Mated to My Rival Step Brother의 모든 챕터: 챕터 201 - 챕터 210

Blake's POV:The clock on my phone said nine thirty and I was sitting on the edge of my bed staring at it like it had personally done something to offend me.Should I go.The question had been circling for the last hour with no sign of landing anywhere useful. On one side there was Alex. The shower. The things he had said. Mine. The way he had not taken it back. On the other side there was also Alex. The control. The way he moved through situations like he had already decided the outcome and was simply waiting for everyone else to catch up to his conclusion.I did not need that.I was a Silver Alpha heir with my own standing and my own mind and I did not need to go anywhere I had not chosen to go with full and independent reasoning behind the choice.My phone lit up.Alex.I opened it.~The door is opened for you. You've just an hour left.I stared at the message.I scratched the back of my nape slowly.The ceiling had nothing useful to offer. I looked at it anyway for a few seconds an

Blake's POV:The bedroom was dim.One lamp on the far side, low and warm, the kind of light that was chosen deliberately and not left by accident. Alex moved through it with the ease of someone in a space they had arranged exactly as they intended and I followed him in and the door stayed open behind me which was the only thing in the room that felt unplanned.The table was against the wall beside the bed.I had clocked it earlier from across the room and not examined it directly and now I was looking at it properly and it was smaller than I had registered. Narrow. Padded along the surface."Sit on the table," Alex said.I looked at it.Half my height. Not even. The proportions of it were not immediately making sense to me and I said so."It is quite small," I said. "Half my height at most.""I will check on that."He moved to the side of it and reached underneath and pulled something out. A fitted extension, built in, drawer style, one section for arms and another that unfolded for le

Blake's POV:He said nothing."And to understand that," I said quietly, "you need to love someone truly. Really truly. With your whole chest and nothing held back."A pause."And I doubt you do that."The words landed in the room and sat there and I watched them hit his face and I did not take them back because they were honest and he had earned the honest version tonight more than anyone I had ever spoken to.I turned back to the door.His t-shirt was warm and smelled like him and I hated that I was keeping it and was going to keep it anyway.I did not wait for his reply.I walked out.The corridor was quiet and cool and ordinary in the way corridors were at this hour and I walked through it with his smell on my skin and my own words still sitting in my chest alongside everything else and the night air when I got outside was exactly what it always was at this hour, clean and cold and completely indifferent to what had just happened in that room.I walked back across the Academy ground

Rafe's POV:Neither of us moved for a long time.The lamp was still on and Leo's shoulder was warm against mine and the safe house was quiet in the way it got very late at night when the whole world had gone somewhere else and left just this small lit space behind.I had stopped trying to manage my expression somewhere around the moment he sat down beside me. There was no point anymore. Leo had a specific talent for arriving at the version of me that existed underneath all the managed parts and waiting there patiently until everything else fell away and tonight I had run out of practiced sentences and rehearsed flatness and what was left was just me, tired and bruised and not actually wanting him to leave.I had never actually wanted him to leave.That was the problem from the beginning."You are still tense," Leo said quietly."I am always tense.""Not like this." He shifted slightly beside me. "This is the specific tension of someone who has been alone with their thoughts for too ma

Maya's POV:The alarm went off at six and I opened my eyes and immediately regretted it.Not in the ordinary way of someone who did not want to be awake. In the specific way of someone whose body had filed a formal complaint overnight and was now presenting the documentation. Every muscle from my shoulders to my calves had that deep settled ache that came from one thing and one thing only. Repeated transformation in a short window.I lay on my back and looked at the ceiling and did not move for approximately thirty seconds because moving required a decision I was not ready to make yet.Then I made it anyway and pushed myself upright and the groan that came out of me was involuntary and honest and I was grateful nobody was there to hear it.Fever. I could feel it sitting in my skin, that particular dry warmth that had nothing to do with blankets or room temperature. My body was running hot from the inside and my joints were doing that thing where they communicated their feelings about r