He's Not My Brother

Chapter 11

Marcus didn't give up easily.

That was the problem.

He'd been circling Aria for weeks now — friendly, persistent, genuinely nice in a way that made it hard to brush him off. And every time he got close, Cayden appeared out of nowhere with an excuse, and Marcus backed off, and the cycle started again.

But today Marcus caught her alone.

Cayden was at practice. Aria was at her locker. And Marcus appeared beside her with an easy smile and absolutely no stepbrother in sight to chase him away.

"Hey, stranger."

"Hey, Marcus."

"So I've been trying to talk to you for like three weeks and every single time your brother materializes out of thin air." He leaned against the locker. "Almost like he's got a tracker on you."

Aria laughed, a little too quickly. "He's just — protective. New school. Whatever."

"Sure." Marcus didn't look convinced, but he let it go. "Look, I'll just ask. There's a thing this weekend. A few of us. Nothing big. You should come."

And there it was. A normal invitation from a normal nice guy who had no idea he was standing in the middle of something impossibly complicated.

"I can't," Aria said. "But thank you. Really."

"Can't, or your brother won't let you?"

The question was light, joking. But it landed wrong.

"It's not like that," she said.

"Okay." Marcus held up his hands. "I had to try. You're hard to get a read on, Aria Reyes."

He walked off, easy and unbothered, and Aria leaned against her locker and let out a breath.

She didn't see Cayden until he was already there.

"What did he want."

She jumped. "God — where did you even come from?"

"Practice ended early." His jaw was tight, eyes following Marcus down the hall. "What did he want."

"Nothing. He invited me to a thing. I said no."

"You said no."

"Obviously I said no."

But something in his expression hadn't relaxed, and Aria recognized it now — the same thing that had been driving every interruption since the day she arrived.

"You're jealous," she said quietly.

"I'm not jealous."

"You're so jealous."

He looked at her, and for a second the public mask slipped, and underneath it was something raw and unguarded that he could never show in a hallway.

"I spent eight months not knowing where you were," he said, voice low. "And now I know exactly where you are and I still have to watch guys like that walk up to you like they have a shot. Yeah. I'm jealous. Sue me."

Her chest did something complicated.

"Cayden, we're in a hallway."

"I know."

"People are looking."

"I know that too." He stepped back, putting careful distance between them, rebuilding the wall. "Doesn't make it not true."

The bell rang.

"Tonight," he said quietly. "Parents have that thing. Talk then."

He walked off before she could answer, hands in his pockets, the cold public version of himself sliding back into place.

But across the hall, someone had been watching the whole thing.

Not Jordan. Not Eli.

A girl named Brooke. Cayden's ex, from before Aria ever arrived. The kind of girl who noticed things, and remembered them, and filed them away.

She'd watched Cayden's face during that conversation.

She'd watched the way he looked at his stepsister.

And something in her expression sharpened, the way a person's does when they catch the edge of a secret that isn't theirs.

She didn't say anything.

She just watched Aria walk to class, and Cayden walk the other way, and the careful distance between them that suddenly looked a lot less like distance and a lot more like restraint.

Then she pulled out her phone and started typing a text to someone.

Aria, meanwhile, felt none of it.

She went to class thinking about tonight, about the empty house, about the impossible boy who'd spent eight months looking for her.

She had no idea she'd just been seen.

She had no idea that the secret she and Cayden were guarding so carefully had just developed its first c***k.

And cracks, in a house this small, had a way of becoming everything.