All Chapters of Initiated by my Alpha Stepbrother's Mark: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

RONAN'S POV I had been with women before.I want to be clear about that, not as a boast but as context, because what I'm about to tell you has to be measured against something, and the something is this: I had never, not once in my life, been on my knees in front of anyone. Literally or otherwise. I was an Alpha. I was built for authority, trained for composure, conditioned since I was old enough to understand what I was to hold every room I walked into by the throat. I did not lose control. I did not shake. I certainly did not look at a woman kneeling in front of me and feel my entire chest crack open like something that had been sealed too long under pressure.And then there was Kaireen.She was looking up at me with those dark, infuriated eyes, her hair loose and wild around her face, her shirt hanging open from where the buttons had lost the argument, the torn strip of my shirt still wrapped around her mouth, and she was the most devastating thing I ha

Kaireen's Pov I hated myself.That was the thought running on repeat somewhere at the back of my mind while my body did everything else entirely on its own. Because there I was, standing in my brother's office with his come warm on my skin and my shirt hanging off my shoulders and my brain sending increasingly frantic messages that nobody was receiving, and all I could think was that if there was a list of worst decisions I had ever made in my entire life, this one was going to need its own section.And then he bent down to reach me and I stopped thinking about the list.His tongue moved across my breast, slow and deliberate, cleaning what he had made of me with a shamelessness that should have offended me and instead set every nerve ending I had on fire. He was crouched to my height, his big hands cupping both breasts, his mouth working over one while his thumb moved in slow circles over the other, and he looked up at me from beneath those dark lashes wit

KAIREEN’S POVThe shower was not long enough.I turned the heat up until the water was almost unbearable and stood under it with my arms wrapped around myself and let it run over everything, over the smell of him, over the memory of his hands, over the sound of his voice in my ear saying things that were going to live in the back of my head permanently against my will. I scrubbed my skin like I could wash the bond off with enough effort and enough expensive hotel soap, like I could rinse three weeks of tension and one catastrophically stupid hour down the drain and come out the other side of the bathroom door a person who had their life together.I could not.What I came out as was clean, at least. Which was something.I pulled on my jeans quickly, dark wash and high waisted, and tugged on the white fitted shirt I had packed that morning before any of today had happened, before I knew what today was going to turn into. I stood at the mirror over the sink and tried to arrange my hair i

Kaireen's Pov The yellow tape was the first thing that really made it real.It's not the black government vehicles parked in two neat rows blocking the entire front entrance, not the men in dark jackets with their earpieces and their expressionless faces, not even the cluster of Kade's staff standing behind the cordon looking small and lost in their scrubs. All of that had looked, for about thirty seconds, like something that could be explained, something administrative, something that would get sorted in a phone call and a few signatures.And then I saw the yellow tape stretched across those wide glass doors, the official seal of the federal office visible from where I stood, and every single instinct in my body fired at once.Kade stepped forward and I stayed close behind him, close enough to feel the heat coming off him, the restrained fury that had his shoulders locked and his jaw set and his hands very deliberately open at his sides in the way of a man remindin

Kaireen's Pov Food was not something I had thought about since morning, but the moment Kade said the word eat, something in my stomach took that as permission to make itself very loudly known. It grumbled so hard that he heard it from the driver's seat and looked at me with one eyebrow raised and said absolutely nothing, because he was a gentleman, and I pressed my hand flat against my stomach like I could shame it into silence.I could not."There's a place I know," he said simply, and redirected the driver.The restaurant was called Goldie's, which was not a name that prepared you for what it actually was. It sat on the corner of a wide, tree-lined street in one of the cleaner parts of the city, It was a fast food place the way a Rolls Royce was a car, technically accurate and also completely missing the point. The smell hit me the moment the door opened, fried chicken and something with garlic and fresh bread and coffee, and my entire body said yes with a conviction that bypassed