HIS TO CLAIM: Mated To My Cruel Stepbrother

CHAPTER THREE

I could not move.

I stood in the middle of my mother's living room with my feet rooted to the floor and my mind completely blank, staring at Damien Hale standing at the bottom of the staircase as though the universe had not already exhausted its entire quota of cruelty on me before noon.

He looked just as frozen as I felt. Just for a second. Just long enough for me to know that he had not known either — that whatever this was, it had blindsided us both in equal measure.

My mother stepped forward with a warm, oblivious smile, gesturing between us with the easy confidence of a woman who believed she was about to do something lovely.

"Nora, this is Damien — my stepson." She rested her hand briefly on my arm. "And Damien, this is my daughter. I have told you so much about her."

The silence that followed that introduction was the loudest I had ever stood inside.

Damien said nothing. I said nothing. My mother looked between us with the beginning of a small, uncertain frown forming at the edges of her smile.

"I need to go home," I said.

My mother's face fell instantly. "What? Nora, you just arrived — you barely walked through the door—"

"This was a mistake." I picked up my bag from the hook by the door where I had just hung it thirty seconds ago. "I appreciate the invitation but I cannot stay here."

"Why?" Her voice cracked on the word, and she stepped toward me with her hands slightly raised, the way you approach someone you are afraid of startling. "Baby, please — tell me why."

I turned and looked at her, and the laugh that came out of me was not a happy one. It was the kind that surfaces when something is so far beyond funny that your body does not know what else to do with it.

"You genuinely do not know," I said. "You are standing here right now, actually asking me why." I set my bag down because what I had to say deserved my full attention and so did she. "Mom, if you had spent even one moment of my childhood paying attention to me — one afternoon, one evening, one single occasion when you pulled your head out of a bottle long enough to actually look at your daughter — you would not need to ask me that question." My voice was steady, and I needed it to stay that way, so I kept my eyes on her face and breathed evenly. "Do you remember the days I came home with my uniform torn? Do you remember the evenings I walked through the door with my eyes swollen from crying? Do you remember the times I had marks on my arms and I told you I had fallen, because the truth was too humiliating to say out loud?"

She was very still.

"That young man standing right there made my life hell for six years," I said. "Six years, Mom. Every single day at that academy, he made sure I understood exactly what he thought of me and exactly where he believed I belonged. He tore me apart in front of people, over and over again, until I stopped being able to hear my own thoughts without his voice underneath them telling me I was worthless." I looked at her without blinking. "You married his father. You invited me here to sit across the dinner table from him and call him family." I picked my bag back up. "I genuinely do not blame you for not knowing. How would you have known? You were never there. But I will not stay in this house, and I will not pretend that I am able to do this."

"Nora, I did not know—" she started, and her voice broke completely. She looked between the two of us with wide, stricken eyes, her hands pressed together in front of her chest. "I swear to you, I had no idea. I would never have—"

"I know," I said, and I meant it, and that almost made it worse. "Of course you did not know."

I walked out the front door.

The afternoon air hit me sharp and cool, and I stood on the front step for half a second before I started moving toward the gate, my heels clicking against the stone pathway, my jaw tight, my throat tight, every part of me locked down against the feeling that was pressing outward from somewhere behind my sternum trying to get out.

I heard the door open behind me.

I heard the footsteps.

I knew before I turned around that it was not my mother.

I stopped walking and turned, and he was there, a few feet behind me, hands loose at his sides, no jacket, his expression carrying something I had never once seen on his face in all the years I had known him. Not arrogance. Not performance. Something that looked, against all reasonable expectation, like genuine remorse.

"Stay away from me," I said. "I am not asking. I am telling you — stay as far away from me as you are physically able to manage."

"Nora." His voice was quiet. "I am sorry."

"Do not." I held up one hand.

"I was foolish," he continued, and he had the decency not to look away when he said it. "The way I treated you was cruel and it was wrong, and I know that no explanation I give you will make it acceptable, because there is no explanation that makes it acceptable. I am not standing here asking you to understand it. I am just telling you that I am sorry."

I looked at him for a long moment.

"Sorry," I repeated.

"Yes."

"You stood in that hallway in front of everyone I had to face every single day," I said slowly, "and you told me I did not deserve to exist in that space. You told me I was disgusting. You told me I was my mother's shame and the pack's embarrassment and that I would never be anything worth looking at." My voice did not shake, and I was proud of every word I was choosing. "Do you have any idea what that does to a person? Not once — over and over, for years. Do you know what it is like to walk into every room for the rest of your life braced for the moment someone confirms what you were told for so long?" I pulled the sleeve of my cardigan up slightly — just enough — and held my wrist toward him. The faint, silvered lines were still there, pale against my skin, faded but permanent. "I did this to myself when I was fifteen. Because I could not find any other way to make the noise in my head stop." I pulled my sleeve back down. "So no. I am sorry, but your apology — however sincere it might be — is not something I am able to accept right now, because it does not reach far enough to touch what you actually cost me."

He stared at the place where the scars had been, and something moved across his face that looked like it genuinely hurt him, and I did not let myself care about that.

"If you actually mean what you say," I continued, "if this is not just another version of Damien Hale getting something he wants, then there is exactly one thing you can do that would mean anything to me at all." I met his eyes. "Reject the mate bond. Get rid of it. Let me walk away from you clean."

Something shifted in his expression.

"The mate bond," he said, and it was not quite a question.

I laughed — a short, sharp sound with no warmth in it. "There it is. There is the part where I discover that the apology had a condition attached to it." I shook my head. "You cannot stand it, can you? Anything that gives you leverage over me, you will hold onto with both hands." I took a step back. "But let me correct something you seem to have gotten confused, Damien. I am not fifteen anymore. I am not the girl who cried in bathroom stalls because of what you said about her. I am not the girl who came home and fell apart and had no idea how to put herself back together." I kept my voice even and my spine straight and looked him directly in the eye. "So hold onto that bond if you need to. Refuse to reject it if it makes you feel powerful. But understand clearly — it means absolutely nothing to me. You have no claim on me. You never did."

I turned around.

I walked away.

And this time, he did not follow.