Page 96 of Heartless Stepbrother

“She’s not special,” I whispered once more.

But this time, I didn’t believe it.

My lips curved in a slow, reluctant smile. The kind that came before something irreversible.

Let her lock the door. Let her pretend she was safe.

Locks were for people who still believed in safety.

And I had already stepped inside her fear.

That was where the real door opened.

I moved toward the dresser, my steps measured, deliberate, the way a man walks when he is forcing himself not to feel. The air in the room was still, too still, the kind of silence that felt aware. Every sound seemed to echo louder, the faint brush of my shoes on the carpet, the quiet rustling of leaves outside.

The mirror above the dresser was an antique. Gilded edges, cracked faintly in the corners, its surface slightly warped from age. It reflected the world like an old memory, half-truth, half-lie. I stood in front of it and stared at myself until my own face began to blur.

I raised a hand, fingers splayed, and dragged it through my hair, destroying the perfect symmetry I’d built that morning. The motion was oddly satisfying, as if disorder could cleanse something deeper. A dark strand fell across my forehead. I let it stay there.

My reflection stared back at me, sharp jaw, cold eyes, a mouth still curved into a faint, unconscious smirk. The predator’s smirk. The one I wore around her all the time.

This is necessary.

The thought rose up in me, like a defense mechanism, a lifeline thrown into the cold.

Everything I do is necessary.

Everything I am doing to her is necessary.

The words pulsed through me like a mantra, hollow and hard. Breaking her was not cruelty; it was strategy. It was an inevitable part of the greater plan. To fracture the illusion my father had built, to tear apart his new marriage until the rot beneath it was exposed for everyone to see. This was not about her. It was about control. Balance. Justice.

Collateral damage. That was what she was.

She was a pawn. A tool. A minor piece to be moved and, if required, sacrificed to end the game.

I repeated the thought until it stopped sounding like murder.

But even as I recited the lie, something deep inside me cracked, the fissure spreading wider with every heartbeat. Because I knew, knew in the pit of my chest where logic couldn’t reach, that I had already crossed the line between necessity and obsession.

I was watching her too closely.

Not as a strategist. Not as a rival. But as something else. Something far more dangerous.

My mind catalogued her without permission. The details came unbidden. The small, defensive clench of her fists when she was fighting the urge to cry, the rigid line that formed along her jaw when she gathered courage to face me, the way her breath caught in her throat before she dared to speak my name. I knew the sound of her silence, the rhythm of her hesitation, the tremor in her defiance.

I should not have known these things.

I should not have wanted to.

It was too intimate. Too human.

I told myself it was reconnaissance. I was studying her patterns, mapping the weaknesses that would one day help me destroy my father’s marriage. It was strategy. Observation. Nothing more.

But the lie was fragile, and I could hear it cracking every time I breathed her name in my head.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

LUNA