All Chapters of CLAIMED BY MY ALPHA STEPBROTHER AND STEPFATHER: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

83 Chapters

CHAPTER 31 - CARELESS

IVY’S POVNobody comes.We lie there frozen for what feels like an hour but is probably ninety seconds with Knox’s hand still between my legs and my heartbeat so loud in my ears that I can barely hear the silence of the hallway over it, and when the apartment stays quiet, Knox exhales against my neck and the tension in his body releases in a way that tells me even HE was scared – which is the first time I’ve seen him scared of anything that wasn’t Viktor-related – and the novelty of it almost makes me laugh.He doesn’t let me laugh.His hand clamps over my mouth and his eyes are gold-ringed in the dark and he says “not a sound” against my ear, and the command sends a jolt through my body that has no business existing given that I just came hard enough to nearly blow our cover, but my hips roll toward him anyway because my body has stopped pretending it has a vote in these situations.He pushes inside me with his hand still covering my mouth and the fullness of him after the edging is

CHAPTER 32 - WORKING

I last three hours into my shift before he invades.Three hours of steaming milk and wiping counters and pretending my thighs aren’t aching from last night and that the bite on my shoulder isn’t throbbing under my collar every time I reach for a cup on the high shelf. I was actually starting to feel like a functioning member of society when the bell above the door chimes and Knox walks in and sits in his booth and doesn’t order, and I know from the way he’s looking at me that the corner booth isn’t his final destination today.He waits until 2 PM when the afternoon rush dies and Beth goes on her break and Leah is restocking napkins at the front counter with her earbuds in, and then he stands up and walks past the register and past the espresso machine and straight through the “STAFF ONLY” door like the sign is a suggestion that doesn’t apply to him, which in his mind it probably isn’t because Knox Voss has never encountered a boundary he didn’t consider a personal challenge.I follow

CHAPTER 33 - INVISIBLE

Dominic hands my essay back at the end of class and his fingers brush mine during the transfer. The contact lasts less than a second but the place where his skin touched mine burns for the next forty-five minutes like he left a chemical residue that my nerve endings are still trying to metabolize.The essay has more red ink on it than black, which means he spent longer writing on my paper than I spent writing the paper, and the density of his annotations is so thorough that every paragraph has been dissected and reassembled in his handwriting.Everyone leaves after class. I don’t.I stay in my seat in the third row and flip through the red-marked pages and feel him watching me from behind his desk the way gravity watches objects from below. The amphitheater is empty except for the two of us and the sound of pages turning and his pen tapping against his desk in a rhythm that might be impatient or might be something else entirely.“You have questions about the feedback,” he says, and it

CHAPTER 34 - MARA

I’m still thinking about the red ink when Knox puts a helmet in my hands and tells me we’re going somewhere, and the contrast between the two Voss men is giving me emotional whiplash because three hours ago Dominic reached into my writing and touched something I didn’t know was exposed and now his son is straddling a motorcycle in the parking lot of The Grind House looking at me like I’m something he plans to devour before the night is over.He takes me to a bar I’ve never seen before, on the outskirts of the city where the streetlights thin out and the buildings get rougher and the clientele look like they’d use a bottle as a weapon before they’d drink from it.The sign above the door says “The Iron” in letters that are missing their neon, and the parking lot is full of motorcycles, and the moment we walk inside something in the atmosphere changes in a way I can feel against my skin but can’t name.The people inside aren’t just people.I know this the way I know Knox isn’t just a per

CHAPTER 35 - PHANTOM FEELINGS

Mara’s gold eyes are two feet from my face and the heat coming off her body is the same wrong-temperature heat that Knox runs at, which means she’s the same thing he is, which means the woman standing between me and the only exit is a werewolf who has just told me she could kill me faster than I could scream, and the worst part is that I believe her completely.“You don’t know what you’ve walked into.” Her voice is low and controlled in a way that reminds me of Dominic, except where Dominic’s control feels like a dam holding something back, Mara’s control feels like a leash being held by someone who’s deciding whether to let go. “You think you’re special because he fucks you in lecture halls and marks you with his scent like you’re something worth keeping, but you are a HUMAN playing house in a world that eats humans for sport, and the only reason you’re still breathing is because his scent is fresh enough on your skin that killing you would mean declaring war on a Voss.”She steps cl

CHAPTER 36 - TERRITORIAL MATH

KNOX’S POVI smell the blood before she comes out of the bathroom.One drop. Less than a drop. But I smell it, and underneath the blood I smell Mara – her fury and her desperation and her half-bond agony coating Ivy’s skin like a second layer of perfume that makes my vision go gold so fast the bartender takes a step backward.Ivy comes out of the bathroom looking like she just fought a war. Her hands are shaking and there’s a single red line on her throat where a claw broke skin, and her eyes find mine across the bar with an expression that’s equal parts terrified and defiant, and the defiance is what tips me over because this girl just stood in a locked room with a shifted she-wolf and walked out vertical.I cross the bar in four strides and my hand goes to the back of her neck and I steer her past the main room and down the back hallway to the storage room that the pack uses for private business, and private business is exactly what I’m about to conduct.Every wolf in this bar smell

CHAPTER 37 - THE ALPHA

IVY’S POVI’ve never seen Knox afraid.I’ve seen him possessive and aggressive and feral and half-shifted with his claws buried in plaster, but I have never seen the colour leave his face the way it does when his eyes land on the silver-haired man in the corner booth.His entire body changes in a single heartbeat – the post-sex looseness in his shoulders solidifies into something rigid and his hand moves from the small of my back to my hip and he shifts me behind him with a motion that’s so instinctive it looks like a reflex.The fact that Knox Voss – who walks into rooms like he owns them and stands over me like I’m something he conquered – is putting his body between me and another person tells me more about the man in the corner than any introduction ever could.“Knox–”“We’re leaving.” His voice is flat in a way I haven’t heard before, stripped of the low heat and the cocky drawl and the filthy undertone.He steers me toward the door with his hand on my hip like a rudder, and I gl

CHAPTER 38 - PROPERLY MARKED

Knox has been a shadow all week.He walks me to every class and picks me up after every shift and texts me so constantly that my phone battery dies by 3 PM, and the possessiveness that used to feel like a game has sharpened into something that feels like a perimeter check.He stands closer. He holds tighter. He sleeps in my room every night now, curled around me with his arm across my ribs like a seatbelt, and the double heartbeat in my chest tells me his wolf hasn’t settled since Viktor’s name lit up his phone screen.Tonight is different because the sky is breaking apart.Thunder rolls across the city in waves that shake the windows, and lightning turns my bedroom white every few seconds, and the rain is hitting the glass so hard it sounds like someone throwing gravel, and Knox opens my door at midnight and he’s half-shifted.I can see it immediately. His shoulders are broader under his t-shirt and his hands are wrong at the edges, fingertips darkening where the claws are pressing f

CHAPTER 39 - PROMISES

The mark on my neck glows faintly in the bathroom mirror when I tilt my head, and in certain light it pulses in rhythm with the double heartbeat in my chest – Knox’s heartbeat, louder, more present since last night, a permanent broadcast signal that I can’t turn off and don’t want to.Knox wants the mark visible. He said it this morning with his mouth against my throat and his hand between my legs and the casual authority of a man issuing a dress code: “No turtlenecks today.”I cover it for my mom because there are limits to my self-destruction that even I haven’t crossed yet, but on campus the collar of my shirt sits low enough that anyone looking can see the silvered scar tissue and the faint golden shimmer underneath, and people are looking.Whispers follow me across the quad like a weather system. Two girls in my morning lecture stare at my neck and then at each other and then at their phones, and I can feel the gossip propagating in real time.At The Grind House, Theo sits at his

CHAPTER 40 - COMPOSURE

I’ve been dodging Knox for two days and the bond is making it nearly impossible.He can feel me through the mark – not just the heartbeat anymore but my location, my mood, the spike in my pulse every time I think about Thursday at 8 PM, which is often enough that I’m sure the bond is sending him a constant feed of data that translates roughly to “your mate is aroused and it’s not about you.”I’ve been taking alternate routes to class and picking up extra shifts at The Grind House and leaving rooms thirty seconds before he enters them, and the effort of avoiding a werewolf who can track you by scent across a city block is exhausting in a way that has nothing to do with physical fitness.He texted me fourteen times today. I answered three of them with variations of “studying” that became less convincing with each repetition, and the bond is carrying his suspicion through my chest like a low-grade fever that spikes every time I lie.It’s 7:45 PM on Thursday.I told my mom I’m going to th

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