My Stepbrother Sent Me to a Juvenile Detention Center Then Proposed

Chapter 2

He stepped forward, pulling me up with cloying gentleness. "Lily," he cooed, honeyed words dripping poison, "the detention center was for your own good. Don't resent your brother, understand?"

Disgust twisted my gut. I shoved him away, bolting for my room like a rabbit fleeing wolves, only to crash down when someone's foot hooked my ankle. Curled on the floor, I clutched my head as the hissed insults surrounded me: "Lunatic," "Madwoman"...

The taunts vanished when Dylan's glacial stare swept the room. "My sister," he declared, voice laced with performative concern, "isn't your punching bag."

The hypocrisy burned like acid. This was the same man who'd condemned me to that hell. Now he played the protective sibling?

We'd been stepsiblings in a blended family until my mother died. Three years ago, Victoria, the Blake family's spoiled princess, decided she wanted Dylan after he donated blood during her car crash. She claimed him as her trophy husband.

His father, a gambling addict desperate for status, would've sold Dylan's soul to the Blake family. When Dylan refused, the old man cracked a bottle over his skull. Still, he resisted.

Then came the night I awoke to his father's fingers creeping up my thigh in the dark. As the bastard tore at my nightclothes, my screams brought Dylan crashing through the door. He snapped, dragging the man off me, fists hammering his face until he lay unconscious and bleeding.

Afterward, Dylan gathered my shaking form, holding me so tight I could barely breathe as he whispered frantic apologies. Back then, I'd been his most precious person.

But no one outmaneuvered that shameless manipulator. In the end, Dylan married Victoria.

Then she found my hidden diary, the one confessing my forbidden love for him. Overnight, my most guarded secret became ammunition for public humiliation.

I'll never forget the look in Dylan's eyes that day, a glacial storm of disgust and loathing that tore through my last defenses.

Yielding to Victoria's demands, he dismissed my desperate sobs with a single hollow phrase: "This is for your own good," before tossing me into that hellhole reformatory.

Each day was a fresh nightmare. Strapped to a chair in a damp, claustrophobic cell, they'd force me to stare at his photo. If my face so much as twitched, the electrodes would sear my skin. At first, I clung to the delusion that he'd been coerced, that Victoria had twisted his arm. But after months of torture, even that feeble hope was extinguished.

By the end, his image couldn't spark a single ember of warmth in my hollow chest. Three years. That's how long I endured this.

I tried escaping once until they carved out my kidney as a lesson. After that, survival meant playing their obedient puppet.

The Blake family staged a press conference to flaunt their "rehabilitation miracle." They paraded me out like some twisted circus act, surrounded by a sea of gawking spectators. When they shoved his photo in my face, the blinding camera flashes and relentless click-whirr of shutters turned my limbs to water. My palms slicked with cold sweat.

Then came the reformatory's shrill alarm tone.

My muscles betrayed me. I collapsed, forehead cracking against the floor in time with the siren as I babbled like a broken record: "I'm s-sick... I shouldn't... love you."

"Kill me."

The crowd's murmurs swarmed like wasps—judgmental whispers identical to the reformatory doctors' taunts. I bashed my skull harder, the c***k of bone on tile drowning them out.

"Proof enough for you all?" Victoria's mocking singsong rang from the stage. "Behold our masterpiece. The Blake family never fails."

The alarm cut dead. When I raised my numb face, Dylan's furrowed brow filled my vision along with the step he'd begun toward me. For one fractured heartbeat, something in my chest twitched. Then the bile rose. I vomited violently until a jacket engulfed me. The tang of fresh oranges sliced through the nausea, tethering me back to my body.

"Have you all lost your damn minds? You soulless monsters."

The man's voice was icy yet carried a faint tremor, crackling with barely restrained fury that threatened to ignite the air. Suddenly, I was engulfed in a vise-like embrace.