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2026-01-08 23:18:34CHAPTER ONE
JULIA “This will be good,” Mom says for the fifth time, and I sigh deeply. “Come on, Julia, this will be good. I promise you.” She nudges my shoulder. I look at her, and my heart squeezes at the guilt on her face. I know she didn’t want to do this; she didn’t want to rip me away from my friends, my school, my life. Ever since Dad left, things have been a little hard for us, but Mom took care of me; she gave me what she didn’t have, she never made me feel the lack and absence. I lived a good life. I had everything and more, but she deprived herself of companionship because of me. I’ve always wondered why she never dated. Is it me, or does she just not want to? She doesn’t really talk about Dad, but I know she loved him. She loved him very much. I’ve seen the old pictures that she always tries to hide. All I know about Dad is that he was her first love, the man she met at nineteen, the man who stuck to her like glue, but eventually left. Something must have happened. It is the biggest mystery of my life – why did he leave? “You’re not saying anything, Jul. Just talk to me.” She pleas. I tear my gaze away from the plane window and look at her. “Does he love you?” I ask. She blinks, caught offguard, “What?” “Does Stephen love you? We are moving to the other side of the world to be with him. You’re leaving your job, I’m leaving school, leaving everything to be with him. We are giving a lot, sacrificing a lot for him. There has to be a balance, Mom. Is it reciprocated? Does he love you enough? We are making so many sacrifices to be with him. What is he doing to be with you?” I articulate, my brows furrowed. She stutters, “Steve, he loves me. He loves us. He paid for our plane tickets. He bought us a house, Julia, our house, in my name. I know you’re worried about everything, but I promise you, our lives are changing for the better. He loves us, and I love him too. He’s everything I’ve always wanted.” I nod, with a fake smile. I’m not too excited about starting over, but at least she’s excited. She’s happy, so I will be happy. She has given so much for me. It is my turn to pay her back for everything. “Steve has two sons, Silas and Sebastian. They’re twins, and just a year older than you. I’m sure you’ll be fast friends. You’ll also make more friends in school. Oh, I’m so excited!” She gushes, and I chuckle at her happiness. We spent the rest of the flight talking about everything. I’m a Senior in High School, and next year, I’ll be off to college. School is resuming in a few days, and I have to start with the new session. Truly, I’m not looking forward to it. It took me a while to get comfortable in school and make friends. I’m more of a nerd, which makes me more likely to be picked on. High School is full of bullies. I survived it once, and now, I have to start over. At least, I won’t be alone. Steve’s twins could help me smooth things over. I close my book as the plane starts to land. Goosebumps trickle down my spine. Everything here is different. The air is different. Mom helps me pack my bags, then grabs hers. I hold to my book as we get off the plane. “Steve is picking us up. Are you hungry?” Mom asks, and I nod, too exhausted to speak. She smiles and begins chattering as we walk through the airport. I don’t respond, but she doesn’t need me to. My head is banging, and exhaustion has settled in my bones. I need to sleep for hours, and maybe swim later. Truly, I am excited for a new possibility. I try to keep an open mind. “Steve!” Mom gasps. I follow her gaze and see Steve. He runs towards us, obviously enamoured by my mom. “Oh, baby!” Mom gushes and hugs him tightly. He cups her face and showers her in kisses. My heart twists painfully as I watch them. I’m nineteen, and I’ve never been in love, not like this, not something as solid and real. I want something like this. I want something real. I want to be loved, too. Steve pulls away from my Mom and wraps me in his big arms. “You look beautiful, Julia.” He presses a kiss to my forehead. I roll my eyes, “Don’t flatter me. I’m so exhausted.” “You’ve had a very long journey, so it’s understandable. I didn’t decorate your bedroom yet, actually, you can choose whatever bedroom you want in the room. The world is your oyster, sweet girl.” He pinches my cheeks tenderly, and I beam widely. My heart squeezes painfully. I’ve never had a father in my life, and Steve is fitting perfectly into the role. “Alright, come on, let’s go home.” He urges, and we file into his Jeep. I glance out the window as he drives us to our new home. I’ve always been afraid of change, but maybe change can be good. The only constant thing in life is change. My mouth falls open in awe as we drive past big companies, hospitals, farms, and pharmacies. This place is a big city compared to my former home. This place will be perfect, and I’m so impatient to begin the rest of my life here. Mom sends me a warm smile, and I return it. “Your school is only ten minutes away from home. By the way, I have a huge surprise for you tomorrow.” Steve informs, and I nod, excited. Eventually, he drives onto a street. I frown as shivers crawl down my spine, for no reason. I push it back and smile when I see my new home. I am oblivious to how my life is about to change.
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Caught Between My Alpha Stepbrothers: Theirs to Ruin 130
CHAPTER 130JULIAThe new house smells like garlic and something burning.That's Sebastian's fault."It's not burning," he announces from the kitchen, to nobody who asked, in the specific tone of a man who knows it's burning and has committed to the position."It's burning," Silas says, from the living room, not looking up from his book."It's a little burning," I confirm, from the couch, also not looking up.The new house is on the east side of the city.We chose everything in this house.Every room, every piece of furniture, every decision made by people doing it freely, with no one managing the outcome. It still surprises me sometimes. The freedom of it.Steve has been dead for four months.He's gone. The things he built are being dismantled. The pack is restructuring around something that doesn't run on fear, which is taking time, which will keep taking time, which is work the twins are doing carefully and daily.It's not clean.It was never going to be clean, but it is, increment
Caught Between My Alpha Stepbrothers: Theirs to Ruin 129
CHAPTER 129SEBASTIANHe's gone.I stand over him, and I wait for something to arrive. Some feeling, some signal, some internal shift that marks the before and after of a thing this large. I've been living in the past my entire life. Twenty years of his house, his voice, his hand on every lever that mattered. Twenty years of the specific survival of being his son.The after should feel like something.It doesn't feel like anything yet.Just cold air. Just the street. Just the specific silence of an ending.Silas is beside me.Neither of us speaks.Julia makes a sound. I turn.She's still upright. Barely. Her shoulder was wrong, her face showing everything the night cost her, blood dried at her temple and her lip, her good arm wrapped around her ribs like she's holding herself in place.She's looking at me.I let her see me, all of it.She doesn't try to fix me.She just stays.Our mother is behind me.She's here.She's actually here.Her hand finds my arm.I look down at it. Her hand
Caught Between My Alpha Stepbrothers: Theirs to Ruin 128
CHAPTER 128SILASI smell her blood from the end of the street.She's on the ground.His knee on her back.Her cheek on the street and her hand flat against the concrete still pushing, still pushing, blood on her face and her shoulder wrong in the specific way I recognise from the first attack, and she is hurt, she is badly hurt, and the thing that moves through me in that moment is not rage.He dies tonight.Sebastian is already moving.He hits my father like a verdict.My father releases Julia.I go to my father's right.He's fast.I know how fast he is. I've known since I was fourteen, and I learned the specific futility of fighting him in his full strength, the ceiling of what I was and the gap between that ceiling and what he was. He used to demonstrate it deliberately. The specific cruelty of showing us our own limits while we were still growing into them.I'm not fourteen.I'm not at my ceiling."Silas." His voice. The warmth is completely absent now, stripped down to the real
Caught Between My Alpha Stepbrothers: Theirs to Ruin 127
CHAPTER 127JULIAThe moment arrives quietly.One second, Steve is turning toward the window, and his attention moves off me by three degrees, and something in my blood says:Now.I move.My elbow finds the side of his head before he's finished turning.The impact runs up my arm. He's solid, denser than he looks, the specific density of an alpha who has been what he is for twenty years, but the surprise of it, the fact that I moved first, that he was not positioned for me to move first, buys me the half second I need.I'm out of the car before he recovers.The street is empty.Of course it is.He chose this location. He chose this street. The deliberate emptiness of it is its own kind of message; we are somewhere he controls, somewhere he prepared, and for a half second I feel the shape of that close around me.Then he's out of the car.And I feel something else.He's fast.Faster than I expected, and I expected fast. He crosses the distance between us in a barely human movement, the
Caught Between My Alpha Stepbrothers: Theirs to Ruin 126
CHAPTER 126JULIAI don't look back.The car is black. He opens the door. I get in.The door closes. The distance opens.It's physical.That's the thing nobody could have told me, the thing I couldn't have understood before the bond, before whatever woke up in my blood and rewired the way I experience proximity and absence. The distance is physical. As the car pulls away from the house, I feel it the way you feel a temperature drop, immediate, total, the specific cold of moving away from the two people my body has learned to orient toward.I breathe through it.I catalogue it and set it aside.I will feel this later.Right now, I need every available resource directed outward.Steve sits beside me.I give him nothing.He smiles anyway, which means he expected nothing and is comfortable with it, which means he's done this before, which means I am not the first person he has sat beside in the back of this car and calculated.I think about his sons.I think about what twenty years of
Caught Between My Alpha Stepbrothers: Theirs to Ruin 125
CHAPTER 125SEBASTIANMy father knocks on the door of his own house like a visitor, like a man making a social call, like someone who has decided that the performance of civility is its own kind of power. Which is it? Which he knows it is. I stand in the hallway, and I hear the knock, and something in my chest goes cold and specific.Silas is beside me.Julia is behind us.Rowan and Bree are in position.I open the door.He looks the same.He's smiling.I want to put my hand through it.I hold.She's beside him and small.She looks at me, and her eyes are the same.Dark and direct and seeing everything.She's older. She's thinner. She's here. My mother is here.My heart bursts alive."Boys," my father says warmly.Like a reunion, a family occasion.I don't look at him.I can't look at him right now because if I look at him right now, the hold will break and everything we've planned, everything Julia laid out in the garden with her jaw set and her voice certain, will come apart before
Caught Between My Alpha Stepbrothers: Theirs to Ruin 58
CHAPTER 58SILAS -- POINT OF VIEWI don’t sleep.I lay awake.The chances of an attack happening is next to none, but I’m paranoid. I have everything to lose. Julia is everything. Losing her will send me into a spiral.Would it be insane to admit that I’m still thinking about Franco’s words.“If yo
Caught Between My Alpha Stepbrothers: Theirs to Ruin 57
CHAPTER 57JULIA -- POINT OF VIEWI look around the bedroom. It is very beautiful. The aesthetic is just like him, dark and yet, has a little trace of light. I run my hands over the walls and smile. His bedroom is large, and for a second, I wonder if it’s really for only him, or he shares it with s
Caught Between My Alpha Stepbrothers: Theirs to Ruin 56
CHAPTER 56 SILAS -- POINT OF VIEW I clench my jaw hard, looking everywhere but her. I hadn’t meant for her to see Meredith and I. I hadn’t even meant to follow her. I’d expected her to get in her car but instead, she decided to walk at night when the weather was that shitty. I couldn’t let her
Caught Between My Alpha Stepbrothers: Theirs to Ruin 55
CHAPTER 55JULIAI gasp as the rain comes down hard on us. My dress sticks to my skin immediately. Where the fuck are we? How did we even get lost? I’d lost my mind the second he started following me and lost my way.“Julia,” he repeats.“What?” I bark, “This is all your fault. All your fault. You
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