My Alpha Stepbrother Wants Me Back

NADIA'S POV

I was nineteen the night the storm knocked out half the county's power grid and trapped me in a cellar with the one person in that house who'd spent three years pretending I didn't exist.

Kade wasn't even supposed to be home. He'd been called back that afternoon, some border skirmish rumor rippling through pack channels, rogue scouts spotted too close to our territory line, and by the time the sirens went off for the shelter drill, he was the one hauling me down the cellar stairs by the wrist instead of my dad, because my dad and Diane were three streets over at a neighbor's, and the storm hit faster than anyone predicted.

"Move," he said, shoving the door shut behind us as the house groaned above our heads.

I'd never been alone with him for longer than the time it took to pass the salt at dinner. Now I was watching him drag a shelving unit in front of the door with one arm, like it weighed nothing, his jaw tight with something that wasn't just concentration.

"Is it actually rogues?" I asked, my voice smaller than I wanted it to be.

"I don't know yet." He crouched near the old lantern, hands steady even though the wholett cellar shook with the next crack of thunder. "Sit down before you fall down."

I sat. He didn't.

For the first twenty minutes he stood near the door like a sentry, with his phone sitting uselessly in his hand, and his jaw working every time the house creaked.

I watched him in the lamp light and understood, for the first time in three years, that the coldness wasn't nothing. It was a wall. And right now, trapped with no room to hide behind it, I could see the cracks.

"You don't have to guard the door the whole time," I said. "Nothing's getting through that."

"You don't know that."

"You keep flinching every time the wind picks up."

He looked at me then, really looked, like he'd forgotten I could see him at all. "I flinch because the last territory dispute I handled personally left four of my men in the ground," he said, flat, like it cost him nothing to say it, even though every line of his body said otherwise. "Forgive me for not trusting a little thunder."

I didn't know what to say to that. So I didn't say anything. I just scooted over on the old bench and patted the space beside me, and after a long moment, he sat.

The shelving unit groaned against the door as a fresh gust hit the house, and a box of old canning jars slid off the top shelf before either of us could react. Kade moved faster than I'd ever seen anything move, his arm hooked around my waist and yanked me sideways as glass shattered where I was sitting a half second earlier.

I landed half against his chest, with his arm locked tight around me, and we were both breathing hard.

And that was when I felt it.

Not the adrenaline. Something else. Something that started low in my stomach and rolled outward like a struck bell, and by the look on his face; the way his pupils blew wide, the way his whole body went rigid against mine, he felt it too.

"What was that," I whispered.

He didn't answer. He was staring at me like I'd just turned into something he'd never seen before, his hand still splayed against my ribs, his breathing gone ragged in a way that had nothing to do with the falling jars.

"Kade."

"Don't," he said, low, almost pleading. "Don't say my name like that right now."

"Like what?"

He pulled his arm back like my skin had burned him, putting a full foot of distance between us on a bench that wasn't big enough for it, and dragged both hands down his face.

"It's nothing," he said, to himself more than me. "It's. Nothing."

We didn't speak again until the clear came two hours later. When the door to the cellar finally opened and daylight poured down the stairs, he was already three steps ahead of me, like he couldn't get out of that room fast enough.

I stood alone in the dust and broken glass for a long moment before I followed him up, my hand pressed flat against my ribs where his arm was, trying to understand why my whole body still felt like it was ringing.

__

He avoided me for four days after that. Leaving anywhere he was immediately I entered them, finding reasons to eat before the rest of us sat down, disappearing into his old office with the door locked for hours at a time.

On the fifth day, I stopped letting him.

I found him in the pack library off the east wing, the one room in that house he'd claimed as his own since he was a teenager, surrounded by maps and border reports he clearly wasn't reading, because he hadn't turned a single page in the ten minutes I'd been standing in the doorway watching him not read them.

"We need to talk about the cellar," I said.

His pen stopped moving. "There's nothing to talk about."

"You felt something. I felt it too. Don't tell me that it was nothing."

He finally looked up, and the wall was back up in his eyes, but it was thinner now, like it had cracked somewhere I could see straight through it if I looked hard enough.

"Nadia—"

"Say it," I said, crossing the room before I could talk myself out of it. "Whatever it was. Say it out loud."

He stood so fast his chair scraped hard against the floor, and then he was in front of me, close enough that I had to tilt my head back to hold his gaze, close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him like a physical thing.

"You want me to say it?" His voice had gone low and rough, nothing like the clipped commander's tone from the cellar. "Fine. I felt the bond snap into place the second I caught you. Every instinct I have has been screaming your name for four straight days, and I have spent every single one of those days telling myself it doesn't matter, because it can't matter, because you are my stepsister and I am not the kind of man who—"

He stopped himself.

"Who what?" I breathed.

His hand came up, slow, hesitant, and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear like he wasn't sure he was allowed to touch me even that much.

"Who lets himself want something this badly," he finished, quieter now. "You have to get out of this room, Nadia. Right now. Because if you don't, I can't make you do it."

I didn't tell him to walk out.

And that was the moment I understood, with a clarity that scared me more than the storm ever had, that whatever this was between us had already stopped being something either of us could control.