Semua Bab I AM MY STEPBROTHER'S OBSESSION : Bab 31 - Bab 40

The wheels slammed into the runway harder than they needed to...or maybe that was just me, every jolt landing like a punch in the gut after the night we’d had. I watched the terminal crawl closer through the window, all glass and washed-out grey morning light, and felt my stomach twist into something ugly and complicated the nearer we got to actually stopping. Home. Richard. The house with his shirts still folded wrong in the closet, the bed we’d shared for three years, the whole ordinary life I now had to walk back into carrying something that no longer fit inside it. Luca hadn’t let go of my hand since the descent started. “You’re gripping like you’re about to jump out of a moving plane,” he said, low, trying for a light joke and not quite landing it. “Feels like I should be.” “Nyra.” “I’m fine.” I wasn’t. We both knew I wasn’t, and the lie just sat there between us, thin and useless...the same kind of lie I’d been telling for three years now, except this time it didn’t slide

Monday morning and I couldn’t find a single pair of tights without a run in them. I stood in front of the dresser for ten straight minutes, digging through a drawer that suddenly seemed full of nothing but holes and static. I was already twenty minutes late for a job I both dreaded and needed in almost equal measure. My fingers kept catching on the fabric. Snagging. Pulling. Every ruined pair felt personal, like the day had already decided to go against me. By the time I finally gave up and just went bare-legged, my hands were shaking a little. I didn’t want to look too closely at why. Traffic was bad. Of course it was. I sat behind a delivery truck for what felt like forever, watching the clock on my dashboard tick past the time I usually got to work. Somewhere around the third red light I caught myself gripping the wheel exactly the way I’d gripped Luca’s hand on the plane...white-knuckled, like the car might try to run away if I let go. My palms were damp, I left the radio off. I

Mom’s texts had gotten more frequent since I started working for Luca. Little check-ins dressed up as nothing...how’s the new job, come by soon, miss your face. I’d been dodging most of them with excuses that weren’t quite lies, just not the whole truth either. Sunday dinner finally caught up with me. There’s only so many times you can say you’re busy before your own mother starts hearing it as something else. Richard begged off. Said the Webb thing again. It had started to feel less like an excuse and more like a whole second life he was living somewhere I wasn’t invited. I drove over alone, and some small, guilty part of me was relieved about that before I’d even parked. Luca’s car was already in the drive when I pulled up. Just seeing it there made something low in my stomach tighten. Heat. Memory. The shape of his hand on mine on the tarmac still lived under my skin like a brand. Mom answered the door with flour still on her hands, pulling me into a hug that smelled like garlic

George called Luca into a private lunch two days later, and I only knew about it because Clara mentioned it in passing while restocking the coffee. Offhand, like it was nothing. “Big lunch with his dad today. Country club. Whole production.” It shouldn’t have made my stomach drop the way it did. But I’d learned enough by now to know that nothing in this family happened without a reason attached, and country club lunches with George didn’t get scheduled for small talk. Luca came back from it two hours later. Jaw tight. Tie loosened like he’d been fighting the knot the whole drive back. He went straight into his office without stopping at my desk the way he usually did. I gave him twenty minutes before I followed, coffee in hand as an excuse, and found him standing at the window with his hands braced against the sill. Shoulders set in a way I recognized from the plane, from the storm, from every moment he was holding something back by pure force. “That bad?” I asked, setting the coff

NYRA'S POV Richard came home late again, keys hitting the counter harder than they needed to, and I heard it from the kitchen where I was pretending to care about the pasta I was making, some habit of domestic normalcy I couldn't seem to let go of even now. The water had gone cloudy from too much salt. The sauce clung to the wooden spoon in thick, sticky threads. I kept stirring anyway, because if I stopped moving I would have to feel the full weight of the day still sitting under my skin. "Hey," he said, dropping his bag by the door. He looked wrong somehow, tie already loose, color gone out of his face in a way that had nothing to do with tiredness. The kitchen light caught the shine of sweat at his temples. His shoulders sat higher than usual, like he was bracing for something that had already happened. "Hey. Dinner's almost ready." "Not hungry." He went straight for the liquor cabinet instead, poured something amber two fingers deep, drank half of it standing at the counter be