CLAIMED BY MY ALPHA STEPBROTHER AND STEPFATHER: MC EROTICA

CHAPTER 23 - PREDATOR

IVY’S POV

Something is wrong with Knox.

He’s been off all day – snapping at a guy who bumped his shoulder in the hallway hard enough that I saw the guy flinch backward like he’d been shoved even though Knox hadn’t moved his hands, and his eyes have been doing that gold-flicker thing that I’ve been filing under “things I’ll deal with later” except later is running out of runway because the flickering has gotten worse since this morning.

In our shared lecture he sat behind me and I could feel the heat pouring off him through the back of my chair like sitting in front of a furnace, and when the professor called on him he didn’t answer because he was gripping the edge of the desk so hard that his knuckles had gone white and the wood was creaking under his fingers.

He skipped his afternoon classes.

His motorcycle was still in the parking lot when I got home from The Grind House, which meant he was here somewhere, and my mom mentioned on her way out to dinner with Dominic that Knox had said he wasn’t feeling well, and she’d left soup on the stove and could I check on him later, and the concern in her voice was so genuine and maternal that I wanted to scream because the last time she asked me to check on her boyfriend’s son I ended up on my knees on my bedroom carpet and I don’t think that’s the kind of checking she had in mind.

It’s 10 PM and the apartment is empty – just me and whatever is happening in Knox’s room, which based on the sounds coming through his door is either a renovation project or a breakdown.

I can hear things breaking. Not crashing, not falling – BREAKING, the splintering sound of wood giving way under force that shouldn’t be possible from a twenty-one-year-old man in a bedroom, and underneath the breaking is a sound that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up because it’s guttural and low and it doesn’t stop for breath.

I stand outside his door with my hand on the knob and every survival instinct I possess is telling me to walk away, to go to my room and lock the door and put headphones in and pretend this isn’t happening, and my hand turns the knob because apparently I’m the kind of person who opens doors that should stay closed, which tracks because I’ve been that person since the first night he walked into my room with his belt unbuckling.

Knox is on the floor.

Shirtless, soaked in sweat, and something about his body is WRONG in a way that my brain tries to reject before my eyes finish processing it. The muscles under his skin are moving – MOVING, shifting and rippling like something underneath is trying to rearrange itself, and his hands are pressed flat against the hardwood and his fingers are tipped with something that isn’t fingernails. They’re longer and curved and dark and they’ve gouged lines into the floor like trenches, and the word my brain supplies is CLAWS even though that word doesn’t belong in a sentence about a human being.

He looks up at me and his eyes are fully gold – not the flicker I’ve been catching for weeks, not the brief flash that I could blink away and pretend I imagined. Full, solid, burning gold that catches the light from his bedside lamp and reflects it back at me like an animal on a highway, and his pupils are wrong, narrowed into slits that track my movement with a precision that doesn’t belong on a human face.

His voice comes out like it’s being dragged across gravel. “Get out.”

I should listen to him.

Every rational cell in my body is screaming at me to listen to him because the man on the floor is not entirely the man I’ve been sleeping with – something else is co-piloting, something that makes his body temperature spike so high I can feel the heat from the doorway and makes his muscles shift under his skin like tectonic plates and makes his HANDS grow claws that have ruined the hardwood and his furniture and I should be terrified.

I am terrified. My heart is slamming against my ribs, and my palms are sweating and every nerve ending I have is firing at maximum because the predator part of my brain – the ancient part that knows what a predator looks like and screams RUN – is fully activated and absolutely correct in its assessment.

But there’s another signal underneath the fear. A frequency that runs parallel to the terror and is just as strong, because my body has spent the last two weeks being trained to respond to Knox Voss in states of intensity, and this – whatever this is, this sweating, shuddering, gold-eyed thing happening on his bedroom floor – is the most intense he’s ever been, and my wiring can’t separate dangerous from arousing anymore because he made them the same thing.

I step inside and close the door behind me.

He lunges.

The speed of it is inhuman – one second he’s on the floor and the next he’s vertical and his body slams into mine and my back hits the wall hard enough to knock the air out of my lungs and his hands are on either side of my head with those clawed fingers digging into the plaster and his face is inches from mine and his eyes are BLAZING gold and his chest is heaving against mine and I can feel every shifted muscle pressing against me through my shirt and his body heat is so extreme that my skin prickles everywhere we’re touching.

His mouth opens and his canines are longer than they should be – not subtle, not ambiguous, FANGS, white and sharp and hovering an inch from the pulse hammering in my throat – and a sound is pouring out of his chest that vibrates through the wall behind me and into my spine, that same growl I heard through the drywall and through Dominic’s office door except a thousand times louder because his mouth is right there and his fangs are right there and he is shaking with the effort of not closing the distance between his teeth and my skin.

I should scream. I should shove him away and run and call my mom and never come back to this apartment. He is pinning me to a wall with claws and fangs and golden eyes and a sound coming out of his chest that belongs to an animal, and my underwear is soaked and my n*****s are hard and my body is arching toward him instead of away because I am fundamentally broken in a way that no amount of therapy will ever repair.

I reach up and put my hands on either side of his face – his jaw is burning hot under my palms and the bones feel different, sharper, like the structure of his skull is shifting beneath the skin – and I pull him closer instead of pushing him away, and his fangs graze my throat and the vibration of his growl travels through my collarbone into my chest and settles next to my heartbeat.

“Show me,” I say.