Oops My Stepbrother and His Rival Want Me

CHAPTER TWO: BLOOD AND TERRITORY

The door doesn't open. It nearly comes off the hinges.

Viper fills the doorway like it was built around him, rain still dripping off his jacket, breathing hard like he ran the last block instead of riding it. It takes him exactly half a second to land on me standing two feet from a rival club president with a gun he hasn't bothered putting away yet.

His face does something I've never once seen it do.

"Get your hands off her."

"Wasn't touching him." Rezo doesn't turn his head all the way, like Viper showing up barely registers as an interruption.

"You're breathing on her. Close enough." Viper crosses the room and every Rida guy who'd drifted closer a minute ago suddenly remembers urgent business at the far end of the bar. "Get out of my club."

"Your club." Rezo's mouth curves, like Viper walking in is the best part of his night instead of the worst. "Came looking for you. Found something better."

"There's nothing here for you to find."

"Funny. I'm looking right at it."

Viper's hand closes around my wrist, not rough, but absolute, the kind of grip that isn't asking either of us for permission. He pulls me half a step behind him without breaking eye contact with Rezo once. "She's not part of whatever this is between us."

"She's part of it the second I decide she is." Something ugly and amused passes between them, five years of bad blood folding itself into about four seconds of staring. "Didn't realize you kept her this close."

"You don't get to know what I keep."

"I know now." Rezo's eyes slide past Viper's shoulder, find me again, and my pulse does something I'd really rather it didn't. "Should've mentioned her sooner. Might've saved us both some time."

"There's no version of this where you get near her again."

"There's a version where I already did." He shrugs, unbothered, like the last ten minutes cost him nothing at all. "Tonight, even. Funny how that works."

"Get out before I make you."

"You and how many of your guys." Rezo glances around the room, at the three Rida members still frozen by the pool table, at Marco still flat against the bottles behind the bar. "Count's not looking great for you right now."

"I don't need numbers."

"Everyone needs numbers eventually." Something almost like respect flickers across Rezo's face, gone as fast as it came. "I'll see you around."

"You won't."

"We'll find out." He's already walking backward toward the door, unbothered, gun finally tucked away wherever guns go when men like him decide a room isn't worth dying in tonight. "Figuring out her name myself. Takes the fun out of it if somebody just hands it over."

"Come back here again and I put you in the ground."

"You've said that before." He pauses at the door just long enough to make it an insult. "Get back to me when you actually mean it."

The door swings shut, and the whole bar exhales at once, like it's been holding its breath since the chain snapped off the hinges.

Nobody moves for a second. Then Marco surfaces from behind the bar looking like he's aged a decade in five minutes, and Theo finally lets go of the death grip he's had on his own barstool the entire time.

"Holy s**t," Theo says, to nobody, to everybody. "Holy actual s**t. Did that seriously just happen."

"Get him some water." Viper jerks his chin at Marco without looking away from me. One of the guys near the pool table scrambles to obey. Viper doesn't ask twice. Never has.

Theo grabs my sleeve, voice dropped to a whisper even though half the bar already watched the whole thing happen in real time. "He looked at you like he wanted to eat you alive."

"He looked at me like I was a problem he hadn't budgeted for." I don't actually believe that, but saying the true version out loud feels like handing somebody a loaded weapon.

"Sure. Keep telling yourself that."

His hand is still around my wrist.

"I'm fine." I try tugging it loose, mostly to see if he'll actually let go. "You can stop now."

He doesn't.

"He had a gun on Marco." Viper's voice has dropped into something quieter than yelling, which is somehow worse. "How close did he get to you."

"Close enough to be annoying. Not close enough to matter."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one you're getting tonight." I finally pull free, and his hand hovers at my elbow instead, like he hasn't fully decided I'm allowed out of arm's reach yet. "I'm not made of glass, Vee."

"I know exactly what you're made of." Something flickers across his face and disappears before I can name it. "That's not the problem."

"Then what is."

He doesn't answer right away. The bar's gone back to its normal noise around us, somebody's already restocking the bottles Rezo broke, Theo's hovering close enough to listen but pretending very hard not to, and for a second it's just the two of us standing too close in the middle of a room that's pretending to move on without us.

"You don't get it." Viper drags a hand through his hair, and for the first time all night he looks less like a club president and more like someone running out of road. "He doesn't lose interest once he decides he wants something. I've watched him take apart entire crews over less than what happened in here tonight."

"So what, you think he's going to come back for me specifically?"

"I think he already decided to." Viper's eyes drop to where his hand used to be around my wrist, like he's only now registering he let go. "And I can't put a guard on you without you noticing, and you'd hate me for it if I tried, and I still want to do it anyway."

"That's insane, Vee."

"Three years," he says finally, like it costs him something to say it out loud. "Three years of being careful. Of making sure nobody ever had a reason to look at you twice. And the first time someone does, it's him."

"It's not that deep, Vee. He's just an arrogant ass with a gun complex."

"He's Voss's president. He doesn't lose interest in things he decides he wants." Viper's jaw works like he's holding something back by force. "And I watched him decide, tonight, in real time, in my own club."

"So what. You're worried about competition now?"

His hand comes up before I can finish the sentence properly, fingers brushing along my jaw, careful and slow in a way that has never once felt like something a brother does, and we've spent three years agreeing out loud never to say so.

"Keira." My name comes out low, almost wrecked. "You're not competition. You're—"

He stops himself.

I wait for the rest of it, and his jaw works like he's swallowing the end of that sentence whole instead of handing it to me.

"I'm what, Vee."