All Chapters of Dirty Stepbrother: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

I didn’t tell Sebastian about Val.I told myself it was because there wasn’t anything to tell yet, no deal made, no promises kept or broken, just a conversation on an empty street that hadn’t led anywhere concrete. It was a thin excuse, and I knew it even as I used it, but the alternative meant explaining why Val had been outside the club at midnight in the first place, and that door led somewhere I still wasn’t ready to open.Instead, I found myself in the library the next afternoon, tucked into a corner computer nobody used, pulling up local news archives from the year my father died.The official story hadn’t changed in the retelling my whole life: robbery, gone wrong, case closed within the week. I’d never actually gone looking for the raw coverage myself. It felt strange, sitting there scrolling through old headlines with my father’s name buried somewhere in paragraph three of an article that clearly hadn’t considered him important enough for the first line.Most of what I found m

The property sat at the end of a long gravel drive, gates closing behind the car before the house even came fully into view stone and glass, lit low along the edges, bigger than anything I’d stood in front of before.Camille met me at the door herself, dressed for the evening already, though it wasn’t clear yet what the evening actually required of me.“You’ll stay in the east wing,” she said, leading me down a hallway separate from the sound of voices and music drifting faintly from somewhere deeper in the house. “Away from the main gathering until we need you.”“Need me for what, exactly?”“Tonight, nothing beyond an introduction. Tomorrow, more.” She stopped at a door and pushed it open into a room larger than my entire apartment. “Rest a little. Someone will come get you when it’s time.”She left before I could ask anything else, heels fading down the hall. I stood there a moment, taking in the room: bed too big for one person, a window overlooking dark grounds I couldn’t fully mak

The house went quiet around midnight, the last of the guests retreating to their rooms, staff footsteps thinning to nothing more than the occasional distant creak of floorboards settling.I lay awake anyway, George’s words circling with Robert’s warning, neither one letting me rest. Eventually I gave up pretending sleep was coming and slipped out of bed, easing my door open with the kind of care that came from months of sneaking around Sebastian’s apartment, Archer’s office, every corner of my life that required silence to survive.The hallway sat empty, dim, the steel door waiting exactly where I’d left it in my memory.I crept closer than I had the first time, close enough now to hear something I hadn’t expected: voices, muffled behind the thick door, low enough that I had to hold my breath to catch fragments.“…the Castillo situation…”Robert’s voice. Unmistakable.“…contained until after the weekend, that’s all I’m asking…”A second voice, unfamiliar, responded too quietly for me

I got home late, my whole body running on the kind of exhaustion that made even simple tasks feel distant and slow. I made tea without thinking much about it, the same routine I’d followed a hundred nights before, and collapsed onto my mattress still half-dressed shortly after, my phone slipping from my hand somewhere in the dark. I don’t remember anything after that. Not until I woke up in a hospital bed, an oxygen mask fitted loosely over my face, Sebastian gripping my hand so tight it almost hurt. “Hey.” His voice cracked on the word. “Hey, you’re okay. You’re okay.” “What happened?” My throat felt raw, my head thick with something heavier than ordinary tiredness. “Gas leak. Your stove.” He pressed his forehead briefly against our joined hands, breathing hard like he was still catching up to whatever fear he’d been carrying. “I couldn’t reach you tonight. Called twice, no answer, and something just felt wrong, so I drove over.” His jaw tightened. “The second I got off the

Sebastian bought me a secondhand bike the week after the gas leak, something practical and unglamorous, chain slightly rusted, but functional enough to save me from relying on the bus every night between campus and the club. “Faster than waiting on public transit,” he’d said, wheeling it into his apartment like it was nothing, though I caught the careful way he watched my face for a reaction. “And safer than walking alone this late. I checked the brakes myself before I bought it.” I hadn’t ridden much since I was a kid, but muscle memory came back quickly enough, and within a few days it had folded itself into my routine as it had always been there: quick rides between buildings, a shortcut through the park that shaved fifteen minutes off my usual walk to the bus stop. I didn’t know yet that someone had already found the bike before I ever touched it. The morning it happened, I was running late for my first class, scrambling through Sebastian’s apartment half-dressed, my usual b