Page 47 of Heartless Stepbrother
I started walking toward the path that led down to my suite.
Each step was a promise.
Each breath, a surrender.
The night waited.
And so did he.
I made it back to my room, the world outside dissolving into the hush of ocean air and the heavy quiet that lived inside these walls. The wooden floor gleamed beneath the low light, cold and unyielding, its perfection mocking the chaos beneath my skin. I paced its length again and again, each step an argument with myself, each turn a silent scream.
The clock on the wall ticked with exquisite cruelty. Its second hand slid forward in delicate, deliberate motions, carving time into me. The minute hand crawled toward midnight as if it knew the threshold I was about to cross, as if it wanted to give me a chance to stop.
The older, primitive part of me, buried but not gone, was howling. It wanted me to stay. To lock the door, tear off the mask, crawl into bed, and pretend I hadn’t heard the challenge in Riley’s voice. That voice screamed inside me:Don’t go. You don’t owe him anything. This is wrong. This is dangerous.
But there was another voice too. A newer one. A quieter, colder creature born in the furnace of his gaze earlier that night. It wasn’t afraid. It whispered against the shell of my ear, soft aspoison,If you don’t go, you prove him right. You prove you are weak. Afraid. Exactly what he thinks you are.
The war between them filled the room, invisible but suffocating.
I stopped pacing, my reflection catching my eye in the long mirror across the room. For a moment, I didn’t recognize the girl staring back. She looked too composed, too calm, like a doll carved from stillness. Only her eyes betrayed her, wide and bright and desperate.
I turned toward the wardrobe, my fingers trembling as I pushed the hangers aside. Denim brushed against cotton, whispers of clothes that belonged to another life. Finally, I found what I was looking for. A bikini, dark blue, almost black beneath the lamplight. It was simple. Functional. This would be my armor.
I peeled the dress from my skin, letting it fall in a soft sigh of fabric to the floor. It lay there like shed skin, like a confession I couldn’t take back. The air was cool against my bare shoulders, raising goosebumps across my arms as I pulled on the swimsuit.
When I stood again before the mirror, the girl looking back at me was different. Her eyes had hardened into something steadier, something colder. Her mouth was set, no tremor, no uncertainty. I smoothed my expression. I practiced the indifference I would need, the stillness of someone who couldn’t be shaken.
Inside, the panic remained as a small, coiled creature deep in my stomach, but I pressed it down until it became something sharp and usable. Fear could be shaped into purpose if you held it long enough.
This wasn’t surrender. This wasn’t about him.
This was reconnaissance.
I told myself I was going to observe, to understand, to see the battlefield from his side. Knowledge was power, and I needed it. I would not play his game, but I would step onto his field.
My phone flickered to life. 11:58 PM.
It was time.
The door opened with a quiet sigh, and the humid night reached for me like an accomplice. The corridor was empty, the world between the reception and the ocean transformed into something secret, intimate, and heavy with consequence.
The path wound through lush gardens, the air thick with the metallic bite of an incoming storm. The tiki torches lining the walk cast small, trembling halos of light that did little to soften the darkness between them. Each step I took made the shadows shift, alive with movement.
The resort had gone still, the laughter and music from earlier swallowed by the vastness of the night. Only the ocean remained, a restless, unseen force that breathed and sighed beyond the beach. Its rhythm used to comfort me, but now it sounded like warning. Like the slow exhale of something watching.
The sound of the waves was no longer soothing. It hissed against the rocks like it disapproved of what I was doing, like it wanted to drag me back before it was too late.
But I kept walking.
The air grew heavier as I drew closer to the pool. Every nerve in my body was awake now, every heartbeat a countdown.
I told myself I wasn’t afraid. I told myself I was in control.
But the truth was simpler, quieter.
I was being pulled toward him by something I didn’t understand.
And beneath all the defiance and logic and lies I wrapped around myself, one thought pulsed like a living thing inside my chest.
