All Chapters of My Abusive Ex Watched Me Marry His Stepbrother: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

"Obviously." She reached out and lifted a strand of my hair, studying the split ends like they had personally offended her. "We're cutting four inches and adding layers. Sit."I sat. For the next three hours, I was poked, measured, plucked, styled, and critiqued by three women who treated my body like a renovation project. They cut my hair to my shoulders and blew it out until it fell in smooth, shiny waves I had never achieved on my own. They shaped my eyebrows, which apparently had been a disaster my entire life without my knowledge."Try this one," Monica ordered, handing me a black dress. I tried it on. She shook her head before I even finished zipping it. "Too corporate. Next."Blue satin. "Too safe."White silk. "Too bridal. We're not announcing the wedding yet."Green velvet. "Wrong undertone for your skin."By dress number five I felt like a mannequin being dressed and undressed by strangers. By dress number seven I had stopped caring what they put on me.Then Monica pulled ou

Kyle's POVWe worked the room for the next hour. Lara played her part better than I expected. She smiled at the right moments, laughed at the right jokes, and looked at me with a practiced adoration that was almost embarrassing in its effectiveness. Her hand rested on my arm when we stood together. She leaned into me slightly when someone took a photo. She called me "Kyle" instead of "Mr. Morrison" and made it sound intimate.She was good at this. Too good. I found myself wondering which parts were performance and which parts were something else.My hand stayed on her lower back through every conversation, every introduction, every handshake. Possessive. Deliberate. Sending a message to every man in the room. She is with me. She belongs here. She is not available.Contract language. Strategic positioning. Nothing more.Except my thumb kept tracing small circles against her spine through the silk, and I was not sure when that started or why I could not stop.Between conversations, I ca

"Right." Kyle's tone was bored, dismissive, like he was listening to a child throw a tantrum. "And your nose just broke itself out of sympathy."Sarah appeared at Maxton's side, gripping his arm again, her face tight with fury and fear."Maxton, stop this," she hissed. "Not here. People are watching.""Let them watch!" Maxton shook her off again, his voice rising. "Let them see what kind of man my brother really is. A thief. A manipulator. A man who takes what doesn't belong to him.""She's not property, Maxton." Kyle's voice dropped to something quiet and cold, the temperature of the air between them plummeting. "Though I understand that concept might be difficult for you."Maxton's eyes snapped to mine. And there it was. The look. The one I knew better than my own reflection. The tightening around his mouth, the narrowing of his pupils, the slight forward tilt of his body like a spring being compressed before it explodes.That was the look that came before he hit me.My body reacted

It was small. A tiny contraction of her body against my side, a barely visible tightening of her shoulders. Nobody else would have noticed. But my hand was on her waist, my fingers pressed against her skin through the silk, and I felt every tremor like a seismograph reading an earthquake.She was flinching because of me. Not Maxton. Me.Because I was using her. Using her pain, her trauma, her humiliation as ammunition against my stepbrother. Every word out of my mouth was a bullet, and she was the gun I was firing it from. I was waving her around like a trophy, displaying her bruises through implication, mining her suffering for strategic advantage.She was not a business partner in this moment. She was a weapon. My weapon.Guilt surged through my chest, hot and unwanted, and I shoved it down with the efficiency of a man who had been burying inconvenient emotions his entire adult life. This was revenge. This was what she signed up for. She knew what the gala would be. She read the con

Kyle studied me with those dark, calculating eyes. His jaw tightened slightly, the only sign that my words had landed anywhere close to something real."You knew what this arrangement entailed," he reminded me, his voice dropping to that low, controlled register that used to intimidate me. "You read the contract.""The contract says public appearances. It doesn't say public humiliation." I stepped closer, anger pushing past the fear and exhaustion. "It doesn't say being paraded around as a trophy while your stepbrother threatens to kill me.""He threatened you?"The sharpness in Kyle's voice caught me off guard. It was subtle, barely there, like a knife being drawn an inch from its sheath. His eyes narrowed, and something shifted behind them. Something that looked almost like concern, though I knew better than to trust it."In the garage, weeks ago, he told me he'd make sure I never breathe," I reminded him. "Tonight he leaned into my face and told me I'm still his. But you were too b