Wrong: A Stepbrother Romance

It took an hour, but I listened to him.

* * *

In the morning, Liam’s nightstand was clear. No cell phone. No wallet. When I called, it went straight to voicemail. When my bare feet padded downstairs, I found Aria wandering the kitchen area, craning her neck into various rooms. I took one look at her bewildered face and knew she was wondering exactly what I was. The front door ajar, we turned when A.J came back in wearing just his flannel sweats. He raked his hand through his messy hair, looking as confused as he did completely stressed.

“Yeah, he took the rental, too,” he confirmed.

And with that, we knew that Liam was gone.

Chapter Thirty-One

His cell was still off, and no one had seen or heard from him all day.

But I knew Max was lying to me.

I touched down at LaGuardia at 7PM. The flight from Colorado had been the longest six-and-a-half hours of my life, but in that time, A.J helped me figure out the in-flight texting, and I managed to message the guys from the gym who might not know to lie to me.

Hey sash! Called him couldn’t get through. Haven’t gotten to the gym yet but I’ll let you know if I see him.

The only one who took my bait was Shane, the gym’s newest arrival. When he did check in however, it was with little information.

He’s not here no one has seen him. Tried to ask Max but he’s not here the guys said he hasn’t been in yet today. Sorry!

Knowing not to check the gym, I had the cab go straight from the airport to the apartment while Aria went with A.J to look in some of Liam’s other spots.

My heart was pounding as I waited for the elevator to open onto our floor. I burst out the second I did, soon finding myself in an apartment empty of Liam but not his bags. The luggage he’d taken to Vail was placed by the door. But it was still full of the clothes he’d dirtied while snowboarding. Next to it, I spotted a single footprint that told me Liam had stepped halfway into the apartment to drop off his luggage, and that was all he had done before heading right back out.

A dark feeling spread through me as I thought about where he went with such urgency.

Tossing my own bag into the apartment, I slammed the door. Fear rattled every bone in my body, but I kept my composure as best as I could, flying out the building onto the sidewalk and hailing the first cab I saw to the Upper East Side.

* * *

Back when I lived with him, Ethan was the one who yelled at me when I forgot to padlock the door, even if it was already twice locked. As the proud owner of “hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of the rarest baseball memorabilia,” he was absolutely paranoid about security.

So I knew something was wrong when I found his front door ajar.

Frozen, I stood in the hallway outside his apartment, my urgency sucked away and replaced with dread. I could hear his television playing ESPN – what he generally put on as background noise. The faint voices of the commentators chatted and laughed on as I stepped one foot in front of the other, reminding myself to rinse and repeat despite my pure trepidation.

I told myself I was imagining the smell of blood when I neared the door.

But when I pushed it open, I saw the angry dashes of red on the polished hardwood – the splatters and the bloody footprints patterned across the floor. My hand covered my mouth as I stopped in the doorframe, gripping it tightly till my eyes followed the trail of blood to Ethan’s limp body on the floor, propped haphazardly up against the couch. Bile rose in my throat when my eyes traveled over his injuries, across all the wide-open gashes. Then I met the white of his eyes already staring at me.

“Hello,” he said.

A chill ran through me. It wasn’t the greeting I expected, and while I hadn’t come here with a plan, I stood even more lost and confused as I gaped at Ethan sitting on the floor of our old apartment, half-dead but trying to grin at me. The whites of his eyes jumped out at me from under the caked blood on his face. I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to say to him. I could have asked what happened, but I knew exactly what did. I imagined Liam had come early to Ethan’s apartment, maybe sat on the steps leading up to the roof till he saw Ethan walk in, headphones on as usual, paying no attention to the staircase behind him. Once Ethan opened the door, Liam forced his way in.

I looked down to see the dried footprints of his boots still wet from the Colorado snow. They traveled neatly throughout the living room area, some prints half blood, half snow. I saw Ethan’s laptop open and an empty envelope on the floor, and just like that, I knew that because of Liam, the Facebook post was gone, and my letters from Owen were no longer under this roof.

I had nothing to say, really.

If anything, I needed to start pleading.

“He’s screwed, you know.”

I looked up from the blood on the floor to Ethan’s eyes. I stepped in and shut the door. Only then did I notice Daisy. My heart flipped when my eyes landed on her – finally up close and in real life, after so many months of obsessing over her every puppy-eyed snapshot on social media. I wished my first time physically near her wasn’t this way. She was behind the closed French doors of the bedroom, barely visible as she cowered into the corner. All I saw was the top of her head and her big scared eyes peering out from under that deeply furrowed brow. I heard her whimper as my feet drew closer into the apartment.

“Poor thing, Daisy,” Ethan clucked. His voice was tired and throaty. He cursed and winced as he adjusted his position, his left arm immobile and draped over his stomach like dead weight. Under the dried blood on his face, I could see a deep cut over his black eye. His nose was swollen beyond recognition. Still, he spoke to me casually, as if he had the upper hand.