CLAIMED BY MY STEPBROTHER

Lila The air in the mansion's grand hall felt thick with lilies and lies. Soft murmurs of "such a tragedy" and "he'll be missed" floated around me like smoke, drifting from mouth to mouth with the rehearsed sincerity of people who had never actually liked my father but understood the social arithmetic of a Voss family funeral. I stood near the tall windows in a fitted black dress that hugged my hips and chest a little too tightly, clutching a glass of red wine I had no intention of drinking. I'd tugged the hemline down three times already. After the third I'd stopped bothering. My father's death should have left a bigger hole. That was what kept circling through my mind as I stood there watching strangers perform grief over a man none of them had truly known. The hole I'd expected hadn't appeared. In its place was something quieter and more damning… a low, flat numbness that felt less like mourning and more like the final confirmation of something I had always half-known. That Viktor Voss had never quite gotten around to seeing me as a person rather than a peripheral detail in his larger story. He had always been more shadow than father anyway. The grand hall was packed with faces I barely recognized…distant relatives in expensive black, associates with carefully neutral expressions and harder eyes underneath, a cluster of suits near the bar who had stopped pretending to mourn and were openly discussing restructuring. My father's empire didn't pause for sentiment. It never had. He would have respected that, probably. Would have looked at the men carving up his legacy before his body was cold and felt closer to pride than offense. I set my wine on the nearest surface and pressed my fingers briefly to my sternum. One more hour. Then I was done with this room, this house, all of it. I wanted my apartment back. My half-finished design projects spread across the kitchen table, cold coffee going stale beside my laptop, the fragile and carefully constructed illusion of a normal life I'd been building brick by quiet brick for the last three years. A life with clean lines and no armed men at the doors. A life where nobody looked at me the way the men in this room kept looking at me, like I was an asset whose value they were quietly calculating. Marcus had texted twice. Thinking of you tonight. Call whenever you're ready. Uncomplicated…safe in a way I'd been deliberately choosing for exactly two months because I was tired of everything in my life feeling like standing at the edge of a thing with no visible bottom. I should have felt grateful thinking about him. Instead I felt the ghost of a hallway seven years ago. Sixteen years old and breathless and completely undone by proximity, Damien's hand burning through the fabric of my dress, his breath coming fast against my temple, the entire world narrowing to the charged and terrible space between us. The almost. The almost that had never become anything because he had pulled back and walked away and six months later they had told us he was dead and I had spent seven years trying to burn that almost out of my memory like it was something I could choose to un-feel. I hadn't managed it. The shameful truth was I had never managed it. It lived in my chest like a splinter lodged too deep to reach… a persistent warmth I'd learned to wall off and absolutely never examine too closely. Stop it, I told myself. Your father is in the ground tonight. Focus on that. The heavy double doors at the far end of the hall slammed open. Not opened, not swung but slammed with a force that sent one ornate handle cracking hard into the wall and drove a collective flinch through the entire room simultaneously. The sound split the air like a gunshot and the murmuring voices died instantly, completely, like someone had cut the feed. Silence fell like a guillotine. He stood in the doorway. Tall. Easily over six-three, with the kind of broad-shouldered, powerful build that made his expensive black suit look like a weapon rather than clothing. Intricate tattoos climbed from his collar and peeked past his cuffs. His sharp jaw was clenched, a thin scar cutting through his left brow that hadn't been there before. Dark hair. And those eyes… stormy and devastating scanning the room in one slow sweep before locking onto me with a focused, burning intensity that hit me like a physical impact. Like a fist closing around something in my chest. Damien Voss. My stepbrother. The one who had disappeared seven years ago after that charged, forbidden night when I was sixteen years old and the world had briefly rearranged itself around the space between us. The one they had told us was dead. The one I had grieved in private, in ways that shamed me, in ways that had nothing to do with grief and everything to do with the specific ache of a moment that had almost happened and then hadn't. My fingers went numb. The wine glass slipped and shattered on the marble floor, red spreading outward in a slow bloom that looked disturbingly, perfectly like blood. He didn't stop. Didn't speak to the shocked relatives frozen in place around him. Didn't acknowledge the armed men stationed at the corners of the room, men who tensed as he entered and then, went completely still. Not one of them moved to intercept him. Not one of them reached for the weapons I knew they were carrying. They saw him and they went still the way people go still in the presence of something that has already decided the outcome and is simply in the process of executing it. That stillness told me everything about who Damien had become in seven years. The cold clarity of it moved through me. He walked straight through the frozen crowd, his gaze never leaving mine. The distance between us closed with horrible, inevitable steadiness and I stood there with shattered glass at my feet and my heart slamming so hard against my ribs I could feel it in my temples, and I did not move. Could not move. Every survival instinct I possessed was screaming at me to back away and my feet had apparently decided to ignore all of them. He stopped in front of me. Up close he was more overwhelming, not less. He smelled like cold air and something darker underneath, unchanged after seven years in ways that bypassed every rational defense I had and went straight to the part of me that had been keeping that splinter warm since I was sixteen. A muscle ticked in his jaw. His eyes, this close, held layers I couldn't fully read but felt in my chest… seven years of restrained hunger and now completely done being restrained. "Damien…" My voice came out wrecked. Barely sound. "You're… they said you were" "I know what they said." Low yet rough. Moving through me like a current with nowhere to ground. His large hand wrapped around my wrist. Like a shackle. Warm and immovable and completely certain. "You're done here." In one fluid, effortless motion he bent, grabbed my waist, and threw me over his shoulder. The world inverted. My dress rode up high on my thighs. The blood rushed to my head and I gasped, driving my fists into the hard muscle of his back. "Damien! Put me down! What the hell are you…" His palm landed on the back of my bare thigh. Not a slap. A claim. Fingers spreading wide, pressing into soft flesh with slow and deliberate possession, digging in just enough to mean something. "I said quiet," he said. Low yet final. The words hit the base of my spine like a lit match. Heat flooded my face… shame and something else, something I refused to name, that had no business existing in my body when I was furious and frightened and being carried out of my father's wake over a man's shoulder like a declaration of war. Gasps erupted behind us. Raised voices. Someone called his name. One of the suited men near the bar, sharp and authoritative yet Damien didn't break stride. Didn't acknowledge it. He walked through the chaos like it was weather, carrying me out through the grand doors and into the cool night air, my dress riding around my hips, the cold hitting my exposed skin. A blacked-out SUV waited at the base of the stone steps. Engine running. The rear door was already open, as though someone had known exactly how this night would end. He folded me into the backseat and climbed in right after me. The door slammed. The child locks engaged with a sound that was soft and very, very final. The car moved before I'd fully upright. I scrambled to the far door, pressing my back against it, dragging my dress down with shaking hands. My pulse was a wreck. My thoughts were a wreck. He sat on the opposite side of the wide seat with his forearms resting on his knees, watching me with those unreadable, burning eyes. Like he had played this scene out a thousand times in his head and was simply watching it happen now the way he'd always known it would. "They told us you were dead." My voice shook and I couldn't stop it. "Six months after you disappeared my father confirmed it and you just…you've been" "Your father lied." "He was good at that." The city slid past the tinted windows in streaks of gold and white. I was acutely aware of how fast we were moving. How many turns we'd already taken. How completely I had no idea where we were going. "Where are you taking me?" His gaze moved over my body slowly… the disheveled hair, the dress, the bare thighs I was pressing together against a warmth I absolutely refused to examine. His jaw tightened once. A muscle flickering in his cheek before going still. "Somewhere safe," he said. "Safe." The word came out almost like a laugh. "You just threw me over your shoulder at my father's wake in front of everyone…" "And I'd do it again." His hand reached across the seat and gripped my thigh, pulling me toward him in one smooth motion before I could react. His fingers were warm through the thin fabric. His thumb pressed in slow and deliberate. "You have no idea what tonight would have become if I hadn't walked through those doors, Lila." The way he said my name. Like he'd been rationing it. Like saying it cost him what he'd been carefully budgeting for years. "You left me," I said quietly. The truest and most painful thing I owned. "You disappeared and I thought you were dead and you never…" "I know." His expression shifted brief and quickly controlled. His thumb moved once against my thigh, slow and almost involuntary. "I know exactly what I left you with." "Then why…" "Because staying would have destroyed you." His eyes held mine across the charged dark of the backseat. "And I wasn't willing to do that. Not then." Not then hung between us with the weight of everything it implied about now. I swallowed hard, thighs pressing tighter together, hating my own body for the warmth pooling there… for the traitorous, seven-year response to his proximity that no amount of rational thought had ever successfully dismantled. "I'm not yours, Damien," I said. "You don't get to leave and come back and just…" "I came back for what's always belonged to me." His voice dropped lower, darker. His hand slid higher on my thigh and I stopped breathing entirely. "And you already know it. You've known it since you were sixteen years old." The SUV sped deeper into the glittering night. And the most humiliating, unforgivable true thing was the part of me buried beneath seven years of careful distance and intentional forgetting… the part that had kept that splinter lodged and warm through every attempt to remove it, that part exhaled. Like it had been waiting. Like some treacherous, bone-deep piece of me had always known he would come back. Like I had never, not for a single day, truly believed he was gone.