All Chapters of MY ALPHA STEPBROTHER IS OBSESSED WITH MY SECRET IDENTITY : Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

🌸VIOLET🌸Two days now.Two full days without a single word from Xavier, no dark stare waiting for me somewhere down the hallway, no low voice calling me Violence across some room I'd been foolish enough to think was private that particular day. I told myself the silence felt like relief and mostly managed to convince myself I believed it, though some traitorous part of my chest kept checking the empty seat at breakfast every single morning like it expected a different answer eventually.Training had chewed through four more recruits since registration day, the number sitting at twenty now, myself included, and I still didn't understand exactly how I'd survived where four others hadn't. I hadn't asked. I hadn't wanted an answer badly enough to actually go looking for one, not with the way every instructor's face closed off the second anyone dared bring up the missing names, not with the way the remaining recruits had learned within a day to stop counting out loud. Whatever had happen

♣️XAVIER♣️The drive back from the Thorneveil estate left a taste in my mouth I couldn't wash out no matter how many times I ran my tongue over my own teeth, something bitter and cloying, the aftertaste of forced smiles and my father's careful diplomacy and Celine's mother watching me across a dinner table like she was already measuring me for a wedding suit.They wanted more than the alliance now. They wanted my time, my resources, my warriors pulled off border patrol and reassigned to combing through twenty-year-old cold leads on a daughter they'd never stopped grieving, and I'd sat there for three straight days listening to Celine's father explain, again, why the search mattered so much, why the alliance obligated me to care about a dead child I'd never met.I didn't care. I refused to pretend otherwise for their comfort.The house sat quiet and dark when I finally pulled through the gate, most of the staff long since gone to bed, and I noted immediately, instinctively, the absence

🌸VIOLET🌸 Say it like I mean it. Do I even mean it? I waited for the memories to flood in, for the old triggers to surface the way they always did whenever I found myself pinned beneath weight I couldn't shift, whenever hands held me down and my body remembered things my mind fought hard to forget. I waited for the panic, the cold sweat, the darkness creeping in from the edges of my vision. All I got was the feeling of him. Solid and warm above me, his knee pressed against my hip, his fist loose but immovable around my wrists, and underneath the anger still simmering hot in my chest, something far more traitorous stirring low in my stomach, refusing to let fear win the way it always had before. I hated myself for not finding the willpower to shove him off. The arena had gone quiet somewhere in the background, twenty recruits watching their Alpha pinned over his own stepsister on a training mat, and I knew it, some distant part of my brain cataloguing exactly how this looked, an

🌸VIOLET🌸My heart literally sank the second I heard my mother's voice bleed through the wood of his door, muffled but unmistakable, close enough that I felt the sound of it land somewhere behind my sternum like a physical blow.Shit.What had I even been thinking, storming into this room, into this house, into whatever gravitational pull kept dragging me toward a man who apparently couldn't keep his hands off me for longer than five minutes at a stretch. My whole body went rigid against the wall, every muscle locking tight, my pulse suddenly roaring loud enough in my own ears that I barely registered the cold plaster pressing hard against my shoulder blades.Xavier's grip on my wrists didn't loosen. If anything, he tightened it, slow and deliberate, his thumb pressing firm against the delicate skin on the inside of my forearm, and a slow, satisfied curve pulled at the corner of his mouth like my panic was the single most entertaining thing he'd witnessed in this entire miserable day

🌸VIOLET🌸I came downstairs still trying to force my breathing into something that passed for normal, my hair hastily smoothed with damp palms, my heart still slamming a rhythm nowhere close to settled enough for a family dinner. My hands wouldn't stop shaking faintly at my sides, and I curled my fingers into loose fists as I crossed the hall, hoping the motion would burn off whatever was still crackling under my skin.My mother, Lily, and Mr Marcus were already seated when I stepped through the archway, warm light spilling over the table, the smell of curry and fresh bread drifting thick through the room, and my mother's face lit up the second she spotted me."Violet, I was looking for you." She waved me over, her bracelets clinking soft against her wrist. "Xavier said you were in the gym."That devil."Yes." The lie sat sour and heavy on my tongue, my heart clenching hard at how easily it slid out, how naturally I'd already learned to bend the truth for a man I'd claimed to hate si