All Chapters of Dirty Stepbrother: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

“Show me the original.” Val’s mouth tightened. “I don’t have the original.” “Then what am I looking at?” “A photograph of it. My source works records at the county building. She let me in for ten minutes, off the books, before that file gets sealed for good next month.” Val’s voice stayed even. “That’s not fake, Jae. I wouldn’t hand you something I couldn’t stand behind.” I stared at the page again, my mother’s name printed clean beside a line that rewrote everything I thought I understood about my father’s death. Elena hadn’t just failed to talk about it properly over the years, hadn’t just remarried Archer faster than felt right to me at seventeen. She’d been there, close enough to see something, close enough to make it disappear from the record. “Why would she do that?” “I don’t know yet.” Val closed the folder. “But whatever she saw, she chose to bury it. People don’t do that for nothing.” I left without finishing my coffee. …… Sebastian was still hooked to monitors when

I didn’t tell Sebastian about the dinner until his second-to-last night in the hospital, mostly because I already knew what he’d say. “Absolutely not. Not alone.” “I have to go, Sebastian. It’s the only way I get close enough to actually watch her reaction.” “Then I’m coming.” “You’re still hooked to a monitor.” “I’m discharged Thursday. Dinner’s Friday, right?” He shifted against the pillows, some of the old stubbornness back in his face now that the worst of the concussion symptoms had faded. “I can sit in a car outside. I’m not letting you walk into that house without someone knowing exactly where you are.” I didn’t argue the point further, mostly because some part of me was relieved not to have to. “Fine. You wait outside.” “And you record it.” “What?” “Your phone. Put it in your pocket, let it run the whole dinner.” He said it plainly, like it wasn’t a strange thing to ask. “If she says anything close to what that guard told you, we need it captured. Not just your mem

The hospital discharge took much longer than it should have. Mid-morning light cut through the thick glass of the lobby windows, throwing grey shadows across the linoleum floor while the floor nurse stamped the final stack of release forms. Sebastian didn't say a word during the entire wait. He stood by the main desk, his weight shifted heavily onto his good leg, his jaw set in a hard, flat line that told the staff to hurry up without him having to open his mouth. When the nurse finally handed over the packet of post-op instructions, Sebastian took them with a short nod, turned, and walked toward the sliding glass doors with a slow, calculated limp.I stayed half a step behind him, keeping my hands inside my jacket pockets so I wouldn't reach out to grab his elbow. He hated being handled when he was hurt.The drive back to his apartment was completely silent. The city traffic moved in a sluggish, noisy crawl, the hum of the engine filling the small space between us. Sebastian leane

The kitchen looked like a crime scene by morning. Photographs, ledgers, the yellow letter- all of it still spread across the table exactly where we’d left it the night before, neither of us willing to disturb the order we’d sorted everything into.Sebastian sat with his coffee gone cold, his bad wrist propped on a folded towel, dark circles under his eyes that had nothing to do with the concussion anymore.“Read it again,” he said, nodding at the letter.I picked it up carefully, the paper soft with age. I am keeping Jae safe the only way I know how, even if he hates me for it. I’d read that line a dozen times overnight, and it still didn’t sit right against everything else in the box.“It’s not enough on its own,” I said. “It doesn’t name Archer. It doesn’t name anyone.”“No.” Sebastian pulled the ledger toward him instead, tapping the column of transfers. “But this does, kind of. Solace Holdings. That’s not her account structure, Jae. She’s the recipient, not the one moving the mone

Val didn’t invite him to dinner at her father’s house. She invited him to dinner- period- just the two of them, a restaurant downtown with the kind of menu that doesn’t list prices, and Sebastian only found out it wasn’t a group thing when he showed up and there was no group.He told me about it after, sitting on my bed still in his jacket, looking like a man recovering from a car crash.“She booked a table for two and didn’t tell me. I thought it was the whole family thing again.”“So what’d you do?”“What was I supposed to do, walk out? Her dad set it up with my dad. If I bail, it’s not just rude; it’s like political.” He rubbed his face. “So I sat there for an hour and a half.”“An hour and a half.”“There were four courses, Jae. FOUR. Who eats four courses on a Tuesday?” I was already laughing before he even got to the bad part.“She had this whole thing planned. Like, planned planned. She’d looked up the restaurant I mentioned liking two years ago at some team dinner. TWO YEAR