Wrong: A Stepbrother Romance

“Ethan!” I pounded on it, listening to the sounds of him tearing the envelopes open from the other side. “Ethan! You have no right to read those!”

“Tell me more about what I have the right to do in my own fucking house,” Ethan muttered, though he trailed off as clearly, he started reading. Panicking in the hall, I tried to think of what moves I had left. When he swung the door open again, I burst into tears I wasn’t sure if I was even faking or not.

“Ethan,” I pleaded. “If you want to know the truth, I just need to show those to my mom, and then I need to burn them. That’s it. That’s all I want, and it has nothing to do with you or us or Liam. I just need those for me. You know what happened with Owen, you know everything with me and my mom, and if you ever loved me at any point, Ethan, you’d let me try to get some closure on that part of my life, so please hand those letters back to me. Please.”

Ethan’s wild eyes flickered down at the letters in his hand. He was calming down, visibly thinking. Finally, his jaw went slack as he let out a sigh. “Fine. Have them.” He held out the letter in his hand. I breathed out hard, but just as I reached for it, he snatched them away. “Actually, no. You don’t get to have them just yet,” he said, tucking the letters behind his back.

“Damn it, give them to me now,” I demanded shakily. When I started into the apartment, he stood in my way.

“This isn’t your home anymore, Sasha. If these letters are under my roof, they’re as good as mine,” he reminded me evenly. “Of course, there’s a decision you can make to make this your roof again. And it’s the only way you get your letters back. Probably the only way you get your mom back. Definitely the only way you get to see Daisy. So think about it. Because you do want all those things. They’re all the things that’ll make your life easy and good and drama-free again. Aren’t they?”

I stood there at a loss for words, in awe of how truly revolting Ethan could be. I thought he’d hit rock bottom when he surprised me at the bar, but this was a brand new low. “You couldn’t have possibly thought a speech like that would sell me,” I said. He was deliberately blithe as he shrugged.

“I thought it could. I still think it can. Good decisions are always the hard ones, babe, so take your time thinking about it,” he said, whipping the stack of letters out from his back pocket. “Just know that the longer you take, the more of these I’ll be reading.”

“Ethan – ”

“What?” he cut in. “Change your mind yet?”

“Of course not,” I hissed between my teeth, my hands shaking furiously at my sides.

He exaggerated a shrug. “Well. Just give it time then, babe. I promise you, it changes everything,” he said before shutting the door.

Chapter Twenty-Five

“I never thought I’d say this, but I’m kind of glad we’re heading up there a day early,” Riley said as she drove us to Hudson Valley in Travis’s old Audi. “I just need a fucking break from the city.”

I winced. My nails dug into the leather of the passenger seat as I recalled what Liam said to me the night before.

I need a break.

With those four words, I’d reached my official tipping point. If I was a mess before, I was a disaster now.

The unraveling had started the night of A.J’s dinner. That was the night the first wall went up between Liam and me. The second went up the night after, when he came home to find me quiet. My every word to him was strained and admittedly sounded like a lie, but that’s because it was exactly that. I had gone to Ethan’s in secret and failed epically to retrieve the letters from Owen. I was crumbling under the pressure of a million untruths, and it wasn’t hard for Liam to tell that something was different. That I wasn’t “fine,” and that I had no intention of telling him what happened.

I dodged about a dozen questions before he lost all patience with me.

“I can feel it, Sasha,” Liam growled, grabbing me on my way to my bedroom. “When you’re hurt. When you’re in any kind of pain, I can feel it in my own muscles, my own fucking bones. It tortures me. It drives me insane when I can’t help you, because all I think about is you, and you know that. But you’re still going to keep me in the dark. You’re still going to keep me guessing – aren’t you?”

I couldn’t come up with an answer for him. Not a good one at least. I considered coming clean about Ethan for a second, but then I saw Liam becoming violent the way he had with Tuck, but a thousand times worse. He hadn’t truly fought in years – in the ring or at a bar or anywhere – but I wasn’t convinced that that side of him was just gone. I saw how hard a fraction of it had come out on Tuck, and I had a feeling that it only needed the right reason to come out completely, and that Ethan would be his ideal excuse.

So I kept my mouth shut.

And for the next three days, I was the one who was kept guessing because he was gone. He didn’t come home for a minute. He didn’t answer my texts or my calls, and neither A.J nor Max had seen him at the gym.

It wasn’t till the third night that he finally messaged me back with words that tore my heart clean down the middle.

I’m sorry. I need a break.

“Damn it, Sash. It’s like buzzkill city in here,” Riley groaned. “Why did you even decide to come with me if you weren’t going to talk at all the whole ride?”

“I’m sorry,” I murmured.

I just need to see Liam.

My mother had asked Riley to come up a day early to help prep the food. Vic had asked Liam to do the same, needing someone to fix the stairs on the deck before guests arrived. That left me, alone and uninvited. It was obvious to me that my mother had no interest in seeing me if she didn’t have to, and under normal circumstances, I’d grant her that wish. But Liam hadn’t answered my texts since the last one he sent me, and I was falling apart fast. I needed to see him. I needed to know what was happening – what he was thinking, if there was even an us anymore. Every nerve ending in my body had spent the past few days fraying to nothing, and it was getting to the point where I could no longer stand my own company. I was neck-deep in fear, doubt and regret, and worst of all, I was afraid that if I opened my mouth for a second, everything would come pouring out.

So I kept mum the whole ride up to Hudson Valley. And more eagerly than ever, I anticipated seeing Liam.