Owned by my step uncles

Chapter three

I came down to breakfast because staying in the new room any longer felt like hiding.

The main-wing suite they’d moved me into last night still smelled like fresh sheets and someone else’s decisions. It had a wider bed closer to their doors. The windows faced the ocean instead of the east gardens, and every time the waves hit the rocks I remembered the sound of that door closing in the unused wing. Neither of them had explained it. They’d checked the security feeds, walked the halls, and come back with the same tight silence. Nothing on the cameras, nothing out of place. Just the three of us left listening to a house that suddenly had too many empty rooms.

The grand dining room felt even larger than usual. It had a long table, and high-backed chairs. Morning light pouring through the tall windows and landing in pale stripes across the polished wood. Someone on staff had already set places for three. A low arrangement of white flowers that looked too perfect to touch.

Jarrah was already seated at the head of the table.

He looked up when I walked in and didn’t look away. Dark eyes and unblinking. The kind of stare that made the air feel thinner. He was dressed simply with a black sweater and sleeves pushed to the forearms, but everything about him still took up space. He had broad shoulders, that permanent intensity that never quite left his face. I felt it land on me and stayed.

My skin went warm under it.

I pulled out the chair two seats down from him because sitting closer felt dangerous and sitting farther felt like running. The chair scraped softly against the floor as I sat, folded my hands in my lap so he wouldn’t see them fidget.

Reeve came in a minute later, hair still damp from a shower, carrying the faint scent of whatever soap he used. He took the seat across from me, easy as anything, and reached for the coffee pot like this was any other morning.

It wasn’t.

“How was your sleep?” Reeve asked. His voice was lighter than his brother’s. It still didn’t reach the part of me that had stayed half-awake listening for footsteps in the hall.

“Fine,” I said.

Jarrah hadn’t spoken yet. He was still looking at me. Not at my eyes but Lower, he stared at my lips. The weight of it was deliberate yer heavy. I felt it the way you feel a hand that hasn’t touched you yet. Heat crawled up my neck and settled under my jaw. I reached for my water glass just to have something to do with my hands.

The crystal felt cold against my fingers.

Staff moved quietly in and out with fresh juice, plates of eggs and fruit and toast that no one had ordered out loud. The usual invisible efficiency of a house of this size. I picked at a piece of melon and tried to ignore the way Jarrah’s gaze never shifted.

It stayed on my lips.

I knew how they looked when I was nervous. They looked fuller and Soft. I had the sudden, humiliating urge to press them together or hide them behind the rim of my cup but I didn't ,I just sat there and let the burn spread across my skin while the ocean kept throwing itself against the rocks outside.

Reeve broke a piece of toast. The sound was too loud in the quiet.

“Cameras are clean,” he said, almost conversational. “East wing too. Nothing triggered overnight.”

Jarrah finally spoke. His voice was low, rough around the edges from disuse. “Doesn’t mean nothing was there.”

I looked between them. “You still think someone was inside.”

Neither of them answered right away. A look passed across the table, quick, private, the kind they’d been sharing since my mother left. Jarrah’s fingers tightened once around his coffee cup. The scar across his collarbone shifted under the neckline of his sweater when he leaned forward.

“I think someone wants us to wonder,” he said.

The words settled over the table like dust. I set my fork down because the melon suddenly tasted like nothing. Forced proximity had a shape now. It looked like this: three place settings instead of five. Empty chairs that used to hold my mother and Dorian. Two men who had spent years keeping careful distance and were now the only ones left to fill the silence.

Jarrah’s eyes returned to my lip

I felt it again, that slow, unblinking attention. It made my pulse kick hard against the soft place under my jaw. I shifted in the chair. Crossed one ankle over the other under the table. The movement did nothing. The heat stayed, It lived in the space between us even though half the length of the table still separated our bodies.

Reeve watched the exchange with quiet interest, like he was waiting to see which of us would break first. He took a sip of coffee and set the cup down carefully.

“You should eat more than fruit,” he said to me. Softer and almost gentle. “You barely touched dinner last night.”

I didn’t remember him noticing. That was the problem. They noticed everything now, the way I held my shoulders, the way I avoided the east hallway. The way my voice changed when one of them stood too close.

I forced a small bite of toast. It stuck in my throat.

Jarrah leaned back in his chair. The wood creaked under his weight, but he still hadn’t looked away from my lips. The intensity of it was starting to feel like a second heartbeat in the room, it was steady, relentless and impossible to ignore. I wondered what he was thinking. I wondered if he knew exactly what the staring was doing to me. The thought alone made the heat under my skin sharpen.

Outside, a gull cried once and went silent.

I set my napkin down. “I’m going to walk the grounds later.”

“No.”

Jarrah’s answer was immediate, Flat and Final.

I met his eyes for the first time that morning. “I wasn’t asking permission.”

Something dark moved behind his stare. Not anger. Something closer to possession, still carefully leashed. “The access road still has traffic that doesn’t belong. Until we know who’s sitting out there, you stay inside the walls.”

Reeve’s voice came quieter. “He’s right, Just for now.”

Just for now. The phrase felt like a door closing.

I looked down at my plate. The food blurred. Loneliness and something hotter twisted together in my chest until I couldn’t tell them apart. The house was too big. The table was too long. And the man at the head of it was looking at my lips like he was already imagining what it would feel like under his.

I stood up too quickly and the chair scraped.

“I’m finished.”

Neither of them stopped me. But when I reached the doorway I felt it again, Jarrah’s gaze still locked on the place where my lips had been, heavy and unblinking, following me even after I turned the corner.

I made it halfway down the hall before the security panel on the wall lit up red.

A soft alarm chimed once, then again.

Reeve’s voice carried from the dining room, suddenly sharp.

“East gate had Motion.”

I froze.

Behind me, chairs scraped back hard. Footsteps moved fast. And somewhere outside the high walls, something or someone had just decided the quiet was over.