TRAPPED WITH MY STEP BROTHERS

Chapter 11

Ladina

"We should just burn it," Gabriel said. His voice was full of anger. "We should burn the whole house. The walls, the floor, everything inside it."

"And then where do we sleep?" Oliver asked. He did not even look up from the tin can of food he was opening.

"Do we sleep outside in the freezing snow?"

It was eight thirty in the morning, and nobody had touched their coffee yet. The piece of paper was on the kitchen counter. We all stared at it like it was a dangerous snake that might bite us.

Tonight, leave the study door open. It was just a few short words. But I had read those words so many times that they did not even look like real words anymore. They just looked like a terrible promise.

"They just want to get a reaction out of us," Oliver said calmly. "That is all this game is about. They want to see what we will do."

"Then I will show them exactly what I will do," Gabriel yelled. He slammed his fist down on the marble counter. He hit it so hard that the metal cans jumped and rattled. "Someone watched us, Oliver! Someone watched all of us. And they did it inside a room that you promised was completely empty and safe."

The kitchen became very, very quiet. Oliver slowly put down the metal can opener. "I know what I promised," he said softly. "I know what I searched."

"Please, stop it," I said. My voice broke, and both men turned to look at me. "You said it yourself, Oliver. Whoever is watching us wants us to fight. They want us to tear each other apart."

Gabriel breathed out loudly. His chest moved up and down. Oliver rubbed his tired eyes with the palms of his hands. For the very first time since I had met him, Oliver actually looked his real age. He was only twenty-three years old, and not a single day older.

"We are not going to obey their rules, and we are not going to explode at each other," Oliver said quietly. "We are going to search that room one more time. Then, we are going to lock it shut. We will wait and see what they do when the door stays closed."

So, we searched the small study for two whole hours.

We did not just look around; we tore the room apart. Gabriel pulled up the rug and checked every single wooden board underneath it. Oliver used his knuckles to tap on every single stone in the wall, listening closely like a doctor trying to hear a heartbeat. We looked up at the ceiling. All we found was some dust, one dead moth, and a skiing magazine that was printed before I was even born. We found absolutely nothing else.

When we were finally done, Gabriel pulled the door shut. He turned the little brass lock until it clicked. Then, he shoved the key deep into the pocket of his jeans.

"If that door opens tonight," Gabriel said, looking right at us, "I will definitely know about it."

The snow outside did not stop falling. By lunchtime, the lower windows were completely buried under the snow. By three o'clock in the afternoon, the world outside looked like a solid white wall.

The house had become so quiet that I could hear the kitchen stove ticking from two rooms away.

Oliver sat at the kitchen counter with his sketchbook. He was drawing a picture of the window frame. He drew the exact same window over and over again, keeping his pencil steady. Gabriel spent his time carrying wood from the back room, what he intended to do with the wood. I don't know. He walked up and down the hallway, over and over, like a man trying to make his own legs too tired to work.

"What are you drawing?" I asked Oliver, wanting to break the terrible silence.

"The window," he replied softly.

"You already drew that same window an hour ago," I pointed out.

"I know I did." He turned his sketchbook page so I could see it. It was the same window and the same frame, just shaded a little bit darker this time. "It is the only thing in this whole house that actually stays exactly where I put it."

Lunch was just one small tin of peaches, split three ways. Oliver slid his half over to my plate without saying a single word. Nobody talked about the locked study. That meant we were all thinking about it constantly.

And as for me? I tried to read a book. I read the exact same paragraph of a cookbook six times in a row, but my brain could not understand the words.

Here is what I finally noticed about myself that afternoon. When nobody was touching me, my mind would run in a fast, scary circle. I thought about the typed note. I thought about the video of us. I thought about the hidden camera lens inside the air vent. I imagined whoever was out there, eating a warm dinner somewhere safe, laughing and watching me cry.

But then, Oliver would walk past me and gently rest two fingers on my shoulder. Or Gabriel would sit down and knock his knee gently against my knee.

Whenever they did that, the scary circle in my head stopped spinning. It only stopped for a few seconds, like someone had pulled the plug on a loud machine, but it was enough.

I started to wait for those quiet seconds. I started to plan my entire day around getting them to touch me.

By late afternoon, I found Gabriel in the back mudroom. He was stacking logs against the wall. Snow had blown in under the bottom of the door and was melting on his shoulders, so he was trying to fix it. He did not turn around when I walked in.

"Go back and sit by the fire," he ordered me. "You are cold."

"You are cold, too," I said.

"I am fine."

"Gabriel, your hands are turning blue."

He finally stopped working and looked at me. I reached out, took both of his hands, and held them tightly between mine. His skin felt like freezing cold metal. I rubbed his hands slowly to warm them up. I watched his throat move sharply when he swallowed.

"Dina," his voice dropped very low. "What are you doing?"

"I am warming you up," I said softly.

"That is not what this is," he replied.

He was right. I stood up on my toes and kissed him anyway. I kissed him hard, almost like I was angry. He made a rough, deep sound against my mouth and wrapped both of his strong arms around me, pulling me in close. For ten seconds, maybe twenty seconds, the bad thoughts vanished. There was no scary note. There was no hidden camera. There was no stranger watching us.

There was only the intense heat of his body, the rough feeling of his jaw against my skin, and the hard wooden logs pressing onto my back. It was the beautiful thoughts that I had been chasing all day long.

Suddenly, he broke the kiss and pulled away. He was breathing very fast as he held my face in his hands.

"You are shaking," he whispered.

"I am just cold," I said.

"You are lying to me." His thumb brushed softly under my eye. "Talk to me, Dina."

"I do not want to talk." I reached out to pull him back to me. "Please, Gabriel. Just do not stop touching me."

He caught my wrists gently, just like he had the night before when I told them to wait. He held my hands still.

"Tell me what this is actually about," he said softly. "Tell me you want me, and I will carry you upstairs right now."

I opened my mouth to speak, but no words came out. I could not lie to him.

A wooden floorboard creaked loudly behind us. Oliver was standing in the doorway with the bright lantern hanging at his side. I do not know how long he had been standing there watching us. He was not angry, and somehow, that felt so much worse. He looked at me the exact same way he looked at one of his drawings when he made a bad mistake.

"Dinner is ready," Oliver said calmly.

Then, he spoke so softly that only I could hear his next words: "You looked at him like he was a door you were trying to escape through."

I did not ask Oliver what he meant by that. I was too afraid, because I already knew he was right.

Nobody talked much during dinner. Afterward, we made our beds in the large living room. We built three small nests on the floor right next to the fireplace.

Gabriel used the wood he got to make a fire. We had to sleep there because the living room fire was the only source of warmth left in the freezing house.

Oliver fell asleep first. One of his arms was draped carefully over his open sketchbook. Gabriel laid flat on his back, staring up at the dark ceiling with his eyes wide open. His fist was closed tight around the brass key to the study.

Around midnight, his breathing finally slowed down as he fell asleep.

I lay right on my own nest and forced myself to think in simple, honest words. I did want them. That part was completely true. But I also desperately wanted the way they made the scary noises in my head stop. I wanted to feel safe, and I could no longer tell the difference between wanting them and wanting to hide in them.

That thought scared me even more than the stranger's note did.

Then, I heard a sound.

It was underneath the popping sounds of the hot fire. It was so small and quiet that I thought I had just imagined it.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

It was steady and very patient, sounding exactly like a heartbeat trapped inside the walls of the house.

I looked at Gabriel's hand. His fist was still closed completely tight around the brass key. I checked it twice just to be absolutely sure. The key was safe.

I followed the ticking noise. It led me down the freezing, dark hallway. It led me right past the kitchen. I knew exactly where the sound was going before I even reached the end of the hall.

The door to the study was wide open.

A wave of warm air rolled out of the room and washed over my bare feet. It smelled of fresh woodsmoke. I looked inside. The small stove, which Gabriel had left completely empty, was now burning with a low, bright orange fire.

I know now that I should have run back and woken them up immediately.

But I stood there and watched Gabriel locking that door with my own two eyes. The only key to the lock had not left his pocket while he slept. But somehow, somebody had walked into that locked room anyway. Somebody had built a warm fire. And somebody had taken the pieces of the broken clock and put them all back together while we were sleeping just down the hall. There, sitting quietly on the wooden shelf, right where Oliver had left it in broken pieces, the old clock was completely whole again.

And it was ticking.