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110

Author: Naya
last update publish date: 2026-04-09 15:17:16

CHAPTER 110

JULIA

She sits down when she sees my face.

She pulls the chair around, sits and folds her hands on the table and looks at me with those red-rimmed eyes and waits.

I put my phone between us.

The cracked screen. The photographs. I open the folder, and I lay it there, and I watch her look at it.

She looks for a long time.

The kitchen is very quiet. The refrigerator hums. Outside, the street does its ordinary evening thing. In here, it's just the two of us and the thesis photographs and
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    CHAPTER 112JULIAIt starts with a door handle.I'm half asleep, reaching for the handle of Sebastian's bedroom door in the early morning dark. My hand closes around the handle. I push, and the door opens so fast it hits the wall.I stand in the doorway, heart pounding.I look at the door, then at my hand.The handle is slightly bent.I don't tell them immediately.I go back to my room. I sit on the edge of my bed, my whole body trembling from what just happened.The strength is strange, and I do not understand it, so I find the twins.Sebastian's face when I show him the handle does something complicated, pride and fear arriving simultaneously. He looks at it for a long moment. Then he looks at Silas."Come on," He urges."Where?” I ask, chewing on my bottom lip."Outside," he says. "Come on."The woods behind the house are different at six in the morning.I've been in them before, walked through them with Bree, once, in the early weeks when everything was still new, and I was still

  • Caught Between My Alpha Stepbrothers: Theirs to Ruin   111

    CHAPTER 111JULIAThey're in Sebastian's room.Sebastian is at his desk, not doing anything. Silas is on the floor with his back against the bed, forearms on his knees, looking at nothing.They look up when I come in.I close the door behind me."Tell me about your father," I say.Sebastian starts.He talks about growing up.The way their father moved through a room and how the room changed when he entered it. The particular quality of his approval, which was rare and conditional and designed, Sebastian understands now, to keep them reaching. The disapproval, which was quieter and more total and which both of them spent years trying to outrun without knowing they were running.Then Silas takes it.He talks about their mother.He talks about the night the fire came, the night she died’She was alive. She had been alive the whole time. She was being kept alive in the specific way that is designed to be a leash, present enough to be used, isolated enough to be controlled, loving her sons

  • Caught Between My Alpha Stepbrothers: Theirs to Ruin   110

    CHAPTER 110JULIAShe sits down when she sees my face.She pulls the chair around, sits and folds her hands on the table and looks at me with those red-rimmed eyes and waits.I put my phone between us.The cracked screen. The photographs. I open the folder, and I lay it there, and I watch her look at it.She looks for a long time.The kitchen is very quiet. The refrigerator hums. Outside, the street does its ordinary evening thing. In here, it's just the two of us and the thesis photographs and eighteen years of careful omission arranged on the table between us.She doesn't touch the phone."How much do you already know?" she says.Not what is this, or where did you get these? Not an attempt at the exit. She goes straight to the real question, which tells me something: she's been preparing for this conversation, maybe for years, certainly for the weeks since she saw me in the kitchen with the kettle and the face I thought was blank.She knew I'd seen it.Of course, she knew."Tell me

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