Alle Kapitel von My Alpha Stepbrother Wants Me Back: Kapitel 1 – Kapitel 5

NADIA'S POVI was nineteen the night the storm knocked out half the county's power grid and trapped me in a cellar with the one person in that house who'd spent three years pretending I didn't exist.Kade wasn't even supposed to be home. He'd been called back that afternoon, some border skirmish rumor rippling through pack channels, rogue scouts spotted too close to our territory line, and by the time the sirens went off for the shelter drill, he was the one hauling me down the cellar stairs by the wrist instead of my dad, because my dad and Diane were three streets over at a neighbor's, and the storm hit faster than anyone predicted."Move," he said, shoving the door shut behind us as the house groaned above our heads.I'd never been alone with him for longer than the time it took to pass the salt at dinner. Now I was watching him drag a shelving unit in front of the door with one arm, like it weighed nothing, his jaw tight with something that wasn't just concentration."Is it actual

I sat on the edge of my bathtub staring at two pink lines that didn’t waver no matter how many times I blinked at them.Six weeks of him barely looking at me. Six weeks of clipped hallway greetings and locked office doors and a silence that felt like punishment, though I still don’t know if he was getting punished too.He started leaving before breakfast and coming home after everyone else was asleep, and the only time I’d caught him in the kitchen at midnight, he’d looked at me like I was something he needed very far away from himself.I sat on that bathroom floor for almost an hour, pressed one hand flat against my stomach, trying to reconcile the two lines with the six weeks of nothing that had come before them.By the time I made the appointment two days later, deep down I already knew what the doctor was going to tell me, even though I wished with all my heart that it wasn’t true, but I knew it, I felt it. I sat in the waiting room of the clinic, flipping through a magazine I did

KADE’S POVSeven years.Seven years since Nadia disappeared without a single word, and I still hadn’t found a version of myself that didn’t check every room for her the second I walked into it. Restaurants. Airports. Once, absurdly, a grocery store three states away, because a woman with her exact walk had turned down the cereal aisle and my whole chest had seized before I even caught up to my own feet.I told myself, at the time, that pushing her toward hatred was some kind of mercy. That if I was cold enough, cruel enough, distant enough, she’d forget me faster and go build a life that didn’t have a werewolf Alpha wrecking it from the inside out. I told myself a lot of things, back then, that let me sleep at night.It was the worst lie I ever told myself, and I’ve had seven years to catalogue the competition.I married Selene eight months after Nadia vanished. It lasted less than two years. Selene wanted an Alpha who could actually love her, and by the time she asked me for that, pl