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Todos los capítulos de Caught Between My Alpha Stepbrothers: Theirs to Ruin: Capítulo 101 - Capítulo 110

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101

CHAPTER 101JULIA – POINT OF VIEWLater, I will not be able to tell you the sequence of it.Memory doesn't work the way you think it does under real fear. I remember the grip on my wrist.Alicia's fingers, cold and certain, and the quality of her stillness, not the stillness of someone waiting but the stillness of someone who knows what's coming and has already decided not to flinch from it. I register this before I register anything else. She knows. She's been standing here, knowing the whole time I've been thinking I was the one paying attention.I pull my wrist back.She lets me go.That's when I understand that letting go isn't mercy, I'm not running away from her, I'm running toward something she's already positioned. But understanding it and stopping my body are two different things, and my body is already moving, already turning toward the dark edge of the field where the firelight doesn't reach, because that's where the gap is, that's where the crowd thins, that's where the tr

102

CHAPTER 102SEBASTIAN – POINT OF VIEWI feel it before I know what it is.One moment I am standing in the kitchen with my phone in my hand, and the next moment something moves through my chest like a blade, clean and total, and I am already moving before my brain has caught up with my body. The glass I was holding hit the floor. I don't hear it break. I am already through the kitchen door, already in the hallway, already reaching for my keys with a hand that isn't entirely steady.Silas is at the bottom of the stairs.He looks at me, and I look at him, and we don't say anything because there is nothing to say. We both felt it. The same thing, at the same moment, through whatever channel exists between us that has no name and has never needed one. Something has happened to Julia.We go.The drive takes seven minutes.My jaw hurts.I realise I've been grinding my teeth since we left the house. I release it deliberately. It doesn't help.Silas is on his phone, low and fast, getting infor

103

CHAPTER 103SILASThe wall doesn't break when I put my fist through it.I want it to. I want something to break, something outside of me, something I can point to and say there, that's what this feels like, that's the shape of it. I pull my hand back. Dust on my knuckles. A jagged hole at chest height.Rowan is in the corner of the hallway, not looking at me, which is the right thing to do. Sebastian is at the window, both arms braced against the frame, looking at the street below like it owes him something. We've been in this hallway for twenty minutes because we can't be in the room where Julia is, the healer needs space, Bree is in there, her mother is in there, and we are in the hallway being useless and enormous and too full of something that has nowhere to go.I look at my hand.She needs me here.She needs me here.The healer came out twenty minutes ago and said she'll be okay, and said the ribs are bruised, not broken, and said the shoulder will need time, and I stood there a

104

CHAPTER 104JULIAThe first two days are the bad ones.I know this because Bree tells me, on the third day, that the first two were bad, and I believe her because I don't remember them clearly enough to argue. What I have from those two days is fragments. The ceiling of my bedroom. The specific weight of the duvet, which became unbearable at some point and then necessary again. My mother's hand on my forehead doing the thing she did when I was small and sick, the repetitive stroke of it, and me not telling her to stop because I didn't want her to stop.Pain. The dull persistent kind that sets up residence and makes itself at home. My ribs when I breathe in too far. My shoulder when I forget and reach for something. My palms, bandaged, which itch in a way that is somehow worse than the pain that preceded it.I sleep a lot.When I'm not sleeping I'm somewhere between sleep and not, that grey corridor where nothing is fully real and nothing is fully not, and that's where the wolves are.

105

CHAPTER 105JULIASebastian can't sit down.Silas is beside me on the bed.I am very still.Sebastian stops pacing.He stands at the foot of the bed and looks at me, and the look on his face is the one I've never had a name for, the one that holds too many things at once, and he opens his mouth and closes it."Just say it," I say. Quiet. "Whatever it is. Just say it."He looks at Silas. Silas looks at me."We're werewolves."The room is very quiet."Okay," I say.Sebastian looks at me like I've said something in a language he didn't expect."Okay," he repeats."Keep going," I say.He does.They take turns. The pack. The structure of it. What an alpha is and what it means, and what their father is, what their father has been, what living under him has looked like since they were old enough to understand what they were living under.I listen.The wolf gene. The hierarchy. The way the bond between Sebastian and Silas works, which explains approximately a thousand things I've been catalog

106

CHAPTER 106JULIA – POINT OF VIEWThey don't tell it cleanly.I don't think they could, even if they tried. So it comes out the way real things come out, in pieces, in the wrong order sometimes, one of them saying something and the other one going quiet because the something landed somewhere personal.I don't rush them.I sit with my back against the headboard and my ribs making their presence known every time.Silas tells me about the bond first.The twin thing, the channel, the whatever-it-is that meant Sebastian felt it when I went down in that field before his phone could have told him. He describes it plainly, without drama, the way he describes everything, and I think about every moment I've watched them communicate without communicating and feel the specific relief of a mystery resolving.Then Sebastian says, "It's not just us."He's at the window. He's been at the window for most of this, hands in his pockets, looking at the street and then at me and then at the street again.

107

CHAPTER 107JULIA – POINT OF VIEWThey tell me everything and more, then I say, "I need an hour," They look at each other, and they go. The door closes. Their footsteps down the hall.I listen until I can't hear them anymore.Then I lie back on the bed and stare at the ceiling and let myself be alone with it.I start with the inventory because that's what I do. I think about the thesis. My mother was sitting in that study writing about her own daughter in academic language because the academic language was the only way she could bear to look directly at it.I think about what it means that she knew.I set that down for now. The smell thing is the one that embarrasses me the most.I know their smell, both of them, specifically, individually, I could find either of them in a dark building, and I don't say this as hyperbole, I say it as a thing I've quietly known for weeks and refused to examine. Sebastian smells like woodsmoke and something darker underneath, cedar maybe, something th

108

CHAPTER 108JULIABree arrives like she always does, no announcement, no ceremony, just suddenly there, filling the doorway with her yellow coat and her too-large bag and the specific energy of someone who has been held back longer than they could stand and has finally been given permission to move.She crosses the room in four steps and wraps both arms around me.I let her.I close my eyes and let Bree hold me the way she's been holding me since we were thirteen and the world kept being larger and worse than expected, and I feel the specific safety of being known by someone who has known you long enough that the knowing is in their hands, in the particular way they hold on.She pulls back.She puts both hands on my face and reads it the way she always reads it."You look terrible," she says."I know.""You also look different.""I know."She drops her hands. Her eyes are very bright and very steady, and there's something in them she's been carrying. I can see the shape of it now that

109

CHAPTER 109JULIAI make it to the bottom of the stairs before it hits me.Six feet.I don't move.It starts in my chest.The thing that has been building since before the field, since before the bonfire, since before Alicia's message and the argument and the cabin and all the carefully managed months preceding all of it. The thing that has been accumulating in that filing cabinet I've been pressing shut for so long, the hinges are broken.It isn't about the twins.That's the thing I need to be precise about, standing here on the last step with my hand on the bannister, this is not about Sebastian going still in the kitchen or Silas reading my phone or either of them standing in a hallway full of things they hadn't told me. I've moved through that. I understand that. I can hold their fear for me and their poor execution of it and still love them without contradiction.This is older than they are.This is about being eighteen years old and finding out that the story of your own life wa

110

CHAPTER 110JULIAShe sits down when she sees my face.She pulls the chair around, sits and folds her hands on the table and looks at me with those red-rimmed eyes and waits.I put my phone between us.The cracked screen. The photographs. I open the folder, and I lay it there, and I watch her look at it.She looks for a long time.The kitchen is very quiet. The refrigerator hums. Outside, the street does its ordinary evening thing. In here, it's just the two of us and the thesis photographs and eighteen years of careful omission arranged on the table between us.She doesn't touch the phone."How much do you already know?" she says.Not what is this, or where did you get these? Not an attempt at the exit. She goes straight to the real question, which tells me something: she's been preparing for this conversation, maybe for years, certainly for the weeks since she saw me in the kitchen with the kettle and the face I thought was blank.She knew I'd seen it.Of course, she knew."Tell me

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