Bound to My Step-brother

Chapter Seven

Roseline's POV

I sat in the hostel's visitor lounge with my hands wrapped around a coffee I had no intention of drinking, and the thought that kept circling back, over and over, no matter how hard I tried to outrun it, was this:

~I have been a bad mother.~

Not cruel. Never cruel. But small in the ways that mattered, distracted by the wrong things at the wrong times, by Victor, by the wedding, by the careful architecture of a new life I'd been so desperate to build that I hadn't noticed how much of my daughter I'd left standing in the doorway of it.

She must have waited for me to turn around. I had spent eighteen months worrying about seating arrangements and community gatherings and whether Victor's friends approved of me, and somewhere in all of that worrying, my daughter had been quietly falling apart. And worst of all, she was hunted, terrified, chased by things with no pulse and mercy.

I’d been too busy playing wife to notice how alone she truly was.

Now she was gone. Not hiding, not sulking in her room the way teenagers do. Gone, vanished from the middle of a gathering meant to protect her, and I didn't even know which direction to point my fear.

So many evils had already found her before this one. The Undead in her hostel room, fire crawling up the walls while she screamed for help. If Ryker hadn’t rescued her, she’d have gone.

Now this hunters.

Too many evils. Too coordinated to be coincidence, too precise to be bad luck. Someone wanted my daughter dead, and they kept trying no matter how many times the first attempt failed.

I found Nadia and Talia in the hostel kitchen an hour later, both of them hollow-eyed, Talia gripping a mug of tea she clearly wasn't drinking either. I sat down across from them, folded my hands on the table to keep them from shaking, and asked the only question I could think to ask that might actually lead somewhere.

"Has Lila had any conflicts recently? Arguments. Fights. Anyone who might want to see her hurt?"

Talia and Nadia exchanged a look before either of them answered, and something about the hesitation made my stomach drop before a word was even said.

"There's a girl in the campus," Nadia said carefully. "Cassandra. She and Lila had a fight few weeks back, over a comment Cassandra made about the mansion, about Lila not really belonging in the Blackthorn family or being a wolf. It got physical. Lila hit her. Hard enough that Cassandra had to see the campus nurse.”

She paused for a moment staring at her feet.

"Bad enough that Cassandra's been telling anyone who'll listen that Lila's dangerous," Talia added quietly. "That there's something wrong with her. We didn't think much of it, half the school already whispers things like that about her."

I knew, logically, that a hallway shoving match over a cruel comment didn't connect to silver arrows and coordinated hunters and a corpse walking with fire in its hands. And yet I found myself turning it over anyway, some desperate, grief-starved part of my mind reaching for anything solid enough to hold onto.

I could visit Cassandra's parents, I thought. Ask them plainly. See their faces when I say the word "kidn*pped" and watch whether guilt moves across them.

But even as the thought formed, I recognized how absurd it was. What kind of parents, upon hearing their daughter had been embarrassed in a hallway fight, responded by hiring hunters and silver arrows against the girl who'd humiliated her?

People didn't escalate a bruised ego into an a*******n. Whatever had taken my daughter from that gathering wasn't born out of a schoolyard grudge. It was born out of something older, something with far more at stake than one girl's pride.

I thanked them both anyway, told Nadia gently that none of it was anyone's fault, and left the kitchen with the same hollow feeling I'd walked in with, except heavier now, because I'd used up one thread of hope and found nothing at the end of it.

Walking back through the quiet hallway, another thought arrived, and once it did, I couldn't make it leave.

Victor had never wanted this bond. Not once, not for a single day since the fire had snapped between Lila and Ryker at that gathering. He'd called it forbidden, a liability, a stain on a reputation he'd spent decades polishing. He'd tried, more than once, to separate them, the guest wing, the curfews, the secret courtship arrangement with the Whitlocks he'd arranged behind our backs like Ryker was a piece on a board to be repositioned.

I’d watched something in Victor's composure tighten just a little further, like a man running out of patience for a problem that wouldn't solve itself the way he wanted.

I gripped the steering wheel with shaking hands as I drove away from Lila’s friend’s hostel. Her roommate’s worried face haunted me. My daughter was gone. kidn*pped.

I hated the bond. I hated every twisted thread of it. Ryker was my husband, Victor’s son, and Lila’s half-brother. The Moon Goddess had bound them in that forbidden way, brother and sister drawn together by a cruel mate pull they never asked for.

Ever since the bond snapped, everything fell apart.

Tears streamed down my face, blurring the road ahead. My chest ached with a mother’s unbearable pain, a hollow burning that made every breath hurt.

~Where are you, my baby? ~What are they doing to you right now? Are you scared, hurt, fighting to get back to me?~

I couldn’t let myself think she might be dead. She had to be alive. She had to.

“Damn you, Moon Goddess,” I choked out, voice raw with fury and grief. “You forced this abomination on them and now you punish our innocent daughter for it. I hate you.”

The empty road stretched ahead, mocking my broken heart all the way home.

Could Victor have done this? Could the man I had married, the man I had, God help me, once believed cared for me, have orchestrated something this monstrous, simply to erase an embarrassment from his household before it cost him the standing he valued more than either of us?