All Chapters of CLAIMED BY MY ALPHA STEPBROTHER AND STEPFATHER: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

Knox’s fingers are still inside me when I read the text, and the collision of the two sensations – his hand between my legs and Dominic’s name on my screen – short-circuits something in my brain that I don’t think is going to reconnect anytime soon.I pull Knox’s hand away and slide off his lap and grab my bag and he watches me leave the study room with his wet fingers resting on the table and an expression that says he knows exactly where I’m going and exactly who summoned me, and the fact that he doesn’t stop me is more unsettling than if he’d pinned me to the chair.Dominic’s office is on the third floor of the humanities building, at the end of a hallway that smells like old carpet and printer toner, and the door is closed when I get there, which is different because it’s usually open during office hours. I knock and his voice comes through the wood – “Come in” – and I push the door open and he’s behind his desk with his glasses on and his sleeves rolled to the elbow and a stack o

IVY’S POVSomething is wrong with Knox.He’s been off all day – snapping at a guy who bumped his shoulder in the hallway hard enough that I saw the guy flinch backward like he’d been shoved even though Knox hadn’t moved his hands, and his eyes have been doing that gold-flicker thing that I’ve been filing under “things I’ll deal with later” except later is running out of runway because the flickering has gotten worse since this morning.In our shared lecture he sat behind me and I could feel the heat pouring off him through the back of my chair like sitting in front of a furnace, and when the professor called on him he didn’t answer because he was gripping the edge of the desk so hard that his knuckles had gone white and the wood was creaking under his fingers.He skipped his afternoon classes.His motorcycle was still in the parking lot when I got home from The Grind House, which meant he was here somewhere, and my mom mentioned on her way out to dinner with Dominic that Knox had said

“Yes.”He carries me to the bed like I’m made of paper, and his hands span my entire waist now with his fingertips touching at my spine, and the heat of his palms through my shirt is so intense that I can feel it in my organs. He lays me down and pulls my shirt over my head and my shorts follow and he strips me bare with hands that are too big and too hot and too precise, and then he stands at the edge of the bed and pushes his jeans down and I stop breathing.He was big before. I know he was big before because I felt him inside me and I felt the stretch and I adjusted and it was overwhelming but manageable.What I’m looking at now is not manageable. Whatever the shift did to the rest of his body it did to his cock in proportion, and he’s thick enough that my hand wouldn’t close around him and long enough that I genuinely don’t know where it would fit and the logical part of my brain is doing emergency mathematics while the rest of my brain is flooding my body with a heat so intense t

Theo is sitting at his usual table at The Grind House when I walk in for my shift, and the normalcy of the image – laptop open, his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead the way he does when he’s switching between screens – hits me so hard that I have to pause in the doorway and remember how to be a person who doesn’t have a werewolf’s heartbeat echoing in her chest.“Ivy!” He stands up and hugs me and the contact feels foreign in a way that makes me sad, because Theo’s hugs used to feel like home and now they feel like visiting a country I used to live in where I no longer speak the language.He pulls back and looks at my face and his expression shifts into something careful and assessing.“You look different,” he says, and his eyes drop to my high-necked shirt – the third one this week, in September, and I can tell he’s registering the pattern even if he doesn’t know what it means yet.“Just tired,” I say, and tie my apron on and start my shift, and he watches me from his table

IVY’S POVKnox is at the clubhouse and I am crawling out of my skin.He left at 6 PM on his motorcycle for a “pack business” that he didn’t elaborate on and a kiss pressed to the bite mark on my shoulder that sent the double heartbeat in my chest into overdrive.It’s been five hours since the front door closed behind him and my body has spent every one of those hours reminding me that it was rewired three nights ago by a half-shifted werewolf and that the operating system he installed runs on a fuel source that is currently unavailable.I’ve tried reading. I’ve tried studying. I’ve tried watching a show that I can’t follow because every time a male character speaks in a low register my thighs press together and the echo of Knox’s heartbeat in my chest thumps harder like a dog hearing its owner’s car in the driveway – except the car isn’t in the driveway.The car is across the city at a werewolf biker compound and I am alone in my bed vibrating at a frequency that no amount of normal s