Chapter One

**CHAPTER ONE**

The sound always started at midnight.

A low, steady rhythm against the wall—solid, deliberate, impossible to ignore. It traveled through the new house like a secret that didn’t care about locked doors. I found myself in the hallway again, bare feet cold on the floorboards, heart already ahead of me.

I didn’t go there to spy. Not at first. I went because the silence in my own room felt heavier than the noise. Because something about this house still didn’t feel like mine, and the only proof that anyone else was fully alive in it was that steady, private rhythm behind my mother’s door.

I leaned close. Just enough to hear. Just enough to make the metal of the keyhole press a temporary mark into my skin.

Inside, low voices. My mother’s, breathless. Jake’s, deeper, quieter, the kind of voice that didn’t need volume to fill a room. He was a large man—broad-shouldered, built like someone who had spent years outdoors and never quite learned how to take up less space. At dinner he filled the chair. In doorways he blocked the light. When he looked at me across the table, it was never long, but it always felt measured, like he was cataloguing something and filing it away.

I pulled back before I could hear more. My pulse was too loud. My hands were unsteady. I hated that it affected me. Hated that the man my mother had married occupied more space in my head than he had any right to.

“What are you doing there?”

The voice came from the dark behind me. Low. Familiar. Amused in a way that never meant anything good.

Drake.

He leaned against the opposite wall, hands in his pockets, looking exactly like a younger, sharper version of his father—same height, same build, same dark eyes—but everything about him was restless. Where Jake was steady, Drake was a live current. He had been that way since the day our families collided: the golden boy at school, the one everyone watched, the one who had decided early that I was an inconvenience worth keeping under control.

I straightened too fast. “Nothing.”

He didn’t believe me. He never did. He stepped forward, shoulder brushing mine as he took the place I had just left. He looked through the keyhole for a long second. When he turned back, that slow, knowing smirk was already in place.

“You’re watching.”

I grabbed his wrist and hauled him down the hall before he could say it louder. We stopped in the living room, the only light coming from the streetlamp outside the window. He shook my hand off and crossed his arms, studying me like he already knew the ending of the story and was just waiting for me to admit it.

“Stay out of it,” I said.

“Why? I could walk back there right now and tell them.”

“You wouldn’t.”

He tilted his head. “Try me. Or—” He let the word hang. “You do what I say this weekend. Bike needs work. Errands. You’re with me the whole time. Forty-eight hours. Then we forget this happened.”

Classic Drake. Catch me off-balance, then invent a price. He had been doing variations of this since the wedding. I was the outsider. He was the one who belonged. And he never let me forget the difference.

I met his eyes. “Go ahead and tell them. Tell them I was standing in a hallway listening to my mother and your father. See what that gets you.”

Something shifted in his expression. The smirk didn’t disappear, but it changed. He stepped closer. Close enough that I had to tip my chin up. His voice dropped.

“Why does it bother you so much?”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. Because the truth was tangled and ugly and none of his business: the way Jake’s presence rearranged the air in a room, the way my body reacted to it against my will, the way Drake somehow always seemed to notice.

He watched me for another second, then let the distance grow again. “Weekend,” he said quietly. “My terms. Or I stop being quiet.”

I turned and walked away before he could see anything else on my face. My bedroom door closed harder than I meant it to. The lock clicked. I sat on the edge of the bed and waited for my pulse to slow.

It didn’t.

Down the hall the rhythm continued, distant now but still there. I pressed my forehead to my knees and tried to think of anything else. School. The move. The way this house still smelled like someone else’s life. None of it worked. Every thought circled back to the same two men: the one who had married my mother and the one who had decided I was his problem to manage.

I lay back and stared at the ceiling. The room felt smaller than it had an hour ago. Darker. And somewhere under the anger and the embarrassment and the sharp edge of fear, something else was waiting—quiet, patient, and far more dangerous.

I didn’t know yet whether it belonged to Jake or to Drake.

I only knew I wasn’t going to sleep.