Semua Bab STEP BROTHER DEAREST: Bab 41 - Bab 50

Chapter 41The fog had thinned by morning, but the image of the figure lingered sharp as a blade in my mind. Every time I blinked, I saw him there—still, watching, waiting. Ian. Or a shadow wearing his shape.I hadn’t told Madison. Not yet. She moved around the library with a hard, brittle efficiency, stacking notes, mapping blind alleys, her silence cutting as deep as her words had the night before. If she knew what I’d seen, she’d lock me in this room before letting me follow.But the scrap of paper still burned in my pocket.**Not lost. Watching.**It was a tether. A whisper. Proof that something of Ian remained.And I couldn’t ignore it.---By midafternoon, Madison finally spoke.“He’s escalating.”Her voice was hoarse, low, as though admitting it cost her something.I looked up from the table, where I had been tracing meaningless circles on a scrap of parchment. “What do you mean?”She slid a new object across the wood: a fragment of mirror, edges dulled by careful sanding. On i

Chapter 43The library felt smaller somehow, tighter, as if the walls themselves were pressing in after the night we had spent in the fog. Ian sat on the floor, notebook open but untouched, his hands trembling slightly as he traced imaginary lines across the pages. Madison paced, her steps sharp and controlled, a storm coiled behind her eyes. And I stood, leaning against the window, watching the city outside, trying to feel the pulse beneath the streets, the same pulse that the stepbrother must have known all along.“It’s worse than I thought,” Madison said finally, breaking the silence, her voice low, calculated. “He doesn’t just anticipate our moves. He shapes them. He’s already moved the pieces on the board we didn’t even know existed.”Ian didn’t respond. His hands shook as he flipped the notebook closed. “I know. I saw it tonight. I thought I could control it… I was wrong.”“You weren’t wrong,” I said. “You just… underestimated him. And maybe yourself.”Ian’s gaze lifted, sharp a

Chapter 45The library had never felt more fragile. Papers were scattered across tables, maps overlapping like a chaotic puzzle. Every note we had taken, every hesitation cataloged from the last encounter, had been compiled, analyzed, and cross-referenced. We thought we understood the stepbrother’s limits. We thought we had forced him into reaction.We were wrong.The first sign came as a sound: faint, almost imperceptible, yet enough to make my chest tighten. A footstep. Echoing from the street outside the library. Not random. Deliberate. Controlled.Madison froze, eyes sharp. Ian stiffened. And I realized, with that same hollow certainty that had haunted me for months, that we had been expected.“He’s here,” Madison whispered. Her voice was tight, sharp. “He’s not testing us this time. He’s attacking.”We moved instinctively, each of us to a vantage point we had previously designated as safe, each motion deliberate. The stepbrother’s genius lay not just in anticipation, but in shapi

Chapter 47The silence of the textile mill clung to me long after we’d left it.Even out on the street, with the wind cutting across the broken concrete and the faint hum of the city beyond, it felt as though the labyrinth hadn’t released us. The reflections lingered in my vision, phantom shadows burned into my eyes, silhouettes that shifted in every flicker of light.Ian leaned against the wall of a collapsed storefront, his chest rising and falling in uneven breaths. Sweat streaked his face, but it was his eyes that betrayed him — red, hollow, unfocused. He had been holding himself steady for hours, and now the cracks were showing.Madison crouched nearby, scanning the street with restless precision. “It’s not over,” she said finally, her voice clipped. “You feel that, don’t you? He didn’t close the trap in there. He just opened it wider.”I swallowed against the dryness in my throat. “You think we’re still inside it.”Madison’s gaze flicked toward me, sharp, unwavering. “No. I know

Chapter 49The silence was unbearable.The theater seemed to shrink with him standing there, the center of gravity pulling toward the stage where the stepbrother waited. No shadows, no tricks, no multiplying silhouettes this time. Just him. Flesh, blood, and something sharper than either.His presence didn’t feel like an intrusion anymore. It felt like inevitability.Ian froze mid-step, his chest rising and falling with rapid, shallow breaths. Madison had already lowered into a stance that balanced flight and fight both, her fingers twitching near her belt as though any twitch of his could trigger her move.And me—my pulse thundered in my ears so loud it drowned the creak of the rotting rafters above. For months, he had been a ghost, an idea, a shadow gliding across our nights. Now he was a man, clear and solid, and somehow that made him even more terrifying.His voice, when it came, was softer than I expected.“You’ve learned.”Just two words. But they carried weight, the kind that r