Page 1 of Heartless Stepbrother

CHAPTER ONE

RILEY

Thenightwasmine.

It always had been.

It spread out beneath me like a living thing, a pulse of gold and shadow, a glittering graveyard of promises people were too weak to keep. I leaned against the hood of my car, smoke curling from the cigarette between my fingers, the taste of ash and sinstaining my tongue. The Range Rover waited behind me, sleek and silent, a predator in the dark.

I liked it that way. Quiet. Controlled.

Control was the only language I understood.

The city hummed in the distance, alive and stupid, filled with people pretending they mattered. They didn’t. Not to me. I owned this world, and everything that dared breathe in it.

My knuckles still stung from earlier. Some idiot had thought he could take what wasn’t his. He had learned fast. Most of them did. One punch, clean and final, and the world went still again. I’d wiped the blood from my skin, but the echo of it lingered. Violence was a kind of prayer. A way to remind the world where it stood and where I did.

My father thought otherwise.

He thought he could bringsomeone elseinto this world. A stranger. A woman with a smile too soft and a daughter with a name too pretty.

Luna Carter.

My soon-to-be stepsister.

I let the name roll through my head, slow and deliberate, like a secret I didn’t want to share. It sounded fragile. Breakable. A name made of light that had no place in my darkness.

He said she’d be moving in soon. He said she’d make things different. Better.

Better.

As if anything needed fixing.

It wasn’t anger that burned in me when I thought about it. It was something colder. A quiet, suffocating fury that tasted like betrayal. My father didn’t understand. It had always been the two of us. Just him and me against everything. Every new wife, every perfect little family he tried to build, it always ended the same. Cracked glass. Empty rooms. Me watching it all collapsewhile he pretended not to notice that I was the one pulling the threads loose.

He called it rebellion. I called it preservation.

Because this life, this order, this peace, it belonged to us. No one else.

I didn’t want to destroy him. I just wanted to keep what was ours untouched. Clean.

And if that meant breaking the girl who didn’t belong, so be it.

She was a problem. An intruder. A fracture in the system I’d spent years keeping intact.

But even as I told myself that, something restless stirred beneath the thought. A flicker of curiosity. A hunger I didn’t want to name.

Luna.

I hadn’t seen her. Didn’t need to. I already knew the type. Wide eyes. Soft voice. Someone who still believed the world had kindness in it. Someone who didn’t understand that belonging came with a price.

She would learn.

I’d make sure of it.

She would learn that peace wasn’t given. It was taken. It was protected. It was claimed.

And when she crossed into my world, when she tried to find her place beside my father, she would realize that place already belonged to me.