All Chapters of Driving The Alpha' Brothers Crazy : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

62 Chapters

Chapter 21 – The Weight of What I Know

Audrey's PovThe video ended.I sat there staring at my phone screen, which had gone dark and was now just showing me my own reflection. Wide eyes. Open mouth. The face of a girl who had just watched her entire world do a slow, graceful swan dive off a cliff.Adrian.I looked at him. Actually turned my head and looked at the boy sleeping eighteen inches away from me, his dark hair falling across his forehead, one arm flung over where I'd been lying like even in sleep he was reaching for me. Through the bond I could feel him—warm and steady and achingly familiar, like a hearthfire in a house I'd grown up in.My father's killer, sleeping like a baby.I pressed my hand over my mouth and breathed through my nose for ten seconds. Then twenty. I was not going to fall apart in this bed. I was not going to cry on Theo, who was currently using my pillow, or wake Luca, who slept like a soldier—perfectly still, perfectly alert, hand near the nightstand out of pure instinct. I was not going to do

Chapter 22 – Full Throttle

Adrian's POVLyra was saying something important.I knew it was important because she'd used the word "important" twice already, and also because she had her serious face on—the one where her brow did that particular crease between the eyes that meant she'd been rehearsing this conversation in her head for at least three days."—and I think you've been really distant lately," she was saying, turning her coffee cup in circles on the table between us. "Like, physically present but emotionally just. Gone. And I get that things are complicated right now, with the race and the council and everything, but I feel like every time I try to talk to you, you're somewhere else entirely—"The classroom door opened.Audrey walked in.She was wearing her academy jacket half-zipped over a white t-shirt, hair pulled up in that messy way she did when she hadn't thought about it, which somehow looked better than when people actually tried. She had a paper cup of coffee in one hand and her laptop bag sli

Chapter 23 – Almost

Audrey's POV"Will you let me?"The question sat in the four inches of air between us like something alive.I should have said no. I had approximately nine hundred good reasons to say no, the most significant of which was currently stored in my camera roll and featured Adrian's face in grainy black and white standing over my father's car. I was a smart girl. I had excellent survival instincts. I had, on multiple occasions, been described as someone with a good head on her shoulders.I said nothing.Which was not no.His eyes dropped to my mouth for just a second, and the bond did something catastrophic in my chest—warm and certain and completely, utterly traitorous. My back was against the brick wall, the afternoon sun had made it almost hot, and Adrian was right there, close enough that I could see the water still drying at his collarbone and the way his jaw had gone tight like holding still was costing him something.I hated how much I still wanted him.I hated that the wanting hadn

Chapter 24 – Somebody Else's Problem

Audrey's POVThe party was somebody else's idea and I was only there because Theo had deployed his most devastating weapon, which was not his smile or his arms or the way he said my name, but rather the sentence: "Come on, it'll be fun," delivered with such complete and total conviction that my body was already putting shoes on before my brain filed its objection.The objection, for the record, was substantial.The Nightshade Academy delegation had arrived that afternoon for pre-race formalities, which apparently involved a mixer in the main hall with fairy lights and a playlist that someone's older brother had probably made in 2019. Half the academy was there. The other half had shown up anyway.I had a drink I wasn't really consuming and a wall I was leaning against with real commitment, watching Theo work the room with the effortless social energy of someone who had never once in his life felt awkward entering a space. He'd already made three people laugh in the last four minutes.

Chapter 25

Audrey's POVRace day arrived the way all genuinely terrifying things do — quietly, and much too fast.I was up before my alarm, which had never happened in the history of my relationship with mornings. Five forty-three AM, lying on my back staring at the ceiling while the bond hummed with three different flavors of barely-contained anxiety. Theo's was the most obvious — bright and buzzing, like a live wire. Luca's was a controlled burn, steady and hot underneath everything. Adrian's was the one I couldn't look at directly, so I didn't.I showered, made coffee strong enough to constitute a threat, and was in the garage by six fifteen.The Hellcat looked immaculate. Theo's runes covered the undercarriage in careful silver lines, each one annotated in his handwriting. Someone — Luca, almost certainly — had left a printed track map on the driver's seat with three turns circled in red marker and a note that just said: *Don't be stupid here.* No signature. Completely unnecessary. Absolutel

Chapter 26

Audrey's POVThe thing about sleeping with someone you're bonded to is that afterward, the silence has a different quality. Fuller. Like the room itself has taken a breath and decided to hold it.Luca was warm against my back, his heartbeat slowing to something human again, his hand drawing absent patterns on my shoulder that I wasn't sure he was aware of. Through the bond I could feel him settling, all that controlled precision finally, briefly, at rest.Then Theo opened the door.He took in the scene in approximately one second — the sheets, the general atmosphere, the two of us arranged in a way that left very little to interpretation — and his face did something complicated and fast that he smoothed over before I could read it properly."I'll come back," he said, already reversing."Theo—""No, truly, I'll—" He stopped. Looked past us toward the window, and something in his expression sharpened. "Who invited him?"I sat up.Through the villa window, down in the courtyard below, th

Chapter 27

Audrey's POV"Your father," Raphael said carefully, "was a very wealthy man."I stared at him. "I know that. He owned the academy.""Yes." He reached into his jacket and produced a business card, which he held out with the particular formality of someone who had been waiting a long time to make a specific introduction. "But he also had holdings. Investments. Accounts structured so carefully that finding them required someone who knew exactly where to look." A pause. "My father knew where to look."I took the card. “Moreau & Associates. Private Wealth Management.”"Your father," Raphael continued, "was my father's most significant client for eleven years. When Papa died, I inherited the practice. And with it—" he reached into his jacket again and produced an envelope, thick and cream-colored and sealed "—the responsibility of finding you."I turned the envelope over. No name on the front. Just a wax seal pressed with a small letter W.Warner."How much are we talking?" I said, because

Chapter 28 – Joyride

Audrey's POVI got back to the villa at two forty-seven in the morning to find Theo sitting on the kitchen counter eating cereal directly from the box and reading what appeared to be a manual for a 1974 Porsche 911 that definitely didn't belong to him."How was your accountant?" he said, without looking up."Informative." I dropped my keys on the counter and stole a handful of his cereal. "Why are you reading that?""Found it in the garage. Your dad's handwriting is in the margins." He turned a page. "He had opinions about torque curves.""He had opinions about everything.""Clearly a family trait." He looked up then, and his eyes did that thing where they moved across my face reading whatever I hadn't said yet. Through the bond I felt him — warm and unhurried, the party version of Theo fully dissolved into just this, just him, sitting in the kitchen at three in the morning in a t-shirt with cereal. "You okay?""I found out I'm rich tonight."Theo put the manual down. "Like, rich rich

Chapter 29

Audrey's POVI told them about the key at breakfast.Not about the envelope — that was still sitting on my nightstand, sealed, because some things required more courage than winning a supernatural race and I was rationing mine carefully. But the key I held up between two fingers over my coffee cup and said, "My father left me a storage unit in Geneva. Cars. Apparently extraordinary ones. I'm going tomorrow and I'd like company."Three boys looked at me across the breakfast table."Tomorrow," Luca said."Tomorrow.""Geneva is four hours.""I'm aware of where Geneva is.""We have training—""Luca." I set the key on the table between us. "My dead father left me a secret car collection. Training can wait one day."Luca looked at the key. Looked at me. Through the bond I felt him perform the rapid internal calculation of a man weighing protocol against the specific expression on my face, which apparently tipped the scales, because he picked up his coffee and said, "We leave at seven."Theo

Chapter 29 – What Adrian Knows

Adrian's POVThe Stratos had been gone for four minutes and Luca was still watching the road.He had his arms crossed and his jaw set and the specific expression of a man who had decided that watching an empty road was preferable to acknowledging that he had just let the woman he was bonded to drive a fifty-year-old Italian car into the Swiss countryside without so much as a helmet."She's fine," Theo said, from where he was sitting on the bonnet of the Range Rover eating an apple he'd produced from somewhere."I know she's fine," Luca said, in the tone of someone who was not entirely sure she was fine."The bond would tell you if she wasn't.""The bond tells me she's having the time of her life, which is a different category of concern."Theo took another bite of his apple. "You let her race a Blood Moon circuit through supernatural mountain passes at night and you're worried about a straight road in Geneva at ten in the morning."Luca turned to look at him. "The Blood Moon Race had

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