CLAIMED BY MY STEPBROTHER

The house didn’t look real. That was my first thought when the car passed through the gates. Someone had built this place to be photographed, not lived in. White stone rose three stories high, wrapped in glass so clean it looked like water frozen mid-pour. A fountain sat in the middle of the driveway, existing beautifully without a purpose. Even the air felt arranged. "Don't stare too much," Mom said next to me, smoothing her dress for the tenth time. "We live here now." We. That word still felt borrowed. Three weeks ago, it was just the two of us in a two-bedroom apartment with a leaking faucet. Now she was Clara Cross, and I was well, I didn’t actually know what I was yet. Stepson. Guest. Complication. A woman in a black uniform opened the door before we reached it. "Mrs. Cross. Master Max. Welcome home." Master Max. I almost laughed. Nobody had ever called me that. The inside of the house absorbed the sound of our footsteps. Marble floors, ceilings too high to grasp, a staircase that curved into shadow like it belonged in a museum. I turned slowly, taking it in, and caught myself smiling before I could stop it. It was silly to be impressed. It was hard not to be. Damian Cross was already waiting in the sitting room, a glass of something amber in his hand, looking like he was born in a suit. He set the glass down when he saw us and smiled warm, easy, the kind of smile that made you understand how he’d convinced my mother to marry him in four months. "There they are." He crossed the room and kissed Mom's cheek, then turned that warmth on me, extending his hand. "Max. Good to finally have you both under one roof." "Thank you for having us," I said, shaking it. His grip was firm and confident the handshake of a man used to closing deals. "Nonsense. This is your home now." He glanced toward the stairs, and for the first time, something tightened at the corner of his mouth. "Where is he?" It wasn’t really a question. He pulled out his phone, dialed, and waited. I watched three different expressions cross his face irritation, patience, more irritation before he gave up and looked past us at the maid still hovering by the door. "Elise. Get Lucian. Tell him I don't care what he's doing." "Yes, sir." She vanished up the staircase. Mom shot me a look here we go and I gave her a small shrug back. I didn’t know what to expect. I had seen exactly one photo of Lucian Cross, at the wedding rehearsal, from across a room, and all I remembered was that he hadn’t smiled in it either. It took almost five full minutes. Long enough that Damian had refilled his glass and Mom had started fidgeting with her ring. Long enough that I heard it before I saw it footsteps on the stairs, unhurried, deliberate, like whoever was making them wanted you to know they weren’t in a rush. Then he came around the curve of the staircase, and the room actually seemed to get quieter. He was tall taller than his father wearing a black tank that showed off ink climbing up one arm, a wolf's snarling face worked into the shoulder. His blond hair was pushed back like he hadn’t bothered to fix it, as if he hadn’t bothered with anything except being made to come downstairs. His eyes found me for exactly one second. They cataloged me and moved on like I wasn’t worth a second look. He didn’t say a word until he reached the bottom step. "You called." Not hey. Not sorry, I was in the middle of something. Just a flat statement aimed at his father, delivered like a formality he was already bored of. "I did." Damian's jaw tightened, but his voice stayed level, the voice of a man performing patience for an audience. "This is Clara. My wife. And this is Max, her son." Lucian's gaze slid to my mother first. A short nod the bare minimum of manners. Then back to me. Nothing. No nod. No word. Just those pale eyes doing another slow pass, like he was deciding if I was worth the air it would take to greet me. "Lucian." His father's voice sharpened slightly. A warning wrapped in a name. "What." "Your brother." The word landed in the room and did absolutely nothing to Lucian's face. If anything, his jaw ticked, like the word itself was an insult. Damian pressed on anyway, addressing both of us now, the way you'd address two employees being merged into one department. "I know this is an adjustment for everyone. But starting today, you two are family. I expect you to treat each other with respect. Support each other. This is your home too, Max, and Lucian " his eyes cut hard toward his son " I expect you to make him feel that way." Silence. I decided to break it because someone had to, and clearly it wasn't going to be him. I stepped forward and held out my hand. "Hi. I know this is a lot, all at once. I'd like it if we could get along." He looked down at my hand like I’d offered him something used. Three seconds passed. Four. Long enough that I felt heat rise in the back of my neck, long enough that I saw my mother's smile falter at the edges, long enough that even Damian pressed his lips into a thin line. Lucian didn’t take it. He just looked past my hand, straight at me, and said, in a voice with no temperature at all: "We're not going to be anything." Then he turned and went back up the stairs. I let my hand drop and kept my face still. I’d faced worse than this a lot worse and I wasn’t about to let a stranger in a nice house see it hit. "Lucian." Damian's voice followed him up, tighter now, closer to a warning than a request. "Lucian." He didn’t stop. Didn’t even slow down. Just lifted one hand over his shoulder, something between a wave and a dismissal, and kept climbing until he vanished around the curve of the staircase like none of us had been standing there at all. Damian exhaled through his nose, rubbed his temple, and forced the smile back onto his face like flipping a switch. "He'll come around. Elise show them to their rooms." The room Elise led me to was at the end of the third-floor hallway. When she opened the door, I stopped in the frame for a moment, just looking. The bed alone was bigger than my entire bedroom back home. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over the back gardens, and there was a desk already set up, like someone had known a student was coming. "This is yours," Elise said. Then she nodded to the door directly beside mine, close enough that the two doors nearly touched. "And that's Master Lucian's." I glanced at the shared wall between the rooms. It didn't look thick. "You should get settled," she said, setting down my last bag. "Dinner is at seven." She left. I sat on the edge of the bed and let myself have thirty seconds just to breathe it in the room, the house, the fact that my mother finally, finally didn’t have to work two jobs to keep a roof over us. That mattered more to me than a stepbrother who couldn’t be bothered to shake my hand. I told myself it didn’t matter. That I didn’t need him to like me. I was in the middle of unzipping my bag when I heard it his door opening on the other side of that thin wall. Footsteps. Then his voice, low, clearly on the phone with someone, clear enough that I caught every word without even trying. "...don't care what my father wants. He's not staying." A pause. Then, quieter and colder: "I give him a week before he runs back to whatever hole he came from." I froze with my hand still on the zipper. He wasn’t even trying to keep his voice down.