In love with my StepSon

Chapter Eight

Melissa

It should have been me.

I stood there watching Briston pull himself off the floor with his arm pressed against the gash on his shoulder and his teeth locked together against the pain, and the guilt hit me immediately. I started all of this with a bucket and a distracted afternoon and he was the one bleeding for it.

He got upright and the ground seemed to shift under him, his body listed sideways before he caught himself against the wall.

"Let me help you," I said, moving toward him.

"Get away from me," he snapped, and he pushed off the wall and started walking.

I followed him anyway.

He did not look back as he climbed the stairs, one hand trailed the wall for support. I kept pace behind him because standing downstairs doing nothing was not something I was capable of right then. He reached his room and turned at the door with his burning eyes.

"Leave," he told me.

"You are bleeding through your shirt," I replied.

"I said leave."

"I just want to help, I am sorry this happened, you did not deserve any of that and I know that."

Something moved across his face and then it was gone, replaced by the cold wall he kept permanently erected between himself and everything else in this house.

"Guards," he called out flatly.

Two of them appeared from the end of the corridor almost immediately.

"Remove her," Briston ordered, and then he looked directly at me. "If you come near me again I will strangle you myself, do you understand me, you shameless gold digging w***e, stay away from me."

The guards walked me back down the corridor without roughness but without hesitation either. I did not fight them because there was nothing left to fight with.

I walked to my room, knowing there was nowhere else to go.

Draven was already there.

He was standing in the center of the room and the sight of him made something cold crawl up the back of my neck immediately. I stopped just inside the doorway and he looked at me with the particular blankness that I had already learned meant he had already decided what was going to happen and was simply waiting for me to catch up to it.

"Strip!" he commanded.

"Please," I begged, as my voice came out smaller than I wanted it to. "Please Alpha, I am not healed from last night, please just give me one night, just one."

He crossed the room and I backed up but the wall stopped me, his hands found the neckline of my dress and tore it in one motion that left me gasping.

When I pressed my hands against his chest to push him back his hand closed around my throat with a grip that made the edges of my vision swim.

"I bought you," he declared against my face, completely calm, completely absent of anything human. "You are here to break my curse, that is your entire purpose in this house, and you will serve that purpose when I say so."

“Bang! Bang! Bang!”

A knock hit the door, hard and repeated, and Draven's grip loosened by degrees as the knocking continued without stopping.

He crossed to the door and yanked it open.

I heard the guard's voice from the corridor, low and urgent, something about Briston shivering, something about blood loss, shall they take him to the pack hospital.

Draven was silent for a moment.

"No," he said, and closed the door.

I stared at his back.

"He could die," I stated. "He is your son and he could die tonight."

Draven moved to the side table, picked up a cigarette, lit it and walked to the balcony without looking at me once.

I grabbed the nearest thing I could find to cover myself and pulled it on and ran out of the room before he turned around.

The corridor was empty and quiet as I walked fast, my thoughts became louder than my footsteps.

What kind of man heard that his son was bleeding out two floors above him and reached for a cigarette? What kind of father closed a door on that information and went to stand on a balcony.

And then I thought about the curse.

Draven's hands changing the way they did, the claws tearing through without a full shift, the way his face had contorted like something inside him was fighting itself. I had grown up around the royal household my entire life and had never seen anything like that, not once.

Briston had called it out the very first night I arrived, he had said his father was cursed and that buying me was his attempt to break it.

What exactly was this curse, and why did breaking it require me.

I needed to find out.

Sasha was in the hallway outside Briston's room with two other maids standing uselessly beside her. I could saw from her face that something was already wrong.

"Call the hospital," I told her immediately. "Send an ambulance now."

Sasha looked at the floor. "Luna, we already did, the hospital said the Alpha left strict orders, they are not to treat the prince without his direct approval."

I stared at her.

"What?"

Nobody answered me.

I pulled in a breath and let it out slowly. "Go and get me a bowl of warm water and lemon balm, right now, go."

Sasha moved immediately and I pushed the door to Briston's room open and walked in.

He was on the bed with his shirt still on and he was shivering in a way that told me the blood loss had already gone further than it should have. His face had become pale with shallow breathing.

I sat beside him and pressed the back of my hand to his forehead and felt the fever sitting there already.

He was not well before that fight, I realized, looking at him properly in the light of the room, he had come to the table this morning already running on something less than full, and the fight had taken whatever reserve he had left.

Sasha returned with the bowl and the lemon balm and I worked quietly and carefully, cleaning the gash on his shoulder and pressing the cloth against the worst of it until the bleeding slowed, dressing what I could with the plasters from the small kit on his bedside table, warming his face with the cloth because the fever needed to come down and there was nothing else available to bring it down with.

He drifted in and out and I kept working, and eventually his shivering slowed and his breathing evened out.

I did not know how much time had passed when his head slipped sideways and came to rest in my lap. I stayed completely still so he would not be disturbed.

His voice came out barely above a breath, rough and stripped of every wall he had built.

"Mum," he whispered, "Mama.”