HIS TO CLAIM: Mated To My Cruel Stepbrother

My phone buzzed against the nightstand for the third time in as many minutes, and I stared at the ceiling like it had personally offended me.

"That is the same number," Priya said from the other side of the room without looking up from her laptop. She had the particular gift of noticing everything while appearing to notice nothing. "You have been ignoring it for two days straight. Who is it?"

"My mother."

The typing stopped.

Priya swiveled her chair around and looked at me the way she always did when she was deciding whether to say the gentle thing or the honest thing. After three years of friendship, I knew she almost always chose honest. It was one of the reasons I loved her and one of the reasons she occasionally drove me up a wall.

"Nora—"

"She has been calling for three days," I said, sitting up and swinging my legs over the side of the bed. "Three days, Priya. Always the same message. She is changed, she is different, she wants us to reconnect, she misses me, she is sorry." I picked up the phone, looked at the screen, and set it face-down on the mattress. "I have heard every version of that speech. I know it by heart at this point."

"But have you heard this version of it?" Priya closed her laptop and folded her hands in her lap. "People do change, you know. It happens. It is not a myth."

"It is a myth when it comes to her."

"You do not know that."

"I know her," I said. "I spent seventeen years knowing her. I spent seventeen years cleaning up after her, making excuses for her, lying to teachers about why I sometimes came to school in the same clothes two days running, and watching her choose every single thing in this world over her own daughter." I exhaled slowly through my nose. "I spent the last three years building something that is actually mine, and I am not about to let her come in and pull it apart again just because she found a new therapist who taught her how to sound sincere over the phone."

Priya was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "I am not telling you to move back in with her. I am not telling you to forgive everything overnight. I am just saying that refusing to even pick up the phone is not the same thing as protecting yourself — sometimes it is just postponing the conversation until it gets heavier." She paused. "You have been carrying this for three years without putting it down once. Maybe answering the call is not about giving her a chance. Maybe it is about giving yourself one."

I opened my mouth to argue, and then my phone buzzed again.

I looked at Priya. She looked at me. She raised one eyebrow with the infuriating patience of a woman who knew she had already won.

I picked up the phone and answered it. "What is it?"

There was a brief pause on the other end, and then my mother's voice came through — brighter than I remembered it, lighter in a way that caught me slightly off guard. "Nora. Baby, I am so glad you picked up."

"I almost didn't," I said honestly. "What do you want, Mom?"

"I want you," she said, and there was something raw underneath the brightness that I did not entirely know what to do with. "That is all. I want my daughter back. I know I do not have any right to ask that — I know exactly what I put you through and I am not going to stand here and pretend otherwise. I was not the mother you deserved. I was not even close. But I have been working on that every single day for the past two years, and I am asking you — I am begging you — to give me the chance to show you that."

I pressed my thumb against the edge of the phone case and said nothing.

"I know you are angry," she continued. "You have every right to be angry. But I am not calling to argue or to make excuses. I am calling because I love you, and I have been sober for twenty-two months, and I am finally in a place where I can say that out loud without it being a lie." Her voice steadied. "I want a second chance, Nora. I am not asking you to forget anything. I am just asking you not to close the door all the way."

The silence stretched between us, and I hated how much the words landed despite everything I had armed myself with. I had not wanted them to land. I had prepared specifically for them not to.

"I will think about it," I said finally.

"That is all I am asking." She sounded like she was smiling, and then she added, almost carefully, "There is something else I want to tell you. I got married recently — to someone wonderful — and we would love for you to come to a family dinner tomorrow evening. Just a small thing. Just a chance to sit across from each other and talk properly for the first time." She gave me the address. "Will you come?"

I stared at the far wall of Priya's apartment for a long moment.

"I will be there," I said.

Priya was standing directly behind me when I ended the call, holding two mugs of tea with the expression of someone trying very hard not to look smug and failing completely.

"Well?" she said.

"She got married." I accepted the mug she held out. "Some man. She did not say who."

"That is actually a good sign. Stability. Structure."

"Or she swapped one addiction for another and called it a husband," I said, and then I sighed because I knew I was being uncharitable and I was too tired to pretend otherwise. "It is probably one of her friends from the old crowd. Someone who drinks the same cheap vodka and thinks sobriety means switching brands." I set the mug down and stood. "Anyway, it does not matter right now. I need to start getting ready — the annual gala starts in two hours and I refuse to walk in late and give Sabrina Chen the satisfaction of watching me rush through the door looking frazzled."

Priya wrinkled her nose. "That woman needs a hobby that is not making your life difficult."

"She has one," I said, already heading toward the closet. "It is making my life difficult."

I arrived at the venue with twenty minutes to spare, which was exactly the kind of small victory I had learned to appreciate. The ballroom was already filling with the particular breed of people who attended corporate galas — polished and precise, every laugh calculated, every handshake an audition. I smoothed the front of my dress, lifted my chin, and walked in like I had every right to be there.

Because I did.

I made it approximately forty feet before I heard her voice.

"You actually wore that."

I turned around slowly. Sabrina was standing a few feet away in a floor-length red gown that had probably cost more than my monthly rent, her dark hair swept up in a style that looked effortless in the precise way that only very expensive effort could achieve. She was looking at my dress with an expression of theatrical pity that she had clearly rehearsed.

"Nora," she said, tilting her head, "I genuinely do not understand how you keep showing up to these things looking like you picked your outfit out of a donation bin. Can you truly not afford something decent? It is embarrassing, honestly — not just for you, but for the rest of us who have to stand near you."

"Jealousy is a funny thing," I said pleasantly. "It makes otherwise intelligent women say spectacularly stupid things out loud." I let my gaze travel over her slowly, unhurried. "Your dress is beautiful, Sabrina. It truly is. It is just a shame that no amount of expensive fabric has ever managed to cover up what is underneath it — and I am not talking about your figure."

Her expression curdled.

"You absolute—"

"Choose your next word carefully," I said, keeping my voice very calm, because calm was always the sharper weapon. "We are at a company event and there are cameras in every corner of this room."

Her hand came up — a sharp, reflexive movement — and I looked at it, then looked back at her face, and I said in a voice that did not waver by a single degree, "If you lay one finger on me, Sabrina, I will claw your eyes out and feed them to Mr. Patterson's hounds personally. And I will smile while I do it."

She lowered her hand.

I turned and walked away.

I accepted a drink from a passing waitress without slowing down, lifting the glass to my lips and taking a long sip, and I exhaled and let the tension in my shoulders begin to dissolve.

Then the room tilted.

It was subtle at first — a soft, strange wrongness, like the floor had shifted an inch to the left without warning. I blinked and reached for the nearest surface, but my hand found nothing, and the lights above me began to blur at their edges, and I understood with a cold, spiking clarity that something was very wrong.

My legs gave way.

A hand caught me around the waist — firm and certain and impossibly steady — and I tried to turn toward whoever it was, but the darkness was already flooding in from the edges of my vision, swallowing the light in slow, heavy waves.

And then a voice said the nickname. The one I had not heard in five years. The one that only one person in the entire world had ever called me.

The darkness took me before I could place it.