All Chapters of My Stepfather's Son Is My Fated Enemy : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

The moving truck rumbled up the mountain road, and Lily pressed her face against the window. Tall pine trees stretched toward the cloudy sky, and somewhere in that forest, wolves were running. Real wolves. Pack wolves.Her stomach twisted into a tight knot."Isn't it beautiful?" Her mother, Sarah, smiled from the driver's seat. Her eyes sparkled with happiness, the kind Lily hadn't seen in years. "Kane says the cabin has a huge backyard. You and Luna will love it."Lily glanced at the silver-white wolf sleeping in the backseat. Luna's ear twitched, sensing Lily's worry even in sleep. They'd been hiding for three years, staying away from other packs, living quietly in their small apartment. Now Mom was marrying an alpha, the leader of the entire Silver Creek pack, and everything was about to change."Mom," Lily said quietly, "are you sure about this?"Sarah reached over and squeezed her hand. "Sweetheart, I know this is scary. But Kane is a good man. And his son will be a wonderful bro

"How do I know you won't tell them anyway?""You don't." Derek's brutal honesty cut through the room. "You'll have to trust me.""Trust you? I don't even know you!""Then get to know me." Something shifted in Derek's expression, a challenge, maybe, or an invitation. "One year, Lily. It's not forever. And who knows? Maybe you'll realize I'm not the monster you think I am."Lily wanted to scream. She wanted to grab Luna and run away, back to their old life where things were small and safe. But she couldn't. Mom was happy here. Mom loved Kane. And if Lily destroyed that..."What kind of tasks?" she asked, hating how defeated she sounded."Nothing that will hurt you." Derek's voice gentled slightly. "I need help managing pack social events. Research for my alpha training. Dealing with pack members who are..." He paused. "Difficult.""You want me to be your servant.""I want you to be my partner." The correction came swift and firm. "There's a difference."Lily laughed bitterly. "Partners

Derek's hands stayed easy on the wheel, but his voice had shifted into something different. Not threatening, not cold. Instructional. Like he was briefing a soldier before a mission."I'm not asking you to perform," he said. "I'm not asking you to smile at everyone or laugh at my jokes or pretend we grew up together. That would look fake, and people here can smell fake from across a room." He glanced at her. "Literally.""I know how wolves work," Lily said flatly. "I've been one my whole life.""Then you know what I'm about to say." He returned his eyes to the road. "You're new. Omega. No known pack history, no established rank. To everyone at Silver Creek High, you appeared out of nowhere and moved into the alpha's house. That makes you interesting. It also makes you a target."Lily's fingers tightened around the strap of her backpack. "Targets.""Not dangerous ones. Mostly just curious wolves who want to know where you fit." He paused. "And some who'll want to make sure you fit belo

The cafeteria was loud the way only a school cafeteria could be loud,not just the volume of it, but the layered, overlapping quality, conversations stacked on top of conversations, chair legs scraping, trays clattering, someone's laugh rising above everything else for a moment before getting swallowed back into the general noise. It should have felt anonymous. In a human school it would have.But Silver Creek High's cafeteria smelled like pack, and that changed everything.Lily stood in the doorway for a moment with her lunch bag and her tray—she'd gotten soup, because it gave her something to look at—and took stock. Thirty tables. Most of them full. The arrangement had the organic, calcified look of seating hierarchies that had been forming since freshman year and were now as fixed as geography. You didn't need a map. You could read it in posture alone, the easy sprawl of students who sat where they sat because no one would ever ask them to move, and the careful positioning of studen

He found her at her locker at 3:12. She knew the time because she'd been watching the clock at the end of the hallway in the particular way you watched clocks when you were trying to talk yourself into believing aday was almost over, and it was 3:12 when she heard the shift in the hallway's ambient noise, not silence, just a reorientation, the collective unconscious adjustment of two hundred students in a corridor registering something without quite deciding to, and she looked up and Derek was there. He stopped beside her locker. Not in front of it. Beside it, which meant she could still reach the combination lock, which she suspected was deliberate. "Tonight," he said. "Seven o'clock." Lily looked at him, then back at her locker, and dialed the combination. "Tonight what?" "Pack social committee meeting. It's at Priya's house." He held his backpack strap with one hand, weight shifted slightly, the posture of someone who was not quite comfortable saying the next thing but was