Page 48 of Heartless Stepbrother

He’s already winning.

The path narrowed as I neared the pool, winding through a grove of palms that swayed lazily in the wind, their leaves whispering secrets I wasn’t meant to hear. The night seemed to thicken around me. The air was warm and heavy and the low hum of distant waves rose and fell like breath.

When the trees parted, the pool came into view.

It was vast, the kind of luxury that didn’t need to announce itself, secluded and impossibly still, a mirror of blue glass laid out beneath the open sky. The soft lights along its edges shimmered across the surface, breaking into ripples of silver and pale gold where the water met the infinity edge. Beyond that, the ocean stretched into blackness, an endless void that seemed to swallow the stars whole.

And there he was.

Leaning against the far edge of the pool as though he owned the night itself. The faint glow from the water gilded his skin, tracing his shoulders, his throat, the line of his jaw. His dark hair was slicked back, damp and careless, his eyes half-lidded with the kind of calm that wasn’t natural, it was crafted. Perfectly deliberate.

He wasn’t alone.

Three others were with him. Two boys, with the same careless posture Riley wore like a second skin, and a girl bronzed and pretty in a way that only came from knowing it. Cousins, I guessed, or close enough to carry the same air of entitled ease. They lounged in the water like creatures born to it, soft laughter blending with the distant sigh of the ocean.

An audience.

A jury.

I paused at the edge of the stone steps leading down to the pool, my heart tapping out a frantic rhythm that my face refused to show. My instinct screamed to turn back, to walk away beforehe even noticed I was there. But he already had. I felt it before I saw it.

Riley’s gaze found me across the distance.

I braced myself for the smirk, the one that always cut too deep, that made me feel seen and flayed at once. I waited for the arrogance, the quiet cruelty that lived in the tilt of his mouth when he decided to remind me of my place.

But it didn’t come.

Instead, his smile was easy. Warm. Disarming in its casual perfection. It was the kind of smile that could win over anyone, the kind that made you forget every reason you had to hate him.

“Well,” he said, his voice low and smooth, carried easily over the still water. “Look who decided to join the fun.”

The words should have dripped with mockery. They didn’t. He said them lightly, as if I were an old friend, late to the party but forgiven for it. He even laughed, a sound so natural it made my stomach twist.

“The water’s perfect,” he added, gliding a slow stroke closer to the edge. “Glad you came.”

He wasn’t challenging me. He wasn’t baiting me. He was pretending we were equals. It was such a simple shift, and yet it shattered every defense I had built.

I had prepared for cruelty. For the sharpness of his words, for humiliation hidden beneath charm. But this… this version of him… was infinitely worse.

Because the Riley before me wasn’t the one I had faced hours ago. That one had been cruel and cutting, a shadow cloaked in arrogance. This one was sunshine and silk, coaxing, charming, drawing me closer with every word.

And that was his real power.

He wasn’t trying to humiliate me tonight. He was trying to confuse me. To make me doubt my own instincts, to blur the linebetween predator and savior until I didn’t know which one stood before me.

I could feel it happening. The slow erosion of my certainty.

I slipped into the pool before I even realized I had moved. The water met me with a warm embrace, lifting the heat from my skin, softening the tightness in my chest. It curled around my ribs, my waist, my legs, dissolving the tension I had clung to since morning. I sank lower, letting the water mute the world, letting it blur my senses until only the sound of my breathing and the faint ripple of movement remained. For one suspended moment, I felt weightless, unanchored, dangerously willing to drift.

The laughter faded around us. I didn’t notice when the others drifted away, their conversation shrinking into murmurs at the far end of the pool. The world narrowed until there was only him.

He shifted nearer, the water gliding around him in slow ripples, and for a breath I forgot how to breathe. Riley didn’t look at the horizon first. He looked at me. As if the stars were a distant second to whatever he was studying in my face. Only then did he tilt his chin toward the dark line where water swallowed sky.

“Look at that,” he said, voice low enough to slide under my skin. “Most people stare at the stars and make wishes. I don’t. I see a ceiling.”

He paused, the faintest curl touching his mouth. “Something to break through.”

The words shouldn’t have affected me. They were nothing but air and ego, typical Riley bravado. But there was heat behind them, something molten, like the boy was made of the same lava rock the island stood on.