HIS TO CLAIM: Mated To My Cruel Stepbrother

CHAPTER FOUR

He did not move from the spot where I had left him.

I had taken maybe ten steps toward the gate when his voice reached me again, and something in the steadiness of it made my feet slow before my brain had given them permission to.

"I have no interest in hurting you again, Nora." He was not calling after me — his voice was measured and quiet, as though he was simply finishing a thought. "I want you to know that. Whatever you believe about me, that part is true."

I stopped but I did not turn around.

"Today is not about me," he continued. "And it is not about the bond, or the academy, or any of the history sitting between us. Today is about your mother." A pause. "She has been preparing for your visit since yesterday morning. I watched her. She rearranged the flowers on the dining table three times because she could not decide which arrangement looked more welcoming. She changed the menu twice because she wanted to make sure she cooked something you liked." Another pause, quieter this time. "Whatever I am to you, she is your mother, and she has been waiting for this day for a very long time. It would not be fair for her to lose it because of me."

I stood with my back to him and stared at the gate and said nothing.

"If my being here is the problem," he said, "then I will leave. Genuinely. I will get in my car and drive away and give the two of you the afternoon without me in it. No performance, no conditions. If that is what it takes for you to go back inside, then that is what I will do."

I turned around slowly.

He was still standing where I had left him, hands in his pockets, expression unreadable in the way it sometimes was when I suspected he was working harder than he appeared to be at keeping it that way. There was no angle in his face that I could find. No trace of the smirk I had spent years bracing for.

I thought about my mother's face when I had walked out the door. The way it had crumpled.

I thought about the flowers she had rearranged three times.

"You do not have to leave," I said, and the words cost me something, but I said them anyway because they were the right ones. "This is your father's house. I am the guest here." I straightened my shoulders. "But I want it understood between us that nothing has changed from what I said earlier. We are not family. We are not friends. We are two people who are going to be civil for the sake of my mother and nothing beyond that."

He held my gaze and nodded once. "Understood."

I walked back inside.

My mother was waiting just inside the door, and the moment she saw me she crossed the room in three steps and pulled me into her arms so tightly I felt it in my ribs. She was crying — not loudly, but the way people cry when they have been holding something in for so long that the release of it has nowhere left to go except outward.

"I am so sorry," she whispered against my shoulder. "I am so sorry, baby. For all of it. For every single thing I was not there for and every moment I chose wrong and every time you needed me and I was not present enough to notice." She pulled back and held my face in both hands and looked at me with red-rimmed eyes. "I know it might be too late to fix what I broke. I know I do not have any right to ask for what I am asking. But I want to be your mother — the one I should have been from the very beginning. I just want the chance to try."

I looked at her for a moment, and then I did the only thing I could do, which was tell her the truth.

"It is going to take time," I said. "I cannot stand here and promise you that everything is fine, because it is not fine yet. We are not fine yet." I held her gaze. "But I am here. That is what I can give you right now — I am here, and I am willing to try alongside you." I exhaled slowly. "That is going to have to be enough for today."

She nodded quickly, wiping at her face with the back of her hand. "It is more than enough," she managed. "It is more than I deserve."

Lunch was not the warm, flowing reunion I suspected my mother had imagined when she rearranged those flowers for the third time. Damien had disappeared somewhere in the house with a quiet discretion that I grudgingly appreciated, and so it was just the two of us at the dining table, sitting across from each other with plates of food between us and five years of distance that neither of us quite knew how to navigate out loud.

We talked in small, careful sentences. She asked about my work, and I told her the surface version of it. I asked about her recovery, and she answered honestly — the meetings, the difficult months, the slow and unglamorous process of rebuilding from the inside. It was not comfortable. But it was real, and I thought that perhaps real was where you had to start.

When I set my napkin down and told her I needed to get back to work, she caught my hand across the table.

"Come and spend the weekend with us," she said. "You do not have to decide right now — just think about it. A proper visit, with more time. I want to cook for you. I want to sit with you longer than two hours."

"I am not sure," I said, and I meant it honestly. "But I will think about it."

She squeezed my hand and let it go. It was a small thing, the letting go. I noticed it anyway.

My supervisor's office always felt smaller than it actually was.

Gerald Watts was a man who took up more space than he was entitled to in every room he entered, in every sense of the phrase. He had been making comments for months — small ones at first, easy enough to dismiss or sidestep, the kind that left no fingerprints because they were designed not to. A remark about how I looked in a particular blouse. A joke that was not a joke. A hand that lingered half a second too long on the back of a chair I happened to be sitting in.

I had documented every one of them. I had told myself it would not escalate.

I had been wrong.

He closed the office door behind me and turned the lock with a small, deliberate click that sent a cold ripple straight down my spine. Then he leaned against the edge of his desk and looked at me with the settled, confident expression of a man who had never once been told no in a way that stuck.

"I am going to be direct with you," he said. "I think you are an exceptional young woman, Nora. Genuinely. You are talented and driven and you deserve to go much further than your current position." He paused for effect. "I could make that happen. A promotion. Double your current salary. Opportunities that do not normally come to someone at your level." He held my gaze. "All I am asking for is one evening. You and I. Whatever happens between two consenting adults is no one else's business."

I stood very still and let him finish.

Then I crossed the room, drew back my hand, and slapped him hard enough that the sound of it filled every corner of that small, locked office.

"How dare you," I said, and my voice was low and shaking but not with fear — with a fury so clean and complete it had burned everything else out of it. "Do you genuinely believe that my career is something you can purchase? That I am something you can purchase?" I looked at him with absolute clarity. "I am not a w***e, Mr. Watts. I am a woman who has worked for every single thing she has in this company, and you will not stand here and reduce that to a transaction."

His face had gone from shock to scarlet to something cold and dangerous in the space of about four seconds.

"Clear out your desk," he said quietly. "You are done here."

I stared at him.

"And the company apartment?" His voice was precise now, each word placed carefully, like a blade laid flat. "You have twenty-four hours to vacate the premises."

The room was completely silent.

I held his gaze for one long, steady moment. Then I turned, unlocked the office door myself, and walked out without another word.

I made it to the stairwell before I stopped walking and stood in the grey concrete quiet of it with my back against the wall and my eyes closed and both hands pressed flat against the cold surface behind me.

My job was gone.

My apartment was gone.

And I had exactly t

wenty-four hours to figure out what came next.