MY STEPBROTHERS, MY MATES

THE AWKWARD RIDE

CHAPTER NINE

VIOLETTA

I stood in the hallway staring at the front door for a good few seconds after it closed.

*Why would he say that?*

*Was he joking?*

*Why did his voice sound like that when he said it?*

*Why am I reacting like this?*

I pressed both hands to my face and dragged them down slowly, Violetta get a grip on yourself. I grabbed my bag off the floor and walked out.

Jace was already in the driver's seat. Phone in hand, eyes fixed on the screen, lips twitching at whatever he was reading like he hadn't just said what he said and walked away like it was nothing. Like he hadn't completely short-circuited my entire brain on a Tuesday morning before school.

I got into the passenger seat.

The car immediately felt half the size it was before I sat in it.

Jace glanced at me once. "Are you alive, girl?"

I stared straight ahead. "Unfortunately."

He smirked slightly and started the engine.

Which somehow made everything worse.

I kept my eyes on the windscreen and thought about the smirk. He knew what he said affected me. That was the smirk. He said it, he watched it land, and the fact that it landed was not even slightly surprising to him. He had done it on purpose and it had work. Now he was smirking about it from the driver's seat like a completely normal person on a completely normal morning.

Unbearable.

I crossed my arms and looked out the passenger window.

He looked good this morning. That was the other problem. He always looked good but this morning specifically was an issue... hair slightly unsettled, glasses sitting right, jaw doing its thing and he smelled good on top of it. I didn't know what cologne he was wearing but it was doing something deeply unfair to the air inside this car. Something rich and clean and warm underneath it.

Was that a werewolf thing? I wondered. Did they just smell like that naturally? Did the cologne make it worse or was it him?

This was not a productive line of thought.

He made a noise beside me.

I turned to find him watching me. His expression said he had been watching me for longer than I'd noticed, and that he found whatever he'd been watching extremely amusing.

He coughed and faced the road. "How were your classes yesterday?"

I exhaled. "I met a new friend. Petra. She's in my back row."

"Petra Vasile?"

"I don't know her surname. Round glasses, dark hair, sits like she's decided not to care about anything."

"That's Petra." He nodded. "Good. She's decent."

"I also had Pack History." I looked at him. "And before all that, there was your brother's wonderful announcement of my humanity to the entire cafeteria." I drawled the last part and rolled my eyes. "Like it's a crime."

Jace said nothing for a moment. Then he said, "Ian's class is actually useful."

"Sure."

"I mean it. The more you know about how things work here, the better off you are."

I shifted slightly in the seat. "I don't want to sound rude, but the werewolf culture is genuinely weird. The hierarchy diagram. The dotted line. The whole thing."

"Which part specifically?"

"All of it. Why does your rank determine everything? Who decided that?"

He glanced at me briefly. "It's not something that was decided. It developed. Pack structure keeps things stable. Without it you get challenges, fights, territorial disputes every other week."

"And where do humans sit in all this stability?"

"Pack-adjacent."

"I saw the dotted line."

He almost smiled. "The dotted line just means the existing system wasn't built around you. Doesn't mean you can't navigate it."

"How?"

He started explaining then. Not in the way a teacher explains things but in the way someone explains something they actually know. Which students held real social weight and which ones just performed it. How the hierarchy showed up in the cafeteria seating and the corridor dynamics and even which teachers marked by rank without admitting to it.

"And there's the cheer captain, Sienna, minor Alpha's daughter from the neighbouring territory. She's been running the squad like her personal empire for two years, not someone to underestimate." He shakes his head as if his words surprises him.

I listened.

And somewhere between the territorial dispute explanation and the bit about which professor actually graded fairly, I stopped having to remind myself to breathe normally in the car. The tension was still there... it didn't disappear entirely but it was quieter. He talked and I listened. It was the first conversation since I arrived in Lunadora that felt like neither of us was managing anything.

We stopped at a red light.

"You should still try cheer," he glanced at me.

I looked at him immediately. "After yesterday? Absolutely not."

He shrugged. "You'd be good at it."

"You've literally never seen me cheer."

"You carry yourself like someone athletic." He said it casually, eyes still on the light.

I stared at him. My mouth opened and nothing came out. I had absolutely no idea what to say to that so I said nothing and just sat there like an i***t.

Then he added, "And it'll piss people off."

I laughed. It came out before I could stop it.

Jace glanced at me when he heard it. Something crossed his face. Not the smirk. Something quieter. He looked back at the road and the light turned green and he drove.

He pulled into the school car park and found a space and I was still thinking about the laugh and the look when I opened the door and got out.

The whispers started almost immediately.

I heard them before I registered what was happening. You know that specific drop in the noise level that means something has shifted, and then the rise again but different, pointed. I looked up. Students near the entrance had their phones out, angled in our direction, pretending not to. Girls near the main doors were staring. Not at Jace but at me... at me getting out of his car.

Then I saw why.

A blonde girl was standing near the entrance with two others I didn't recognise. She was looking in our direction and the moment I stepped out beside Jace, her expression changed.

It wasn't subtle.

It was the look of someone who had just seen something they considered theirs standing next to something they considered a problem. Every piece of it clicked into place at once: the staring, the phone pictures, the temperature shift in the whole car park.

She was interested in Jace.

And I had just stepped out of his car.

I pressed my lips together and looked away and thought, if only she knew she's got nothing to worry about with her man.

I almost smiled.

Jace grabbed his bag from the back seat and started walking toward the entrance like he hadn't noticed any of it. He probably hadn't. He was looking at his phone again, completely unbothered, entirely unaware of the social situation he had just created by driving me to school.

The blonde girl's eyes moved from him to me.

Then she started walking toward me. Slowly, deliberately, with the specific energy of someone who had decided something and was taking her time about it.

I held my ground.

Then Jace's hand closed around mine and he pulled me forward without looking back.

"Come on," he said.

I went. Mostly because my feet moved before I told them to.

Behind me I felt her eyes on my back like something with heat in it. I didn't turn around. I kept walking beside Jace toward the entrance. I thought about that look on her face, a thought slipped into my mind: this is only the beginning of something.