All Chapters of CLAIMED BY MY ALPHA STEPBROTHER AND STEPFATHER: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

The bite healed in a few days, which seemed fast, but I wasn't exactly monitoring it with scientific rigour because I was too busy crying over Ryan Parker and pretending the frat party never happened. It left a faint silver line on my neck that I cover with concealer out of habit. Sometimes the skin there feels warmer than it should. I don't think about it.I don't know what bit me at that party. I'm choosing not to examine that sentence too closely because I have bigger things to deal with currently.My mom has a type – tall, handsome, confident, full of promises that expire within six months. She collects them the way some people collect stamps or bad habits – methodically and with an optimism that would be inspiring if it didn't always end with her crying in the bathroom at 2 AM while I pretended to be asleep on the other side of the wall.There was the one who drank. The one who yelled. The one who did both at the same time and then bought her roses the next morning like petals co

My jaw aches when I chew my toast and every time it does I feel a pulse between my legs that has no business existing before 8 AM, and I've been checking the clock since I woke up because he said "same time tomorrow" and that means tonight, which means I have approximately fourteen hours to figure out how to be a normal human being in the meantime, which is going poorly because I've touched my swollen lips six times since I brushed my teeth.Knox wasn't at breakfast. His door was closed when I passed it, and his motorcycle was gone from the driveway, and I told myself the relief I felt was because I needed space to process and not because I was disappointed, even though my stomach dropped when I saw the empty parking spot and that's not what relief feels like.I sit in my morning lecture in the front row with my textbooks arranged and my pen ready and my hair pulled back in a ponytail that I'm choosing not to think about in the context of how it felt wrapped around his fist, and I am

KNOX’S POVShe obeyed. I watched her work her entire shift today at The Grind House on legs that were still shaking from what I did to her in that lecture hall, and when she bent over to wipe down a table I caught a flash of bare thigh under her skirt and nothing underneath it and the knowledge that she followed my instruction she walked around all day with nothing between her skin and whatever seat she sat in because I told her to – made my hand tighten around the coffee mug I still hadn’t ordered.I smell her before I see her.It’s been like this since the engagement dinner – this low, constant awareness of where she is in any given room, like my body has developed its own GPS system that runs exclusively on the scent of vanilla shampoo and something faintly sweet underneath that she doesn’t know she puts out but that I can pick up from across the apartment like a fucking bloodhound.It’s 2 AM and I’m standing in the kitchen eating cold leftover pasta straight from the container be

Knox Voss has been sitting in the corner booth of The Grind House for four days straight and he has never once ordered a drink.My manager, Beth, has mentioned it twice – once to me specifically, with the kind of careful look that says I’m not going to ask but I’m definitely going to ask – and once to the other barista, Leah, who just shrugged and said “at least he’s hot” like that’s a valid substitute for paying rent on a table during peak hours. He sits in the same spot every time, leather jacket draped over the back of the booth, legs stretched out under the table, and he watches me work with those grey eyes that haven’t gotten less intense in the four days since he made me cum on his motorcycle on the side of a public road.I’m getting better at pretending I don’t feel his gaze on me. I’m not getting better at not being affected by it, but the pretending part has improved significantly, and right now that’s the best I can offer.My childhood friend, Theo Gallagher, shows up at 3 P

I’ve been standing in the shower for twenty-two minutes trying to wash the feeling of his voice off my skin, which is not how water works but my body is still vibrating at a frequency that Knox Voss set two hours ago and no amount of hot water is going to reset whatever he rewired in my nervous system tonight.I wrap a towel around myself and step into the hallway, and Knox’s bedroom door is open.It’s never open at this hour. He keeps it shut the same way I keep mine shut – a boundary that exists more in theory than in practice but that we both maintain for the sake of the fiction that we’re normal people living under the same roof.But tonight the light from his bedside lamp spills into the hallway in a warm stripe that crosses my bare feet, and I can see him sitting on the edge of his bed with his elbows on his knees like he’s been waiting.He looks up and sees me in my towel with my hair dripping and water beading on my collarbone, and something shifts in his face that goes past w