Semua Bab Caught Between My Alpha Stepbrothers: Theirs to Ruin: Bab 91 - Bab 100

CHAPTER 92JULIA – POINT OF VIEWSteve and Mom return from their date. She refused to tell me where they went, but the tension was very obvious when they returned, stifling and choking. She doesn’t meet my eyes.My mother makes pasta.This is what she does when she wants a meal to feel normal, something that requires stirring, that fills the kitchen with steam and the smell of garlic, that gives everyone somewhere to put their eyes when the table gets quiet. She's been doing it my whole life. I know the move.Steve opens a wine.I sit at the table and watch all of this and think: everyone in this room is performing something. I’m the only one not performing. Perhaps my lack is a performance in itself.The twins come down together, which they always do, but tonight there's something deliberate about it. As if they've agreed on something in the hallway. Anger bubbles in me. They take their usual seats, Sebastian across from me, Silas beside him, and the table fills up, and my mother sta

CHAPTER 94JULIAIt's a Sunday, which means the house moves slowly.My mother is in the garden. I can see her through my bedroom window, with a wide-brimmed hat, old jeans, and completely absorbed. Steve left early. I heard his car before I was fully awake and felt the specific relief of a house that exhales when someone leaves it. Bree has been spending more time with Rowan.The twins are somewhere. Downstairs, I think. I have nowhere to be.I make coffee and bring it back to bed and open Finn and Fiona.I've been rationing it.This is embarrassing enough that I haven't told Bree, who would find it both completely understandable and relentlessly mockable. But I've been reading slowly on purpose, stretching it out, the way you eat the last of something good because you know there's nothing comparable waiting after it.I'm near the end now.Fiona has been in the town for three months. She came for a job, or that's what she told herself, a position at the local school, a chance to reset

CHAPTER 96SILASI wasn't looking for it.I wasn't looking at her phone. I was getting a glass of water, and her phone was on the counter, and it lit up with a preview as I passed.One name.One name and four words of preview text: I know this is probably…I stopped.I put my glass down.I looked at the phone for a moment. Then I picked it up. The message was open; she hadn't locked it before she went upstairs, which means she read it and left it open, which means it's sitting with her, which means it landed.I read it.I've been watching Alicia ever since Julia told me she blackmailed her.Alicia watches people the way you watch an investment, calculating, tracking value and yield. I watch her the way you watch something dangerous that doesn't know it's been clocked. She's been positioning herself since before Julia arrived. Since before we knew Julia was coming, which is the part that has never sat right with me, the part I keep returning to when I'm supposed to be sleeping.My fath

CHAPTER 98JULIA – POINT OF VIEWBree opens the door before I knock. Rowan’s place is cosy. His parents are out of town, and they are playing house.She takes one look at my face and steps aside without saying anything, which is one of the reasons she is my best friend.I sit on the couch.She brings tea I didn't ask for and tucks herself into the opposite corner and waits. She tells me Rowan is at the movies, and I nod."They read my phone," I begin.She wraps both hands around her mug. "Alicia's message."I look at her, suspicious. "You knew about the message.""Rowan heard she was planning something." She meets my eyes without flinching. "I didn't know specifics.""But you knew she was moving.""Yes."I nod slowly. I add Bree to the list, the growing, exhausting list of people who have been quietly informed about the shape of my life while I was living it uninformed. I don't say this out loud. I sit with it instead, the specific weight of it, and I drink my tea."But you knew somet

CHAPTER 100JULIAI smell the bonfire before I see it.Wood smoke and something underneath it, sharper, that makes the back of my neck prickle before I've even turned the corner onto the field. I tell myself it's the cold. I turn the corner.There are maybe sixty people here. Alicia said some people, casual, just a bonfire. Sixty people arranged around a fire that has been burning long enough to be serious, to have settled into its own heat, is not some people. It's a gathering. It has a structure to it, the way the groups are positioned, the way the space around the fire is kept clear, the way people are oriented not toward each other but toward the centre.Toward the fire.Toward wherever Alicia is bringing me.I keep my face neutral and walk forward.She appears at my elbow within thirty seconds of my arrival."You came." She's in something dark and simple, and she looks easy. "I wasn't sure you would.""Here I am," I say.She smiles and touches my arm lightly, and begins steering