All Chapters of MY STEPBROTHER’S OBSESSION : His touch, my sin: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

TreyI don’t know how long I have been sitting in my car after Yubi stormed away from me. It could have been two minutes. It could have been two hours. All I know is that my hands are still gripping the steering wheel like I’m trying to strangle it. My chest won’t loosen. My pulse is all over the damn place.Her words keep replaying in my head, sharp, accurate, stabbing deeper each time.You took my virginity, you stopped speaking to me and a week later you asked someone else to be your girlfriend and wanted me to meet her. Every sentence hits like a punch I actually deserve.But that isn’t what’s eating me alive.What’s destroying me is the picture she painted without even meaning to.Yubi with someone else, Yubi in another man’s arms, Yubi crying on his shoulder.Yubi giving herself to someone else when she should have been mine. No. Don’t finish that thought. You don’t get to.I slam the back of my head into the headrest, groaning.I don’t get to want her, I don’t get to feel bet

Yubi.I don’t even wait to hear the rest of Trey’s sentence.The second Michael finishes explaining that Abel, my supposedly dead father might have taken my mother, something inside me snaps. A cold ache, sharp and nauseating, moves through my chest. The living room suddenly feels too small, too heavy, too full of Trey’s presence and his anger and all the memories I have spent a year trying to outrun.I push off the couch and stand up so quickly the room tilts.“I need air,” I mutter as I walk away. Trey calls my name, but I’m already out the door.The air is humid, heavy with the scent of rain and overripe flowers from the garden. I make it halfway across the yard before my legs give up, and I sink onto the old bench near the gazebo. It creaks beneath me, familiar and worn. I cling to the edge like it’s the only thing keeping me grounded.My hands are shaking.My mom isn’t missing, she has been taken. By a man who should have been buried years ago. A man whose name I have never even

YubiI watch them walk away, Trey holding her hand and something inside me twists, hot and raw. My chest aches in a way I didn’t expect, in a way I hadn’t let myself feel in over a year.And then it hits me all at once.I’m still in love with him.Every memory, every feeling I had when we were young, tangled and forbidden and reckless, comes rushing back. I remember the way his hand felt in mine, the warmth of his touch, the way my heart would hammer against my ribs whenever he smiled at me. The anger. The betrayal. The longing. All of it, just buried beneath the surface, comes crashing back now with the soft sway of his steps as he disappears into the garage.I clutch Chanel to my chest instinctively, needing her warmth, needing the tiny weight of her body to ground me. But it doesn’t. It only makes the emptiness sharper.I close my eyes for a moment and let myself feel it, the longing, the regret, the love I thought I had buried.I hate that I still love him. I hate that he still h

YubiThe heat in the storage room is almost suffocating now. I can feel the sweat beading on my forehead, my chest rising and falling rapidly not just from the stuffy air, but from the proximity of Trey, from the way the tension between us has grown into something electric, impossible to ignore.I try to focus on the letters, on the envelopes, on the stories my mother left behind. I tell myself it’s what matters most. Abel, my mother, Chanel’s safety, those are the priorities. But every time my eyes drift to him every time I catch a glimpse of his bare chest in the dim light, the faint shadows of his muscles, the way his arms flex when he lifts a box I feel something deep inside me stir. Something dangerous.I force myself to look down at the letters in my lap. I pull a stack of envelopes tied together with faded ribbon. The dates stretch back years, some before I even remember. I gingerly untie the ribbon, my hands trembling slightly, the dust rising in little motes around us.Trey

YubiI storm back into the storage room, my hands shaking, my chest still tight with anger. Not the soft, simmering anger that comes from hurt, I mean the kind that ignites, fierce and burning, the kind that has been building inside me since the moment I realized Trey doesn’t, and will never, see me as anything but a little sister.I clutch the letters and old papers in my hands and throw myself onto the floor, ignoring the dust and the smell of old leather and paper that fills the room. I need something to channel all this frustration into, something to make this anger useful, something that isn’t him.Abel. That name has haunted me all my life, whispered in fragments by my mother, never fully explained, always wrapped in secrecy. He might be the key to all of this the disappearances, the secrets, my mother’s silences. My fists clench as I dig into the envelopes, rifling through photographs, letters, anything with his name.I find it. A manila folder, thick and bulging, tucked behind