Claim Me, Alpha StepBrothers

You Better Stay Away From Me

~Olive~

“Olive.” He says my name like he’s tasting it.

“Welcome to Hayes House.”

“Thanks.” I make my voice flat. I make my voice bored. The trick to dealing with boys like this is the trick my father taught me when I was nine and a fourth-grader named Tommy Aldrich was pulling my hair on the bus: don’t react, baby. You react, you feed it. You go cold, it starves. “Looking forward to it.”

His mouth does a thing.
His mouth does a small thing — the corner of it, just the corner, lifts about two millimeters — and I realize, with the kind of horror normally reserved for waking up in a hospital, that I have already lost the first round.


He liked that.
He liked that I went cold.
Oh, f**k me.

“This is my brother.” Crew tilts his head, lazy, toward the staircase. “He’s a little slow today.”

I look up.
Cassius Hayes has not moved.

He is still standing on the fourth step from the top, one hand on the banister, and he is looking at me the way men look at car accidents. He is looking at me the way I imagine Pompeii looked at the volcano.

He is looking at me like I have just walked into his house with a loaded gun in my mouth and asked him to pull the trigger.

He is also — and this is the worst part, this is the part that’s going to keep me up tonight, this is the part I am going to have to sit on top of for the next four months like a woman sitting on a closed suitcase that won’t zip — he is beautiful.

Cassius Hayes is unfairly beautiful.
He is the kind of beautiful that should be illegal in seventeen states. His cheekbones you could cut a man on, a mouth too soft for the rest of his face, a jaw set so hard right now I can see the muscle ticking from across the foyer. He is taller than his brother by maybe an inch. He is broader. He is in a black button-down that is doing things across his chest that no fabric should be allowed to do without a permit.

He is also, currently, the color of a bedsheet.
He has not blinked.
He has not breathed.

I think — I’m not totally sure, but I think — Cassius Hayes is, at this exact moment, having a small private medical event on the staircase.
Good.
Good.

“Cas.” Richard, again, that warm fatherly voice. “Come say hello to Olive.”

Cas does not move.
“Cassius.”

He blinks. Once. Slow. Like a man waking up.
He comes down the stairs. By the time he reaches the foyer floor I have time to count seven separate things he is doing wrong with his body — the breathing, the jaw, the hand fisting at his side, the way his eyes will not, will not, leave my face — and I have time to think he didn’t know I was coming, Richard didn’t tell him, Richard didn’t tell either of them and Crew is faking the surprise but Cas isn’t.

Richard set this up.


Richard set this whole thing up.
I file that.
I file it next to the gold ring on his pinky and the flicker behind his eyes when he saw my face and the fact that my mother is currently looking at the four of us with the soft drowning gaze of a woman in love and seeing absolutely none of it.

Cas stops in front of me.
He is close enough that I can smell him. Cologne — something dark, expensive, a little bit smoky.

He opens his mouth.
He closes it.
He opens it again.

“Olive.”
Fuck.

I smile up at him.
I smile up at Cassius Hayes — six-foot-four, twenty years old, heir to the worst man in the country, beautiful, currently in the process of having what looks like a low-grade panic attack on his own foyer floor — and I say, in the sweetest voice I have ever produced in my entire life:

“Hi, Cassius. It’s so nice to finally meet you.”
His pupils blow out.
Both of them.


I watch it happen. I watch his eyes go from grey to black in the space of a breath and I think, with the small calm voice that lives at the back of my head and only speaks when I’m in real trouble:
Oh. Oh no. Oh, sweet baby Jesus, no.


Because Cassius Hayes is not just a boy whose father killed mine.

Cassius Hayes is not just an heir to a crime family I have spent six years promising my dead father I would burn down.

Cassius Hayes is a problem I did not budget for.
“Welcome.”

“To. Our home.”


It comes out in three pieces. Like he had to assemble it.


“Thanks.” I keep my smile sweet. I keep my voice sugar. I keep my hands at my sides because if I don’t keep them at my sides I am going to do something with them and I do not yet know what that something is. “I’m sure I’ll love it here.”

Behind him, Crew makes a small sound. A laugh, but quieter. The kind of laugh a man makes when he has just watched his brother walk into a wall.
Richard claps his hands.

“Wonderful! Wonderful. Diane, darling, the staff has prepared a small dinner — just the five of us, very intimate, I thought we could — Olive, do you like duck? My boy makes a spectacular duck — “

“Cas cooks?” The words are out of my mouth before I can stop them.
Cas’s eyes find mine again.

“He cooks,” Crew says behind him, helpful as a knife. “He’s full of surprises, our Cassius.”


“I look forward to it.” I do not look at Crew. I do not break Cas’s eyes. “Duck is my favorite.”

Duck is not my favorite. I have eaten duck twice in my entire life and both times I thought it tasted like a sad, expensive chicken.

But I have decided — somewhere in the last sixty seconds, somewhere in the gap between Hi sis and Olive, somewhere in the place inside me where my father’s voice still lives — that I am going to make Cassius Hayes cook for me.

I am going to make him cook for me and I am going to eat every bite and I am going to look him in the eye while I do it and I am going to enjoy myself.

“Excellent.” Richard turns to my mother. “Diane, darling, the staff has prepared a small dinner — just the five of us, very intimate, I thought we could — Olive, do you like duck? My boy makes a spectacular duck — “

Richard and my mother disappear up the staircase after a few more pleasantries.


I stand in the foyer of Hayes House between the two heirs of the man who killed my father and I wait until I can no longer hear my mother’s heels on the marble of the second floor.


I count to five.
Then I drop the smile.


I drop the smile and I look up at Cassius Hayes — up, because he has eight inches on me and the angle is genuinely irritating — and I say, in my real voice, in the voice my dead father gave me, in the voice I have been sharpening on a whetstone for three days straight:

“Listen to me very carefully, Cassius. And you, sis-boy.”


Crew chokes on something. I think it’s a laugh. I do not look.
“I do not want to be here. I do not want to live in this house. I do not want to call your father Dad. I do not want a tour. I do not want a duck dinner. I do not want either of you to look at me, speak to me, sit next to me, or breathe in my general direction for the next four months while my mother enjoys what is, for her, the first happy autumn she’s had in twelve years.”


Cas’s jaw moves.
He doesn’t say anything. He just — moves. Like a man swallowing something that won’t go down.
“In exchange,” I continue, “I will not tell my mother about the bet you ran on me sophom — “
I stop.


I stop because — f**k. f**k, f**k, f**k, f**k. I have not been at Ashford yet. I have not been bet on yet. I am eighteen years old and the bet hasn’t happened yet, I am thinking of a thing that has not happened, I am talking about a future I have rehearsed so many times in my head that for one sliver of a second I forgot it isn’t real yet.


But here is the thing.
Here is the thing about being eighteen and crazy and good at talking.


I do not stutter.
I do not flinch.
I do not, do not, let either of them see the gap.
I close my mouth. I tilt my head. I let the silence sit there for one beat — one beat, because two beats is a tell and one beat is a power move — and then I smile, slow, and I finish the sentence in a completely different direction.


“—enth of October, when one of you tries something. And one of you will try something. I’m not stupid. I have eyes. I have a phone. I have spent the last seventy-two hours looking at every photo of the two of you the internet has ever taken, and I know exactly what kind of boys you are.”
Crew’s eyebrows go up.


“Oh?” he says, voice low and amused, stepping just a little closer so the scent of cigarettes and mint gum curls around me. “And what kind of boys are we, Olive?”

“You’re the kind of boys,” I say sweetly, “who think the word no is a foreign language.”

Crew laughs. He circles me slowly, not quite touching, but close enough that I feel the heat rolling off him. “Cute. Real cute. You come in here in that little red dress, talking like you’re the one holding all the cards, and you expect us to just… behave?” His eyes drag down my body, slow and deliberate, then back up to my face.

“Tell me, baby sister,” he murmurs, leaning in until his breath brushes the shell of my ear, “does that ice-queen voice get your p***y wet? Or do you need someone to melt it for you… make your p***y wet just by telling you all the filthy things we’re going to do to you in this house?”

What the f**k.