CLAIMED BY MY ALPHA STEPBROTHER AND STEPFATHER: MC EROTICA

CHAPTER 35 - PHANTOM FEELINGS

Mara’s gold eyes are two feet from my face and the heat coming off her body is the same wrong-temperature heat that Knox runs at, which means she’s the same thing he is, which means the woman standing between me and the only exit is a werewolf who has just told me she could kill me faster than I could scream, and the worst part is that I believe her completely.

“You don’t know what you’ve walked into.” Her voice is low and controlled in a way that reminds me of Dominic, except where Dominic’s control feels like a dam holding something back, Mara’s control feels like a leash being held by someone who’s deciding whether to let go. “You think you’re special because he f***s you in lecture halls and marks you with his scent like you’re something worth keeping, but you are a HUMAN playing house in a world that eats humans for sport, and the only reason you’re still breathing is because his scent is fresh enough on your skin that killing you would mean declaring war on a Voss.”

She steps closer and I step back and my lower back hits the sink – the same sink Knox pushed me against twenty minutes ago – and the ceramic edge digs into my spine and there’s nowhere else to retreat to because this bathroom is six feet wide and she’s filling the space between me and the door with a presence that makes Knox’s predator energy feel like a house cat by comparison.

“He was MINE.” The word comes out of her like it was torn from somewhere deep, and for the first time I hear something underneath the threat that isn’t anger – it’s pain, raw, bleeding, real enough that my fear trips over itself and lands somewhere adjacent to empathy. “The bonding ritual was completed. The first stage. Do you know what that means?”

I don’t know what that means. I don’t know anything about bonding rituals or wolf customs or whatever political structure exists in the world I’ve been dragged into by a man who decided I was his before I knew his species.

“It means I can FEEL him.” Mara’s voice cracks on the word and her hands are shaking at her sides and I notice that her fingernails are longer than they were a second ago, darker, curving into points that catch the bathroom light. “Every time he touches you, I feel the ghost of it. Every time his hands are on your body, my body registers a phantom that I can’t turn off. When he was inside you in this bathroom twenty minutes ago, I was standing at the bar and I felt it – this sick, hollow echo of pleasure that belongs to me being given to someone else, and I’ve been feeling it for WEEKS, every night, every time he comes to your room at whatever godforsaken hour he’s decided to ruin you, I feel the shadow of it and it’s DESTROYING me.”

Her claws are fully extended now – dark and long enough that they’d open my throat in a single swipe – and her eyes are blazing gold and the heat pouring off her has intensified to the point where I can feel it against my face like standing too close to a fire.

I am trapped between a sink and a she-wolf who has just told me that she’s been involuntarily experiencing the ghost of every s****l encounter I’ve had with Knox since this started, and the horror of that settles into me alongside the fear.

She’s not just jealous. She’s being tortured. Every time Knox puts his hands on me, her body registers a phantom version of it – pleasure she didn’t consent to feeling, intimacy she didn’t ask to witness, a bond that’s being activated by a connection that was supposed to be hers.

Mara has been living inside the echo of my s*x life for weeks and the agony of it is written across her face so clearly that I almost reach for her before I remember that her fingers are currently tipped with weapons that could fillet me like a fish.

“He’ll get bored,” she says, and the cruelty in the words is undercut by how desperately she needs them to be true. “He always moves on. He’ll use your body until the novelty wears off and then he’ll come back to the bond he’s supposed to honor, and you’ll be left with nothing except the memory of how it felt to be wanted by something that was never yours.”

I should be quiet. I should nod and agree and wait for her to unlock the door and let me leave because she is faster than me and stronger than me and her claws are out and I am a nineteen-year-old human in a bar bathroom with no weapons and no wolf and no business being in this conversation at all.

“He came to me.”

The words leave my mouth before my brain approves them, and Mara goes still in a way that’s more frightening than the claws because stillness in a predator means the calculation has shifted.

“He walked into my bedroom and he chose me,” I say, and my voice is shaking but the words aren’t, and something hot and reckless is building in my chest that feels like the first real thing I’ve felt since this conversation started. “I didn’t know about you. I didn’t know about any of this. But he didn’t come to my room because he was bored of you – he came because his wolf chose me, and I don’t know enough about your world to know if that matters, but based on the way he says it, it matters a lot.”

Mara’s clawed hand shoots forward and wraps around my throat – not squeezing, holding, the way Knox holds my throat except that her fingers are tipped with points that press into the skin beneath my jaw hard enough that I can feel the sharpness without the cut.

“His wolf,” she repeats, and her voice is quiet now in a way that’s worse than shouting. “His wolf chose a human girl who doesn’t even know what she is to him. A girl who lets him f**k her in bathrooms and lecture halls like a toy and thinks that makes her special.”

Her claws press harder. I feel a sting – a single point of contact where the tip has broken skin – and a warm trickle of blood runs down my neck toward my collarbone, and Mara watches it travel with gold eyes that track the drop the way Knox’s eyes track my pulse.

She lets go. Steps back. Her claws retract into her fingers and her eyes fade from gold to dark brown and she smooths her hair with hands that are still shaking and the composure she reassembles over the next five seconds is so complete that if I hadn’t just felt her claws on my throat I’d think I imagined the entire encounter.

She unlocks the bathroom door and pauses with her hand on the handle.

“Next time he puts his hands on you,” she says without turning around, “remember that I’m feeling every second of it. And one day I’m going to stop being patient about that.”

She walks out. The door swings shut behind her.

I stand at the sink with blood running down my neck and my hands gripping the porcelain and my legs shaking badly enough that the only reason I’m upright is because falling would require letting go, and I look at my reflection in the cracked mirror and the girl looking back at me is someone I’ve never met before.

She didn’t run.