Semua Bab Caught Between My Alpha Stepbrothers: Theirs to Ruin: Bab 111 - Bab 118

CHAPTER 111JULIAThey're in Sebastian's room.Sebastian is at his desk, not doing anything. Silas is on the floor with his back against the bed, forearms on his knees, looking at nothing.They look up when I come in.I close the door behind me."Tell me about your father," I say.Sebastian starts.He talks about growing up.The way their father moved through a room and how the room changed when he entered it. The particular quality of his approval, which was rare and conditional and designed, Sebastian understands now, to keep them reaching. The disapproval, which was quieter and more total and which both of them spent years trying to outrun without knowing they were running.Then Silas takes it.He talks about their mother.He talks about the night the fire came, the night she died’She was alive. She had been alive the whole time. She was being kept alive in the specific way that is designed to be a leash, present enough to be used, isolated enough to be controlled, loving her sons

CHAPTER 113SILASShe learns the way she does everything, completely.I've been watching Julia learn things since September, the layout of the house, the rhythms of the pack without knowing it was a pack, the specific language of Sebastian and me, without knowing she was learning a language. She absorbs. She observes first, longer than most people can tolerate observing without acting, and then when she moves, she moves with a precision that suggests she'd already run the calculation internally and was just waiting for confirmation.I didn't know, back in September, what that meant.I know now.She was always built for this.__We start before Sebastian is awake.So it's just Julia and me in the pre-dawn grey of the backyard, her in the old training clothes she'd found somewhere in the house, hair pulled back, looking at me with that expression she gets when she's about to be taught something.I know all her expressions now."We start with stillness," I begin calmly.She blinks and sc

CHAPTER 115JULIAWhen we finally move, we do not collide out of hunger.Instead, there’s a certain softness in the air, a tenderness like no other, as if they are being cautious, not because they are trying to treat me like a porcelain plate, but because this changes everything.Sex won’t be just sex now. It’ll be different. We’ll be merged as wolves. I might not have seen my wolf yet, let her embody me, but I can feel her, patient, simmering, waiting for the perfect time. Sex will involve marking. They’ll have to bite me, sink their essence into me, and hope that my wolf can survive it. I know we can. Everything has built up to this moment, amongst others. We were always inevitable.Sebastain reaches for me first.I feel his heartbeat as if it’s pounding in my own heart, loud and awake.He presses his mouth to my wrist, then runs his mouth over my wrist, sending shivers down my spine. My heart roars in my chest, and I lean into him, pushing my whole body against his. He wraps one h

CHAPTER 117JULIAAlicia arrives two days later.She looks afraid. She's terrified.We put her in the kitchen.Sebastian leans against the far wall with his arms crossed and his jaw set. He does not look at her like someone who used to love her. His rage is palpable. Silas takes the chair across from her.I stand beside Silas.Rowan is in the doorway."You have five minutes," Sebastian snaps. "Use them."She looks up.She starts at the beginning.She'd been with Sebastian for seven months, and she was happy. She says this without sentimentality.Then Steve called her in.An invitation that was the shape of a request and the weight of a command. She went. Of course, she went. He told her she was important to him, that he valued her specifically, that she had a particular kind of intelligence he wanted close. She believed him. "My mother told me," she says. "She'd heard things. About Steve, about the way he operated, about what happened to people who got close to him and stopped being