"Clary." he said, catching at her sleeve. "Be careful."

She detached herself gently and headed up the stairs, taking her witchlight rune-stone to illuminate her way.

The windows along the upstairs corridor were open, and a cool breeze blew down the hall, smelling of city stone and canal water, lifting her hair away from her face.

Clary reached her bedroom and pushed the door open... and froze. The witchlight pulsed in her hand, casting bright spokes of light across the room.

There was someone sitting on her bed. A tall someone, with white-fair hair, a sword across his lap, and a silver bracelet that sparked like fire in the witchlight. «If I cannot reach Heaven, I will raise Hell.» "Hello, sister mine." Sebastian said.

Clary opened her lips, but she couldn't scream: her brother's lips on her own didn't grant her to try. She stared him and bit his tongue.

Sebastian's blood spurted in her mouth, but this wasn't enough to stop him. His hands clawed her hips and held her, while a creeping frost taken over her.

She tried to ask what the hell he was doing to her, but something much more powerful than a Silence rune crushed her throat. She gasped and struggled, but her legs failed her. She collapsed to the ground, leaning against the closed door, and any attempt to push him away proved weaker than she wanted.

Sebastian picked her up as if she were a doll and laid her on the bed; then he sat down at her side. He was smiling and his eyes had never been so full, but she couldn't u figure out what they contained. It was a feverish gleam, bordering delirium, though the facial features were relaxed, free from wrinkles. Sebastian was polished, in spite of any turmoil. He stroked her face with the back of his hand. "I didn't come to fight, Clarissa." he said. "I came to talk and you'll listen to, once and for all."

Clary shivered and drew back. « Let me go. » spelled, frowning.

Her brother shook his head. "If I did it, you would scream; or you would try to kill me."

Clary rolled her eyes.

"Okay, maybe you would have the right." granted her the laid. He took a lock of hair and turned it over in his fingers. "But you'll change your mind." He licked his lips like a cat. A memory flashed in the echo of a smile, but it was only a moment. "You and I belong each other, you know. You can't keep me away forever. My blood is calling you as yours is calling me."

Clary frowned and writhing. She growled and sat, then she leaned against the headboard and crossed her arms.

Sebastian laughed between his teeth. "See, that's what I like about you." he said. "Even paralyzed and mute, you always find a way to have your say." He stepped closer and unhooked the weapons belt to put it on a shelf, out of her reach. He sat back down as if they had all the time in the world, closer than before. The blood was boiling in his veins. Every cell was ordering him to rape her: he had come to that, basically. He touched her leg. He couldn't do it. No matter how he desired to give in to that urge: he wanted her to be consenting. Even more than her body, he wished that she gave him the same look she had addressed to Jace. "You know, when we were in Paris I really thought you was giving me a chance. I believed you were melting and soon I could reveal to you what I had in mind to do."

Clary pursed her lips and immediately bitten them.

"I was sure that you would have followed me. I was so close to feel happy... and, for a moment, I even thought I could give up the Infernal Cup. What nonsense, eh? Though, if you had asked me, I would."

Clary shook her head.

Sebastian grinned and leaned forward with his bust. "Pretend I'm lying I will not make a liar, sister." he whispered on her lips. He touched them with his own and retreated before Clary could bite him again. "You saw what our father did to me. You know what he did to Jace... and he was his favorite. Can you really blame me, if I am not Prince Charming?" he urged her. He took her by the hips and counted the vertebrae from the base of the back to the nape. He held her, chest to chest, despite her arms in the middle, and cocked his head in the crook of her shoulder. "I want you." he whispered. "And I'll have you even if I will have to collect you from the world's ashes. No matter how long it takes." He got up and untied the bonds that had tightened around her. It would have been more logical to take her away and tame her away from prying eyes, but what bound him to her was the best part of himself, that spark of humanity that he still had and, as long as it existed, he wouldn't ever take her by force.

Clary gasped and leaned forward even before she knew it herself. "Wait!" mumbled. Tighten her fingers around his wrist was an illogical relief, but it filled her stomach with a sufficient heat to embarrass the same Holy Fire. "You... You can't..." she tried to say, but the suffocation that had forced her to keep quiet for so long made it difficult to articulate sounds.

Sebastian felt that he shouldn't do this, but he sat down beside her. He caressed her face, nape and neck. An Iratze would be almost useless. He sifted the room with his eyes and saw a half-empty bottle on a table. He got up to take it and handed it to her.

Clary followed his movements as if they belonged to someone else, but received water as a blessing. She would have to take advantage of that moment to take Eosforos and stick it in his back; instead, she was trying to tell the biggest nonsense of her life. She dropped to the ground the bottle and licked her lips moist. They tasted him. "You can't leave without letting me reply." she let out and, for a moment, she wanted to slap herself. It was even worse than what she actually meant.

Sebastian smiled and kissed her again, for a long time, but without fury. "Give me a reason." he whispered, but he didn't give her time to respond, or react. He had to be gone crazy; there was no other explanation for what he was doing. He was putting the plan at risk only for those lips.

Clary takes longer than necessary, but pressed her hands on his shoulders and stepped back. "You can't have me in this way. You can't. I'm your sister."

Sebastian gritted his teeth. "With Jace you didn't care." He stood up. "I am better than him. I can give you more. I can give you the best."

Clary shook her head. "No." she said. "You can only give me ashes and death. This is not love."

Sebastian's eyes blazed. "So what is love, for you?"

Clary could have expected everything, but not that question. She bit her lower lip. All the definitions that came to her mind seemed wrong, perhaps because they were imbued with Jace. "Love is to wish for the happiness of the person you love even in spite of yours." she decided.

Sebastian growled, but it was not enough to hold back the bitter laugh that escaped his lips. "In practice, I have to stop to exist, so you and your beloved Jace can live happily ever after in my detriment." he blurted. He wanted to destroy something, anything, to give vent to what was moving in his stomach, but nearby there was nothing suitable for the purpose. "I bet you and Jocelyn" He said his mother's name like an insult. "were happy when I died. Did you celebrate? Did you toasted?"

Clary clenched her fists. Why he distorted what she was trying to tell him? She loaded the slap in the wake of the despair and she wasn't that much surprised when Sebastian's big hand parried the hit. "I'm not the bad one, here!" she protested, saturated.

"You left me alone, like everyone else. You're as guilty as everyone else." Sebastian pushed her away. It had all been useless. With good manners he never obtained anything. He spun the Morgenstern's ring.

He appeared in his room and let out the air remaining in his lungs. He opened his eyes and collided with something for which he was unprepared. "Clarissa."

"You can't run away in the middle of a discussion."

Sebastian laughed. He hugged her and feel the soft flesh of the woman for whom he would do everything to pieces under his fingers. This made everything blurred and useless for several seconds. "Your stubbornness is your punishment, little sister." he hissed. He kissed her and pushed her against the wall.

Clary mumbled a protest that was lost in the lips' crash. He scraped his back and bit his lip, but did not need to be reflected in Sebastian's eyes to know that she did not look like a victim. "You have not understood anything of love and not even of me."

"You're wrong, little sister." Sebastian smiled. "I understand more than you think." He caged her between himself and the wall. He could feel her heart beating against his, at rhythm of the breath that fondled his pale skin. "You are here, with me, and I'll not let you go longer."

Clary stiffened in his grasp, but she did not try to escape. "I have not celebrated your death." she whispered. She had celebrated for Valentine's one, for being still alive, but she didn't hated him enough to rejoice of his departure. If he died at that very moment, it would be different, but it was better not to specify this.

"But you did not even cry for me."

"Because of you, all those I care risked to die, do you remember?"

Sebastian nodded and curled his lips in a grimace. "I was different then. Or, maybe, I'm different now." He drew her lips with his thumb and repressed the echo of a thought.

Clary had to swallow a sigh. "Come back to Alicante with me. We can still fix things."

He narrowed his lips and his eyes. "It wouldn't allow me to have you by my side."

"Not like that, no." Clary confirmed. She stroked his face with one hand, and for a few seconds she seemed to grasp a layer of goose bumps under her own fingers. "But I can be your sister."

Sebastian chained his eyes with hers. He trembled to the core, but not a muscle moved, as if he had been turned to stone. "It would be worse." he said. "Watch you with another man would be even worse to lose the marks and become a mundane."

Clary swallowed. The part of her that had brought her there (wherever it was there) roared in his belly and was fighting with everything else that was trying to keep her focused onto reality. "Jonathan..." she whispered, but failed to add more. There was something, in those blacks eyes, which seemed to devour her soul.

Sebastian squeezed her shoulders until he crunched her bones. He had white knuckles and contracted jaw. "This is not a whim, Clarissa." he said. "I need you more than I've ever needed Jace." He kissed her, never sated by her. He tasted her tongue against his own, her jaw and her neck's skin. He sucked to leave a visible trace of his passage, and went down on her chest.

Clary felt dizzy. How she had come to that? She had followed him to convince him to stop the war, but he was the one who was persuading her. Her body recognized him, even though it was wrong. She drowned just like at the Fairchild estate and she wanted it. She groaned.

The demon blood in Sebastian's veins seethed and snarled. "Once, only once." he let out, in a gasp.

Clary couldn't say why, but she hugged him. She encircled his shoulders and stroked his hair. Vacuum swallowed, as if she her throat sprinkled with cinnamon. "I can't." she whispered. If only I were not a virgin... She didn't dare finish that thought. She shouldn't even think such a thing, and yet it was there, beating down on the edge of consciousness.

Sebastian flinched. "Then leave. Go back to Alicante, but be aware that the next time I'll see you, I'll kill you. If I can't have you, no one will."

Clary didn't move. That was her best chance to leave and she wouldn't have another, but she couldn't. She knew that her apprehension for Sebastian made no sense. He was a monster, he had shown more than once and everyone did nothing but repeat it, but she couldn't forget Paris. She shook her head. "I don't leave, unless you first tell me why. What do you gain, to destroy everything?"

Sebastian clicked his tongue. "None of your business." he said, almost offended by the question.

"They are, instead, if you want me with you in this madness!" relaunched Clary. She pulled away from the wall and put her hands on her hips, in her best imitation of Jocelyn that scolded her when she was little. "Convince me and I will be on your side."

Sebastian sighed. He ran a hand through his light hair and smiled. "I do it for Lilith." he admitted and the tone almost desperate with which he whispered those words, combined with tremor that broke his voice, was enough to add that he hadn't been able to confess.

"She's not your mother, Jonathan. Jocelyn is your mother, and her greatest regret is leaving you with Valentine. She thought that his experiments had destroyed your humanity, but if he saw you now... do you think would not help you?"

"She would stab me with an angelic sword in my heart before I can say a word." He approached her again and held her. "But I don't care." he said. "I just need you."

Clary faced his eyes. "I will not fight against my family and my friends and I will not accept that they drink from the Infernal Cup."

Sebastian took her to her wrists. He looked at her as if to say something, but he gave up, distracted by the slender hands Clary who reciprocated the narrow and explored the arms and the back through the cloth. A languid sigh slipped between his lips and he stretched them into a smile. "A month. Just give me a month to make you fall in love. If I fail, we'll do it in your way."

Clary smiled. "I'll be by your side in any case." promised and she was the one who kissed him. She was gentle, slow, almost shy. She explored his brother's lips with his own, with her tongue and teeth. A hot shiver filled her stomach with lava and she knew to be boarded in the biggest foolishness of her life.

Hi, everyone!

I'm Italian and this is the first time I try to translate my story in English and I'm pretty sure that it is full of errors, but I had to try, so... each correction is more than welcome: I really love this language and I want to learn. I chosen this story because I really love Clary and Sebastian/Jonathan. They're one of my favorites OTP. This story is the beginning of a series, so... if you like it (and if this experiment is not this bad as I think) let me know, please: it would be very, very good for my self-confidence and I could try translate sequels.

See you!