Page 40 of Heartless Stepbrother

Every guest except me.

I felt as though I had been dipped in shadow while everyone else bathed in light. My skin was chilled despite the heat. My thoughts were loud despite the music. My heartbeat thudded against my ribs with the panicked rhythm of prey sprinting through an unseen forest.

I walked blindly, letting the planner lead the way. The white linens blurred. The crystal glasses caught the lights and fractured them into tiny shards that stabbed at my eyes. I stared at place cards as if each one might offer salvation.

But salvation was not on tonight’s menu.

Riley’s prophecy, delivered minutes earlier in a voice that slid beneath my skin like a blade, hung over me with the weight of inevitability. Of course he had been right.

My place card sat beside his. Not across. Not even one chair away. Side by side, as if fate and the wedding planner herself delighted in stitching nightmares from perfectly curated romance.

Riley paused at my chair and pulled it out for me. The gesture was elegant, courtly, and obscene. A gentleman’s etiquette wrapped around a villain’s intention. He waited for me to sit, and the weight of his attention pressed between my shoulder blades until I lowered myself into the velvet backed seat.

Only then did he sink into his own place with that devastating, effortless confidence he wore like a second skin. He lounged, possessing the space, claiming it without words. Claiming more than that. Claiming proximity.

Air became scarce.

The distance between our bodies was nonexistent. Our knees brushed under the tablecloth and the contact jolted through me like a live wire. My breath stumbled. A sound rose in my throat, embarrassingly soft and startled, and I forced it into a cough, hoping no one noticed the tremor that rippled through me.

I tried to angle my body away. A subtle shift. A small escape. But the movement only pressed more of me against him. My thigh met the warmth of his suit pants. Heat radiated from him as if he carried fire beneath his skin and I was the unfortunate moth forced too close to his flame.

Across the table, my mum glowed. Her happiness was so bright it almost hurt to look at her. Beside her, Marcus looked relaxed. They exchanged a quiet look, a small moment of shared bliss, entirely convinced that the world had settled into place. Their world had. Mine had not.

They saw two teenagers seated beside one another, two newly merged families blending seamlessly beneath strings of lights. They did not see the battlefield beneath the white linen, or the way Riley leaned into the war with a smile.

He lifted one long leg beneath the table and stretched it out, nudging my knee more firmly. The contact was deliberate. Dominant. A chain disguised as a touch.

Then he moved.

He draped his arm across the back of my chair with a lazy, relaxed indifference that made my pulse slam painfully against my ribs. His hand hovered just beyond my shoulder, close enough that I felt the air stir each time his fingers shifted. The tips of them occasionally brushed the sheer fabric of my dress, a ghost of contact that scorched through me every time.

It was a gesture that should have looked innocent to anyone watching. Casual. Brotherly. New family bonding.

But there was nothing innocent about Riley.

The gesture was a taunt. A possession. A declaration spoken without sound.

I own this space.

I own your attention.

I own your reactions.

I straightened my back, trying to find a thread of distance, a breath of space, anything, but the cage he built around me was made of silk and velvet and meticulously polite touches. I could not stand without creating a scene. I could not lean forward without drawing everyone’s eyes. I could not shift away without brushing some other part of him.

He had trapped me with nothing but proximity.

And he knew it.

I felt the heat of him at my side. The steady rhythm of his breath. The faint scent of his cologne, something dark and clean,wrapping around me like smoke. My pulse refused to calm. My thoughts skittered like frantic birds.

I looked at my mum again. At Marcus. At the soft joy radiating from them.

They were already living inside the happily ever after.

And I was seated beside the boy determined to burn it all to ash.

CHAPTER NINE