One Night With My Stepbrother, Forever His Obsession

The man I gave my body to last night was apologising to another woman for it. "Celeste, I'm sorry." Ronan's voice came through his bedroom door, low and rough. "I don't remember much. I don't remember... anything, really. That isn't an excuse." I stood frozen in the hallway with a laundry basket in my arms, the one I'd grabbed so I'd have a reason to walk past his door. My heart was banging so loudly I was sure they could hear it inside. "You don't need to be sorry," Celeste Marchetti said. Her voice was smooth and calm, a lawyer's voice. "We're adults, Ronan. And we were always going to end up here, weren't we?" A long silence. Then the creak of the bed, as if he'd sat up. "I'll do the right thing," he said. "I'll talk to my father today, and yours. We'll make it official." "Official," Celeste repeated softly, and I could hear her smiling. I walked away before I heard any more. I walked very carefully, the way I'd learned to walk in this house for six years, quiet on the edges of the carpet where the floor didn't squeak. Inside my chest, something was cracking like old paint. Last night had started with a box. Yesterday was my graduation day at Hollow Creek University. Nobody from my family came. I didn't expect them to; I'd planned to take the bus home with my books in a cardboard box. Then a black car stopped at the curb, every girl on the steps started whispering, and Ronan Ashcroft stepped out in a dark suit, the new Alpha of Blackridge Pack, the CEO on last month's magazine cover, the most wanted man in the city. He came for me. "Get in, June," he said, taking the box out of my arms. "You'll drop that." In the car, he handed me a small velvet box. Inside was a silver fountain pen with my name on it: Juniper Calloway. "For your first big restoration contract," he said, looking out the window like it didn't matter. "You'll sign it with that." "What if I never get a big contract?" "You will." He said it the way he said everything, like it was already true. I almost cried in his car. I didn't. I'd had six years of practice. Six years since my mother married his father and moved me into this cold glass mansion on the hill. Six years of being the poor girl with no wolf, the one the servants called the stray. Ronan's cousins called me Fat Juniper at school. Ronan said it too, once, in the cafeteria, while everyone laughed. The next day he broke the nose of a boy who repeated it. I never understood him. I only loved him, quietly, since I was sixteen, the way you love the sun; from very far away, knowing you'll burn if you get close. He called me his little sister. He meant it. When I got home yesterday, my mother came into my room with a gift. Marisol Ashcroft never gave me anything without a reason, so I just stared at it. It was a set of keys. "You're a grown woman now, sweetheart," she said, smiling her charity-gala smile. "Grown women don't live under their stepfather's roof. People talk. An unmated girl in the same house as an unmated Alpha... it looks bad for the family. It looks bad for me." "Of course," I said. "I understand. Thank you for the keys." She left lighter, like I'd taken a weight off her shoulders. I had one week left in this house. One week left near him. The party that night wasn't for me; I knew that. It was a masquerade ball full of pack leaders and cameras. I wore a plain black mask. Ronan danced with me for three minutes, and I let myself pretend for every second of them. Then he stumbled. His grey eyes were huge and black, his skin burned under my hands, and I knew at once: someone had drugged his drink. I got him upstairs before anyone saw the Alpha weak. At his door he caught my wrist. "Help me," he whispered. For one wild second I thought he meant me. "Bring me Celeste," he said. "Please. Find Celeste." I said yes. I walked ten steps down the hallway, and on the table by the window lay a white and gold mask shaped like a swan. Celeste's mask. She'd left it there to take a phone call outside. One week left. In a few months he'd be mated to a woman in a swan mask, and I'd be a face in a family photo that nobody looked at. Why can't it be me, just once? I put on the mask. I walked into his room and turned off every light until the dark was total. "Celeste?" he said. I didn't answer. His hand found mine in the dark. His thumb stopped on my fingertips, on the tiny burn scars from years of cleaning chemicals at the museum lab, and for one second I was sure he'd know. Then he pulled me closer. What happened next was slow and hungry and gentler than I ever dreamed. He held my face like I was something precious. He never said her name again. Near dawn, I slid out of his bed with shaking legs, found my dress on the floor, and put my hand on the door handle. Behind me, in the dark, he said my name. Not Celeste. Juniper. I froze. I didn't breathe. But he didn't move again; his breathing was slow and deep. He was asleep, talking in a dream. I'll never know if he was dreaming of me, or if some part of him knew. I ran. In the hallway I almost crashed into Mrs. Pruitt, the head housekeeper, carrying a pile of morning linen up the stairs. I pushed the swan mask flat under my dress and kept my head down. "Up early, aren't we?" she said, her small eyes moving over my bare feet. "Couldn't sleep," I whispered, and I didn't stop walking. I hid the mask under my mattress. One feather was missing from its left wing. Then I sat on the floor of my bathroom until the sun came up, telling myself it was enough. One night. One night was enough for a whole life. An hour later, Celeste came back up the stairs looking for her lost mask. She found Ronan alone in a wrecked bed, and a single torn white feather on the pillow. And she made a choice. Now I stood at the bottom of the stairs with my laundry basket, listening to the house wake up around me, and I told myself it was better this way. He'd never know. Nobody would ever know. Above me, a door opened. Ronan came out of his room in a black T-shirt and grey sweatpants, his black hair wet from the shower, the thin scar through his eyebrow pale against his tired face. He looked down the stairs, and his grey eyes found me. He stopped. For a long moment he didn't say anything. He just looked at me, the way he looked at a room before he walked into it, searching for the danger. Then he came down three steps, slowly, and stopped close enough that I could smell his soap. "June," he said quietly. "Where were you last night?"