Home / LGBTQ+ / Mated to My Rival Step Brother / Kabanata 181 - Kabanata 190

Lahat ng Kabanata ng Mated to My Rival Step Brother: Kabanata 181 - Kabanata 190

307 Kabanata

181. The Weight of a Name

Alex's POV:Blake lowered the phone slowly after Liam's voice cut off.He did not put it down immediately. He just held it at his side and stood near the window and looked at nothing specific on the wall opposite him. The grey early light was coming in thin and flat through the curtain gap and it made everything in the room look slightly unreal."He says someone saw Leo near the Blood Moon border," Blake said. His voice was very even. "Three nights ago and again last night. With someone. He does not know who."I said nothing."Leo has been strange for weeks." Blake set the phone on the table. "Coming in late. Not answering messages for hours and then giving explanations that do not fully add up. I noticed it and I told myself it was nothing. Academy pressure. Adjustment period." A short pause. "I told myself a story because it was easier than asking the actual question."He turned slightly and looked toward the window."A rival pack. That is what Liam said. Someone from a rival pack."

182. A Secret Bond

Blake's POV:The door of Alex's building closed behind me and the morning air hit my face and I stood there for a moment and just breathed it in.Cold. Clean. The kind of air that exists only in that specific window between the end of night and the actual arrival of dawn when the world has not committed to being awake yet. The sky above the Academy grounds was the colour of old pewter, pale grey with the faintest suggestion of something warmer coming up behind the treeline to the east.I closed my eyes.This was something I had learned young, before the Academy, before formal training. When you needed to find someone you knew, you did not use logic first. You used the bond. The pack thread that ran between all of us like wire beneath the floor, present always, detectable if you went quiet enough inside to feel it.Leo's thread was familiar. Had been familiar my whole life. It had a particular quality to it that I could not describe to anyone who had not grown up with a pack bond becaus

183. Just the Connection is Never Enough

Blake's POV:Then switched to Liam.Typed: Your brother is not with someone bad. So take a chill pill. We will talk about this later on. But relax.Sent that too.Then I sat there for a moment looking at the phone in my hand and then I dialed Alex.It rang twice."Blake." His voice was quiet. Not sleepy. He had not been sleeping either."I am back at my dorm," I said. "I tracked Leo's direction. It led me to the outer grounds." I paused. "I ended up outside the safe house."A beat of silence on his end."I think it is Rafe," I said. "I cannot be fully certain yet but I think so. We need to confirm it but that is where I am landing."Another pause. Longer this time."I guess too," Alex said. "I mean. Yes. Maybe."Something in his voice was careful in a way that was slightly different from his usual careful."You already thought so," I said. "Before tonight.""I was unsure.""Alex.""I could not guess," he said, "that you would take it lightly."I felt something move through me that was

184. Hungry and Dumped

Blake's POV:I did not mean to sleep.That was the last coherent thought I had before the ceiling stopped being something I was looking at and became something I was no longer aware of at all. One moment I was lying on my back with the dawn light coming in grey and pale through the curtain gap and my phone face down beside me and the specific weight of Alex's words still sitting somewhere in the middle of my chest. The next moment there was nothing.No dreams. No half-conscious wandering. Just the clean hard absence of someone who had run out of everything and the body making the executive decision without consulting anyone.The knocking pulled me back up.Three knocks. A pause. Three more.I opened my eyes and the first thing I registered was that the light coming through the curtain was completely different now. Not grey. Not the thin uncertain light of early dawn. It was full yellow morning light, the kind that sits heavy and warm on whatever surface it falls on, and it was lying in

185. Ironic Situation

Alex's POV:I woke up with his face in my mind.That was the first thing. Before the ceiling, before the light, before the full return of awareness about where I was and what the previous night had contained. Just Blake's face. The specific way he had looked at me in the moment before I said the thing I said. The openness in it. The way he had not yet put the careful measured expression back on and so there had been nothing between me and whatever was actually happening underneath.And then I had said it.Momentum reaction. Nothing else.I lay on my back and looked at the ceiling of my dorm and let the previous night come back in pieces. The phone call from Rafe. The run through the forest, dark green and snow silver moving through old trees. The fight at the border. Blake dropping sideways away from that branch with the kind of timing that had taken ten years off my life in the space of one second. The med kit on the table. His hands careful and steady on my side.The moment before Li

186. Loving is Easy

Blake's POV:Liam made eggs the way he always did when he was cooking in someone else's kitchen, which was confidently and with complete disregard for what ingredients were actually available. He had found cheese somewhere in the back of my cabinet that I had forgotten existed and incorporated it without asking and the result was genuinely better than anything I would have made myself.We were sitting at the small table near the window, plates in front of us, the morning properly established now outside. The Academy grounds were visible from here, students beginning to move along the paths below, the day carrying on with no awareness of or interest in how the previous night had gone for anyone in this particular room.I was halfway through my plate when the knock came.Liam looked up.I looked at the door.Three knocks. Quiet. The kind of knock that is not sure of its welcome.I set my fork down and stood and crossed to the door and opened it.Leo was standing in the corridor with his

187. Cold Handshake

Blake's POV:The Academy looked different in full daylight after a sleepless night.Not different in any objective way. The stone buildings were the same. The training grounds were the same. The other students moving along the paths between classes were the same. But there is a specific quality to the world when you have not slept properly and then walked back into it anyway, a slight sharpness to everything, edges more defined than usual, sounds landing a fraction louder than expected.I had showered after Leo left. Changed into clean clothes. Done the basic mechanical things that move a person from one part of the day to the next. Eaten the rest of the eggs that Liam had made and washed the plate and picked up my training bag and left the room.The trial session had been on the schedule for two weeks. Today was not a surprise. And yet walking toward the main training arena with the morning still sitting in my body like something unfinished, the last thing I wanted was to perform anyt

186. Taste of the North

Blake's POV:Coach Vega's voice cut through the arena clean and final."Group A. Silver and Darkfang. Take your positions."The crowd settled into that particular quality of silence that is not actually silence at all but the collective holding of breath from two hundred people who have decided something is worth their full attention. I moved to my side of the marked circle and Rolf moved to his and we stood about eight meters apart and looked at each other.He had not changed his expression since the handshake.I rolled my neck once to the left and once to the right and kept my breathing even. My shoulder was present in the way it had been all morning, a dull insistent pull that I had decided to stop acknowledging because acknowledging it was not going to make it smaller.Rolf stood with his hands loose at his sides and his weight distributed in a way that told me almost nothing. That was unusual. Most fighters had something readable in their stance before the match began, some lean t

187. No Control

Blake's POV:Aaran took the cloth back from me with a small nod and returned to his bench and I stayed at the edge of the arena floor and watched the next pairing take their positions.Group B.Alex Thorne and Aaran Bloodmoon.The crowd had barely settled from the previous match and was already rebuilding in energy because these were two names that carried weight even among Alpha heirs and everyone in the arena knew it. I found a spot at the lower bench railing and leaned against it with the cloth still pressed loosely to my lip and my shoulder doing its thing quietly.Liam appeared beside me."Good match," he said."Rolf is good.""Rolf is very good," Liam said. "But you were better today. Especially the end." He paused. "Your face looks terrible though.""You have mentioned my face twice today.""It has given me reason twice today."I did not respond to that because Coach Vega was already calling Group B to position and the arena had done its collective breath-holding thing again.Aa

188. Baby Silver

Blake's POV:The locker room was loud when I pushed through the door.Steam was already coming from the shower area at the back, the kind that built up fast when multiple people had been through in quick succession, and the air had that specific post-training weight to it, damp and warm and carrying the collective evidence of a session that had asked something real from everyone in it. Benches ran along both sides between the rows of lockers and a few other heirs were moving through, towels and training bags, the low overlapping conversations of people coming down from adrenaline.I found my row and moved down it.And then the shower door opened.Rolf came out.He had a light blue towel wrapped around his waist and absolutely nothing else and the locker room did one of those subtle collective shifts where people do not stop what they are doing but the quality of their attention changes without them choosing it.I was not immune to this.He was tall. I had registered that on the arena f

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