All Chapters of My Brother’s Love Is a Cage(Not Brothers): Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

The Leverage of Fear POV: Rhys "Where were you?" The question scraped out of his throat, raw and threadbare, echoing in the quiet entryway like a confession. I didn't answer. I unbuttoned my cuffs with slow, measured movements, watching the way his chest heaved as he pressed his back hard against the hall wallpaper. I took in the full picture of him while I worked at the buttons — the bloodshot eyes, the trembling hands he couldn't quite still, the shallow, ragged breathing that told me exactly how long he'd been sitting with this particular terror before I finally walked through the door. Six hours. I'd been gone almost exactly six hours, and every minute of that absence had apparently done more work on him than anything I could have accomplished by staying. I'd anticipated some version of this state when I planned the timing of tonight, though the precision of it still satisfied something clean and quiet in me. A man who returns after six ordinary hours receives an ordinary rec

Ownership & Perception POV: Rhys "You're tense." Morning had settled over the house before I finally noticed how rigid he still was beneath the duvet. I spoke the two words quietly into the cool grey air of the bedroom, my thumb tracing the sharp line of his collarbone. He didn't answer, his eyes fixed on the ceiling, but the erratic hitch in his breath told me enough. He didn't meet my eyes when I sat up. He hadn't touched the water glass I'd left on his nightstand the night before, though I noticed his hand kept drifting toward his phone on the other side of the bed and then stopping, like some invisible wire held it back each time. In my mind, the house had settled back into its proper shape. I dressed in the grey morning light with the same efficient precision I brought to every ordinary day, checking my collar in the mirror, satisfied with what looked back at me. Nothing in my reflection betrayed a single thing that had happened in this room overnight. Downstairs, I m

The Leverage Point POV: Rhys "You stayed too long." I didn't look up from my desk as the front door clicked shut, the sound of his wet boots heavy against the entryway hardwood. Sebastian paused in the doorway of the study, pale and drenched from the rain, his eyes dark with a hollow, haunted exhaustion that told me everything I needed to know about his afternoon with Julian. I studied him for a moment longer before he could retreat further into himself, cataloguing the details the way I always did — the rain-flattened hair, the raw look around his eyes that suggested he'd cried at some point on the walk home and tried to hide it before reaching the door, the particular stillness of someone who had spent an hour failing at the one thing he'd set out to do. He didn't answer. He just stood there, dripping quietly onto the floor, his hands still shaking with whatever had happened in that diner booth. "You tried to talk to him," I said. Not a question. "What did you tell him," I a

unspoken Margin POV: Bash"He didn't eat his shift meal today."I kept my head down, scrubbing the same clean square of the pass over and over until the metal gleamed. One, two, three, four. Across the dining room, Julian stood by the register, staring through the glass doors at the street with a flat, absent look I'd never seen on him before.He always ate. Julian joked about hunger the way other people joked about weather, stealing fries off my plate and calling it a service fee. Today, his sandwich sat wrapped and untouched under the counter, and he hadn't looked at it once.I wanted to go to him, but my feet felt nailed to the floor. I ran through what I could say — you okay, rough day, want to talk — and every version died in my throat before it reached my mouth. My phone still had his unanswered text on the screen from last night. Are you free for lunch tomorrow? I hadn't answered it. I hadn't answered it because Rhys had been standing in the kitchen doorway when it came in, an

Collateral & Capital POV: Rhys "The second agency dropped him from their shortlist at twenty minutes past two." Vance's voice came through the encrypted line, crisp, steady, and devoid of inflection. I leaned back against the headrest, looking out through the tinted windshield at the diner across the avenue, where Sebastian was currently wiping down the front windows. "Clean?" I asked. "Clean. Routine credit flag, nothing traceable. He'll assume it's standard hiring caution." A pause, the sound of a keyboard somewhere behind him. "Is there any chance he traced the inquiry back to us?" "No," Vance said. "I don't leave threads for amateurs to pull." I watched Sebastian through the glass, the careful, methodical way he moved the squeegee in even strokes, top to bottom, never rushing. He didn't know I could see him from here. He rarely knew where I was, which was, in its way, the entire point of the exercise. This wasn't cruelty. I want to be precise about that, even in my own he