All Chapters of I AM MY STEPBROTHER'S OBSESSION : Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

86 Chapters

ESCALATION 2

We did not make it to the bedroom. He backed me against the wall just inside the entryway, his mouth trailing down my throat while one hand worked at the buttons of the shirt beneath my jacket with a deliberate slowness that still felt urgent. Both of us were burning off an entire evening of forced restraint and careful lying at once. The near miss on the balcony was still hot under my skin and the risk was still humming in my blood. “Say it again,” I gasped as his mouth found the curve of my shoulder. “That it means nothing. Her.” “Nothing.” His voice had gone rough and wrecked. “You’re the only thing that’s meant anything all night. The only thing that’s meant anything for longer than I can admit out loud without it sounding like a confession.” He pulled the shirt open and pushed it off my shoulders, then his hands were on my bare skin, warm and sure, sliding down my back and under the waistband of my jeans. I made a sound against his mouth that I barely recognized as my own. He

Last Updated : 2026-08-19

RICHARD CONFRONTS MARCUS

Marcus called me two days after the gala. No preamble. He just told me to meet him at his office instead of a restaurant this time, which should have told me something before I even got in the car. Restaurants were for celebrating. Offices were for business, the real kind, the kind that did not come with a wine list to soften it.His office sat on the eleventh floor of a building I had never had reason to visit before that first dinner. All glass and dark wood. The kind of space that costs more per square foot than most people’s houses. His assistant waved me straight through without announcing me, which meant he was expecting me, which meant whatever this was, he had already decided how it was going to go before I walked in the door.“Richard.” He did not stand when I came in. He just gestured at the chair across from his desk. A folder already sat there waiting, closed, ominous in its stillness. “Thanks for coming on short notice.”“You said it was important.”“It is.” He leaned bac

Last Updated : 2026-08-20

WE ARE OKAY

Mom’s invitation came with less warning than usual. A text on Wednesday asking if we could do lunch Saturday instead of the usual Sunday dinner, something about George having a better morning than afternoon lately and wanting to catch everyone while his energy held. I said yes before I had thought through who else “everyone” might include, and only realized my mistake when I pulled into the driveway and saw Luca’s car already parked at the curb.Richard noticed it too. I felt him clock it beside me, some small, involuntary tightening around his eyes before he smoothed it back into nothing.“Didn’t realize this was a full family thing,” he said, undoing his seatbelt slower than he needed to.“Mom didn’t mention who’d be here. She just said lunch.”“Sure.” He got out of the car without waiting for me, and I sat there a second longer than necessary, bracing myself for whatever version of this afternoon we were about to have.Inside, the house smelled like the roast Mom always made for oc

Last Updated : 2026-08-21

THE OLD PHOTO

NYRA’S POVI was cleaning out the hall closet on a Sunday afternoon, one of those restless chores I had taken up lately whenever the quiet in the house got too loud, when I found the box.It had been pushed to the very back, behind a stack of old coats we never wore anymore and a broken vacuum attachment no one had bothered to throw out. A plain cardboard box gone soft at the corners with age, my handwriting on the side in faded marker: NYRA, OLD STUFF. I almost left it there. Almost shoved it back into the dark and went back to sorting coats that still smelled faintly of a house we no longer lived in. But something made me pull it out instead, sit down cross-legged on the hallway floor with my back against the wall, and open it.Mostly it was nothing. College notebooks filled with handwriting I barely recognized as mine. A few paperback novels gone soft and yellow at the edges. A single earring without its match. And near the bottom, wrapped carefully in a scarf I did not recognize,

Last Updated : 2026-08-22

THE GUILT

LUCA’S POV I’ve told the story so many times now that I almost believe the softer version myself. That’s the dangerous part. If you say a lie gently enough, and often enough, to someone you love, it starts to feel less like a lie and more like a kindness you’re still giving them. Instead of a wound you’re still hiding. I told her I only meant to watch. That’s not what I meant to do. I’ve never said the rest of it out loud to anyone. Not to my father. Not to the private investigator I pay quietly every month to keep looking into what really happened. Not to the therapist I saw exactly twice three years ago before deciding I wasn’t ready to hear myself say it in a room with another person listening. I’ve only ever let myself think it late at night, in the honest way I try to be with myself when there’s nobody around to look composed for. I was going to stop the wedding. Not watch from a distance. Not quietly check that she was happy and then drive home with a clear conscience. I g

Last Updated : 2026-08-24

RICHARD'S CRUELTY GROWS

It started small enough that I almost didn’t notice, the way these things always seem to start small enough that you can talk yourself out of noticing.Richard began asking where I’d been. Not in the ordinary way, the how was your day way we used to trade automatically over dinner, but pointed now, specific, like he was building a file. What time did the meeting actually end. Why did it take forty minutes to get home when the drive was only twenty. Who else stayed late with me.“Just work,” I told him, more than once, and watched something tighten behind his eyes each time I said it, like the answer itself had become the problem rather than whatever it was actually covering for.I found him with my phone one evening, not hiding it exactly, just standing in the kitchen scrolling through it when I came down from the shower, his thumb moving fast over the screen.“What are you doing?”“Nothing.” He set it down too quickly, guilt flashing plain across his face before he smoothed it into s

Last Updated : 2026-08-25

DANIEL'S POACHING ATTEMPT

It started small enough that I almost didn’t notice, the way these things always seem to start. Daniel caught me in the break room on a Thursday with coffee in hand, looking like he’d been waiting for the right moment to say whatever he was about to say. “Got a minute?” “Sure.” I glanced at the clock, already calculating how much time I actually had before Luca’s next call. “What’s up?” He hesitated and glanced toward the door like he wanted to make sure it was properly shut. Something about the care he took with it made my stomach tighten slightly, some instinct telling me this was not going to be a casual conversation. “I’ve been offered a VP role. Dappler Group.” He said it plain, no preamble, watching my reaction closely. “They want to build out a whole new business development arm. I told them I’d only take it if I could bring someone with me.” “Congratulations.” “I want it to be you.” I stood there for a second with my coffee halfway to my mouth, genuinely caught off guar

Last Updated : 2026-08-26

HALF VERSION

I spent the next week doing math I did not want to be doing. Sitting up late after Richard had gone to bed, laptop open on the kitchen island, the house so quiet I could hear the fridge humming. I ran the numbers over and over like the spreadsheet itself might tell me something my own head could not. Dappler’s offer, laid out properly. The salary, the equity vesting schedule. The title that would exist independent of anyone else’s name. Mine alone on a door somewhere. Nobody ever needing to explain how I had gotten there. I looked at it clinically, the way I had learned to look at Henderson’s numbers, at Meridian’s, trying to strip the emotion out and just see the shape of the decision plainly. It did not work. The emotion kept bleeding back in no matter how many times I tried to separate it out. I thought about Richard’s hand around my wrist. About the faint marks that had faded within a day but somehow had not fully faded from my head at all. They were still sitting there every t

Last Updated : 2026-08-27

LUCA'S CONFESSION (PARTIAL)

He came to the house on a Tuesday. That alone told me something had shifted, because Luca never came to the house. He had never once in all these months set foot anywhere near the life I shared with Richard. It was a careful, unspoken boundary neither of us had ever needed to say out loud. Richard was at the office. Some late meeting with Marcus that I had stopped asking too many questions about, the exhaustion of pretending finally outweighing the fear of what I might learn if I actually pushed. I was in the kitchen when the doorbell rang, and I knew who it was before I even opened the door. Some old, familiar hum in my chest that always seemed to announce him before anything else did. “You shouldn’t be here,” I said, opening the door anyway. “I know.” He stood on the porch with his hands in his pockets, something different in his face tonight. Resolved in a way I had not seen from him in weeks. “I need ten minutes. Then I’ll go.” I let him in. We stood in the kitchen, the same k

Last Updated : 2026-08-28

DECISION

I called Daniel on a Thursday morning, before I had fully talked myself out of it, sitting in my car in the parking garage with my hands wrapped tight around the steering wheel like it might steady something in my chest that had felt unsteady for days now.“I need to give you my answer,” I said, when he picked up.“Okay.” A pause, careful. “Which way are you leaning?”I looked up at the building through my windshield. Floors stacked one on top of another. Luca’s office somewhere near the top. The whole structure suddenly feeling less like a trap and more like something I had actually chosen to keep standing inside. That did not make it simple. I was still going home to a husband tonight. I was still wearing a ring. I was still a married woman making a decision that would keep me in the same building as the man I was not supposed to love. And even if Richard were gone tomorrow, even if the marriage ended clean, Luca and I still could not walk into a room together and call it what it wa

Last Updated : 2026-08-31

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