CHAPTER 2 - NEW FAMILY

The bite healed in a few days, which seemed fast, but I wasn't exactly monitoring it with scientific rigour because I was too busy crying over Ryan Parker and pretending the frat party never happened. It left a faint silver line on my neck that I cover with concealer out of habit. Sometimes the skin there feels warmer than it should. I don't think about it.

I don't know what bit me at that party. I'm choosing not to examine that sentence too closely because I have bigger things to deal with currently.

My mom has a type – tall, handsome, confident, full of promises that expire within six months. She collects them the way some people collect stamps or bad habits – methodically and with an optimism that would be inspiring if it didn't always end with her crying in the bathroom at 2 AM while I pretended to be asleep on the other side of the wall.

There was the one who drank. The one who yelled. The one who did both at the same time and then bought her roses the next morning like petals could undo a bruised rib. I stopped learning their names after boyfriend number four because it felt like memorizing the roster of a team that kept getting relegated, and I was tired of showing up to games that always ended the same way.

So when she calls me on a Tuesday afternoon, voice pitched high with that specific brand of excitement that means she's met someone new, I pour myself a glass of water and give this one six months. Generous, honestly.

"He's different, baby," she says, and I mouth the words along with her because she's said them about every man she's ever brought home. "He's a professor. He's refined. You'll love him."

I won't love him. I'll be polite and invisible the way I've trained myself to be – small enough to not attract attention, quiet enough to not become a target, boring enough that whoever he is won't notice me at all, which is exactly how I like it.

The restaurant she picks is nicer than her usual, which tells me this one has money. I get there first and order a water and sit with my hands in my lap and my back straight and wait for whatever fresh disaster my mother has dressed up in a blazer and cologne.

Dominic Voss walks in and I understand immediately why my mom fell for him, because the man looks like he was assembled in a lab specifically designed to make middle-aged women lose their entire minds. Tall, lean, dark hair going silver at the temples in a way that shouldn't be attractive but is. His suit fits him like it was sewn while he was wearing it. He shakes my hand and holds it for exactly one second longer than normal, and his eyes meet mine with this flat, assessing quality that makes me feel like I'm being read cover to cover.

"Ivy," he says, like he's tasting the word, and something about the way he says my name makes the back of my neck prickle.

"Nice to meet you," I say, and pull my hand back first because his grip was warm and dry and unsettling in a way I can't explain.

My mom is glowing. She's wearing the earrings she only wears when she wants to impress someone, and her hand is on Dominic's arm, and she's telling me about how they met at a faculty event and how he teaches Advanced Literature at Ashworth – which is my university, which is fine, everything is fine – and then she says the thing that makes my stomach drop.

"His son Knox is about your age, actually. He dropped out of school about a year ago, but Dominic's convinced him to re-enroll at Ashworth, so you two will be on the same campus! Isn't that great?"

I smile and say "that's great" because that's what invisible girls do, and then the restaurant door opens and the air in the room changes the way it does right before a storm rolls in and you can feel the pressure shift against your skin.

Knox Voss does not belong in this restaurant. He belongs on a highway or in the kind of bar that doesn't card you because the bartender is afraid of what you'll do if he asks. He's tall enough that he has to angle his shoulders slightly to avoid the hostess stand, and he's wearing a leather jacket over a black t-shirt that's doing absolutely nothing to hide the tattoos climbing up his neck, and his jaw is the kind of sharp that looks like it could cut you if you ran your thumb across it.

He doesn't greet anyone. He pulls out the chair across from me and drops into it like he owns the building and everyone in it, and then he looks at me — and something about the way his eyes find mine doesn't feel like a first meeting.

There's a recognition in his gaze that I can't place, like he's confirming something he already suspected, and when his nostrils flare slightly as he settles into his chair. I feel the fading scar on my neck go warm under the concealer, and I press my fingers against it without thinking.

He doesn't stop looking at me.

My mom is talking about the wedding plans – which, yes, apparently they're already engaged and I'm finding out at dinner, which tracks – and Dominic is answering in that measured voice of his, and Knox hasn't said a single word since he sat down. His boot presses against mine under the table. I should move my foot. I don't move my foot.

His eyes are grey and steady and they haven't left my face and I am suddenly, acutely aware that my safe, boring, controlled little life is sitting on a fault line and something is about to crack.

Dinner ends. Parking lot. My mom is hugging Dominic by his car and laughing at something he said, and I'm standing by the passenger door waiting for her when Knox materializes next to me like he was built from the shadows between the streetlights.

He catches my wrist before I register that he's moved, and his thumb presses into my pulse point the way you'd check if something was still alive, and his eyes drop to the spot on my neck where the concealer is covering the fading scar and something flickers across his face that's too fast to read, and the scar on my neck goes warm again in a way that has to be coincidental but doesn't feel coincidental.

He counts my heartbeat for four seconds. Then he looks at my face and the corner of his mouth twitches.

"Fast," he says.

He lets go. Walks to his motorcycle at the back of the lot and throws a leg over it without looking back. The engine growls to life and he's gone, and I stand there in the parking lot with my wrist tingling and my heart doing exactly what he said it was doing.

They move in the next day. Knox's bedroom is across the hall from mine. I lie in bed that first night and stare at the ceiling and listen to the unfamiliar sounds of two strangers living in my space and I tell myself that this is fine and temporary and that my mom's relationships have an expiry date and I just have to wait it out the way I always do.

I fall asleep with my door closed and my covers pulled up to my chin.

I wake up because the air in my room is different – heavier and charged with something that smells like leather and skin.

My eyes adjust to the dark and Knox is standing at the foot of my bed, looking down at me with those grey eyes catching the faint light from the window, and his hands are at his belt and the metal clink of the buckle coming undone is the loudest sound I've ever heard.

I should scream. I should tell him to get out. My mom is down the hall and his father is down the hall and he is my stepbrother as of approximately nine hours ago. But something about the way the air changed when he walked in — the heat, the scent, the way the scar on my neck went warm for the third time today — is short-circuiting the part of my brain that knows how to say no. I don't say anything.

I don't say anything.