother again.

“Stay the fuck out of this,” I shot back, my voice low and dangerous.

Cooper’s gaze didn’t waver; he remained anchored despite my fury. Meanwhile, our mother exhaled dramatically behind him, brushing nonexistent dust from her sleeve as if we were mere inconveniences in her perfect world.

“Your brother was about to hit his own mother, Cooper,” she chimed in sweetly. “Imagine that.”

Cooper didn’t look at her. His gaze remained locked on me, a silent demand for an explanation I didn’t have.

My throat tightened, words lodged somewhere deep inside me. What was the point? No one ever believed me—not my father, not anyone. Why would Cooper be any different? He fucking left the second he could, and now he cared? I felt a bitter laugh bubbling up at the thought.

I stared at him, waiting for him to break the silence, but it dragged on too long, stretching between us like an invisible chasm. Finally, he exhaled through his nose.

“Damien…”

The sound of my name in his voice hit me like a punch to the gut. I wrenched free from his grip and shook my head, fury igniting within me.

“Fuck this.”

Fuck all of this. I turned away from both of them—the mother who twisted every word and every emotion into something monstrous and the brother who would never understand the darkness that consumed me. Staying meant talking, meant remembering things better left buried deep beneath layers of anger and chaos.

I stormed out of that parlor, heart pounding with each step as if my feet knew how to escape before my mind caught up with what was happening. I could hear their voices fading behind me—my mother’s calculated remarks mingling with Cooper’s concerned tones—but I pushed them out like they were nothing more than background noise.

No one deserved to see this side of me—not even Cooper. He’d been raised to think he could fix everything, but he couldn’t fix what was broken in our family or in me.

I burst through the front door into the cold air outside, letting it wash over my skin like a baptism. The chill helped clear my head momentarily; however, it did nothing to extinguish the rage simmering beneath the surface.

As I walked away from that house—a prison of memories—I could feel my heart racing faster than my thoughts. The last thing I wanted was to open myself up again, only to be broken once more by those who should have been there to protect me.

They didn’t get it; they never would.

I barely registered where I was going. All I knew was that I needed to get the fuck out. The Sinclaire house felt like a cage, the walls closing in on me with every breath I took. My mother’s voice echoed in my mind, a constant reminder of the chaos she thrived on.

Holly ruined you.

She’ll leave you again.

No one ever listened. No one ever believed me. Not my father, not Cooper—no one. They were all too caught up in their own worlds to see the truth buried beneath layers of pretense and façade.

My hands tightened around the steering wheel as I sped down the highway, the asphalt blurring beneath me. The familiar route offered no solace, just a growing sense of urgency and desperation that clawed at my insides.

I should go somewhere, find a fight, lose myself in something violent—something that could drown out all this noise in my head. But instead, my mind drifted back to Holly—the way she’d looked at me under that storm, how she had kissed me with such fire and need that it had ignited something inside me long buried.

She had texted me. She had called. She hadn’t left—not yet. But how much longer before she did?

Every second spent away from her twisted into knots of anxiety in my gut. I couldn't shake off the fear that clung to me like a second skin, tightening with each passing moment. What if she listened to my mother? What if those poisonous words seeped into her mind and made her doubt everything we shared?

The headlights from oncoming cars flashed through my windshield, pulling me back to reality for a fleeting moment before darkness crept back in—thoughts of Holly, wrapped up in shadows of uncertainty and dread.

Would she really choose them over me?

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