《Caught Between My Alpha Stepbrothers: Theirs to Ruin》全部章節：第 121 章 - 第 130 章

CHAPTER 121SEBASTAINThe water runs red for a long time.I am in a shower.I am in our house.Julia is on the other side of this door.The problem with what I did in those woods is not that I did it.The problem is how it felt.That's the thought I've been circling since we walked out of the trees, since Silas's hand found the back of my neck and I had to breathe through something that wanted to be a sound and couldn't be. I know what I am. I've always known. Wolf, alpha, a thing with teeth that has been carefully managed since I was fourteen,, and my father looked at what I was becoming and decided it was a threat to be contained rather than a son to be proud of.I know what I'm capable of.I've always known.But knowing it and feeling it are different.My father.He would have felt the same thing.That's the part that sits in me like something cold and immovable. In those woods, in those seconds, I was not thinking about Julia or Silas or what comes next. I was not thinking at all.

CHAPTER 123SILASShe moves through the form incorrectly.Julia never does anything badly now, but there's a tightness in her left shoulder, a compensation she's developed since the attack, a slight adjustment that protects the healing muscle without her realising she's doing it.I see it on the third repetition."Stop," I tell her.She stops."Left shoulder," I say.She rotates it and feels it. "I didn't notice," she admits."Your body is protecting itself," I tell her. "Which is correct. But in a fight, it becomes a tell. Someone watching you long enough will see it. They'll come from the left every time."She absorbs this, nods, and adjusts her stance, shoulders level, the compensation smoothed out deliberately.We're in the back garden.Cold morning. Frost on the grass, breath visible, the sky the particular white that means winter has made a decision. Sebastian is on the far side running the perimeter in the pattern we've established over the last two weeks.Julia and I work on t

CHAPTER 125SEBASTIANMy father knocks on the door of his own house like a visitor, like a man making a social call, like someone who has decided that the performance of civility is its own kind of power. Which is it? Which he knows it is. I stand in the hallway, and I hear the knock, and something in my chest goes cold and specific.Silas is beside me.Julia is behind us.Rowan and Bree are in position.I open the door.He looks the same.He's smiling.I want to put my hand through it.I hold.She's beside him and small.She looks at me, and her eyes are the same.Dark and direct and seeing everything.She's older. She's thinner. She's here. My mother is here.My heart bursts alive."Boys," my father says warmly.Like a reunion, a family occasion.I don't look at him.I can't look at him right now because if I look at him right now, the hold will break and everything we've planned, everything Julia laid out in the garden with her jaw set and her voice certain, will come apart before

CHAPTER 127JULIAThe moment arrives quietly.One second, Steve is turning toward the window, and his attention moves off me by three degrees, and something in my blood says:Now.I move.My elbow finds the side of his head before he's finished turning.The impact runs up my arm. He's solid, denser than he looks, the specific density of an alpha who has been what he is for twenty years, but the surprise of it, the fact that I moved first, that he was not positioned for me to move first, buys me the half second I need.I'm out of the car before he recovers.The street is empty.Of course it is.He chose this location. He chose this street. The deliberate emptiness of it is its own kind of message; we are somewhere he controls, somewhere he prepared, and for a half second I feel the shape of that close around me.Then he's out of the car.And I feel something else.He's fast.Faster than I expected, and I expected fast. He crosses the distance between us in a barely human movement, the

CHAPTER 129SEBASTIANHe's gone.I stand over him, and I wait for something to arrive. Some feeling, some signal, some internal shift that marks the before and after of a thing this large. I've been living in the past my entire life. Twenty years of his house, his voice, his hand on every lever that mattered. Twenty years of the specific survival of being his son.The after should feel like something.It doesn't feel like anything yet.Just cold air. Just the street. Just the specific silence of an ending.Silas is beside me.Neither of us speaks.Julia makes a sound. I turn.She's still upright. Barely. Her shoulder was wrong, her face showing everything the night cost her, blood dried at her temple and her lip, her good arm wrapped around her ribs like she's holding herself in place.She's looking at me.I let her see me, all of it.She doesn't try to fix me.She just stays.Our mother is behind me.She's here.She's actually here.Her hand finds my arm.I look down at it. Her hand