In My Obsessive Biker Stepbrothers’ Embrace

STEP-FREAKING-SIBLINGS??!

Alyssa's POV

I'd left the private lounge with nothing but the outfit on my back and a scrap of paper folded into my palm like it might disintegrate if I loosened my grip. No purse. No shoes, technically, since I'd carried my heels the whole cab ride home while Mom's voice cracked through the speaker about traffic and timing and did you even remember what today was, Alyssa.

I had not. Not really. Not until I was standing in the wreckage of my old bedroom two hours later, shoving clothes into boxes with the hot stranger’s number still creased into the pocket of my jeans, and my mother pacing behind me listing everything the Valeharts were going to think of us if we were late to move into their house.

Now, three days later, I was unpacking the last of those boxes in a bedroom twice the size of my old one, in a house that didn't so much have hallways as it had wings.

"Alyssa!" Mom's voice carried up the staircase, muffled through my half-open door. "Dinner! Come down before it gets cold!"

I checked myself in the mirror—hair still slightly damp, sweater doing nothing to hide how out of place I felt in a house with a chandelier bigger than my old apartment's kitchen—and went down.

The dining room alone could've swallowed my entire childhood home. Mom was already seated, glowing in a way I hadn't seen in years, and at the head of the table sat him.

My stepfather. Alpha of the Valehart Pack.

"Alyssa." He rose halfway when I entered, which felt absurd given the size of him, given the low, gravelly authority in his voice that I imagined could level a room without him raising it at all. "Come, sit. I hope the room's to your liking."

"It's—yeah. It's great. Thank you." I slid into the chair across from Mom, still adjusting to how warm he was, how easily he smiled at her, at me.

I'd expected cold. Powerful men who ran packs the size of small towns weren't supposed to pull out chairs and ask if the water pressure upstairs was working fine.

We'd barely started on the soup when the sound hit—engines, more than one, deep and rumbling, growing louder until the windows practically buzzed with it.

I set my spoon down. "What is that?"

Mom and the Alpha exchanged a look I couldn't read. "My sons," he said simply, like that explained the small earthquake currently happening in the driveway. "They're joining us tonight."

My stomach dropped for no reason I could name yet.

Voices in the front hall. Boots. Low laughter, unhurried, like whoever it belonged to had never once in his life needed to rush anywhere. I kept my eyes on my soup, telling myself it was nothing, that the dread pooling low in my stomach was just nerves about the new house, the new family, the new everything.

Then the dining room doors swung open, and it wasn't nothing at all.

Him. Dark hair, that same unbothered stillness, the same eyes that had watched me fall apart on his lap three nights ago. And behind him—the two with the ink-covered forearms, the ones I'd kissed like my life depended on it in front of Blake.

The room tilted. My hand found the edge of the table and gripped it.

I told myself to breathe. In. Out. Just three men walking into a dining room. Just my new stepbrothers, apparently, here to eat dinner like this was any ordinary Tuesday and not the exact moment my entire carefully-buried night at Velvet Groove decided to walk in wearing leather jackets.

I kept my eyes down, focused very hard on the pattern of the soup bowl, on not making a single sound, on being anywhere but here.

"Ah—there they are." The Alpha rose, warmth in his voice. "Boys, come meet Alyssa."

I forced myself to look up. Forced my face into something that resembled calm.

His gaze landed on me first and held a beat too long—something flickering behind that maddening composure of his, gone almost before I could name it. Recognition. Then nothing at all. He recovered faster than I did, inclining his head toward my mother with an ease that made my chest ache with how unfair it was that he got to be unbothered while I sat there dying by inches.

"Ma'am." Warm, easy, like he hadn't had three fingers inside me the last time I'd seen his face. "Phil." He dropped into the seat directly across from me. Directly across from me, like the universe had a sense of humor I didn't appreciate.

Phil, I made a mental note of his name, the name of the stranger who’d given me the most shattering climax even Blake never did, turning out to be my stepbrother.

The f*****g irony.

"Damien," said the one with ink climbing past his collar, and I caught it then—just a flicker, the corner of his mouth twitching like he was fighting a smirk and mostly winning, gone the second he glanced toward the Alpha.

"Aaron," said the third, settling into the last open seat without so much as a glance my way that lingered too long.

Damien. Aaron. How could the three decisions I’d finally decided to make turn out to be the most embarrassing, infuriating ones to bite me in the ass?!

Mom beamed at all of us like nothing in the world was strange about this. "Alyssa, these are your new brothers."

Brothers. The word landed strange in my mouth, stranger still, watching Phil reach for the bread basket like our past suddenly didn’t matter.

Nobody said anything else.

That was almost worse—the three of them settling into easy, ordinary conversation with the Alpha about the drive over, about someone who apparently owed Aaron money, while I sat frozen, waiting for the other shoe to drop, for one of them to say something that would end my life right there over the soup course.

It never came. If anything, the silence around what had actually happened between us felt heavier than if they'd just said it out loud.

"So," Mom said eventually, glancing between me and the three of them with poorly concealed curiosity, "how do you all already know each other?"

My pulse spiked. I got there before anyone else could.

"Oh—it's silly, honestly." I forced a small, embarrassed laugh, waving a hand like it was nothing. "Blake and I had an issue a few nights ago, and I might've done something dramatic to get back at him. Talked to a couple of guys who happened to be there." I shrugged, aiming for breezy and landing somewhere closer to mortified. "Small world that it was them."

"Alyssa." Mom pressed a hand to her chest, equal parts scandalized and delighted. "You didn't tell me that part."

"There wasn't a part worth telling." I reached for my water glass, desperate for something to do with my hands.

Across the table, Phil said nothing, but I felt his attention on me like a physical thing, patient and unreadable, like he was cataloguing every word I chose not to say.

"Well," the Alpha said warmly, oblivious to the current running under his table, "small world indeed. Glad the ice is already broken, then."

Dinner rolled on after that, easier than I expected—Damien asking me actual questions, where I'd gone to school, whether I liked the city; Aaron arguing with the Alpha about some upcoming pack matter I only half understood. Ordinary. Almost kind. I let myself exhale for the first time since the doors had opened.

It was Phil, eventually, quiet and dry, who nearly undid me.

"You're awfully quiet, little sister." Just that. No smirk, no weight behind it that anyone else at the table could hear. But his eyes told a different story entirely, and I felt the words land somewhere inconvenient.

I stood before I could think better of it.

"Excuse me," I mumbled. "Bathroom."

I didn't stop at the bathroom. I kept walking, past it, down a corridor lined with portraits of Valeharts I didn't recognize, until the noise of the dining room faded into nothing and I could finally breathe again.

My fingers found the folded paper still tucked in my jeans pocket, soft now from three days of handling. I smoothed it open under the hall light.

+1 (909) 555-0145. Call me if you need me to play along again, girlfriend.

I don't know what possessed me. Maybe the same reckless thing that had possessed me at Velvet Groove. I pulled out my phone and dialed the number with shaking fingers, half expecting it to be fake, half hoping it was.

A phone buzzed behind me.

I turned, heart in my throat, and there he was—leaning against the wall at the end of the corridor like he'd been waiting there the whole time, one shoulder against the wallpaper, a black button-down rolled at the sleeves, looking nothing like a biker and every bit as dangerous.

"Need me to play along again," Phil said, voice dropping into that same low, unbothered drawl, phone lighting up in his hand with my name on the screen, "girlfriend?"