The Stepbrother's Toy

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He spat the most degrading insults in bed, but the hands gripping my thighs only tightened, digging bruising crescents into my skin.

Every time it was over, Roman never failed to drop his favorite reminder. You're just a toy for me to blow off steam. Know your place.

I gave a compliant nod.

Later, I secured a full ride and a massive relocation stipend, and without hesitation, I signed my acceptance letter to a top-tier university furthest from his control.

Roman called to interrogate me.

I kept my voice perfectly earnest. "The stress of the prep courses was getting to me. It's better to find a release than bottle it up, you know?"

A sharp crash echoed through the speaker, sounding like something heavy shattering against a wall. "Wren! Did you just use me as a fucking vibrator!?"

Chapter 1

"You're just as cheap as your mother. She seduced my dad, and you play hard to get with me." Roman's waist and abdomen flexed tight, every ridge of his abs cutting sharp shadows like carved marble.

Here we go again.

I regulated my breathing and rolled my eyes. It was always the same tired script in bed. He wasn't tired of saying it, but I was definitely tired of hearing it. I let out a dismissive hum, letting the insult slide right off me.

Honestly, it wasn't even an insult. Every word he said was true.

I bit my lower lip and tightened my core, instantly feeling the sharp hitch in his breath from above.

"Fuck! Say something if you have a problem! Are you playing dead again?"

I had no intention of making a sound. The most I ever gave him was a muffled, breathless gasp slipping past my lips.

Roman had hated that for a long time. "Can you drop the corpse act?"

I didn't reply, just silently shifted my position.

Roman's breathing grew even more ragged. "Don't you fucking turn your back on me!"

I cursed him out in my head, but kept my face blank.

When it was over, Roman pulled on his shirt. "You're just a toy for me to blow off steam. Know your place."

My whole body felt thoroughly satisfied. My brain buzzed with a pleasant haze. "Yeah, I know," I brushed him off.

His answer was the heavy door slamming shut.

Roman was my stepbrother.

Last year, my mother met his father, Lawrence. While I was grinding through my senior year finals, she was plotting her way into high society. After a year of our respective hard work, my college application was rejected, and she successfully became a wealthy trophy wife. So I started my hell-mode senior year do-overall to get that life-changing ticket to an Ivy League.

She started her anchor-baby projectgetting pregnant.

We both had bright futures ahead of us. Bullshit. She didn't give a damn about me. Because I was just the karma she got for tasting the forbidden fruit at eighteen.

I learned how to read a room from a young age. After moving into their sprawling estate, I quickly realized the center of power rested entirely on this newly-turned eighteen-year-old stepbrother. Even Lawrence, the supposed head of the household, had to walk on eggshells around Roman. A little digging revealed that Lawrence had signed a brutal prenuptial agreement to marry into money.

No wonder it took him ten years after his wife's death to remarryhe still had to answer to the sole heir of the family trust fund.

Karma never missed a beat.

I had sworn to never follow in my mother's footsteps, yet our paths looked identical. Exactly as Roman had put it. I played the weak, obedient girl for him, dangling the bait and pulling it back. Old tricks or new, all that mattered was that they worked.

Roman, a virgin who just got his first taste, was predictably hooked. And I was starting to reap the benefits.

For one, the physical release was incredibly relaxing. For another, crashing from pure exhaustion meant no more agonizing, sleepless nights. And then there was the fact that I could attend top-tier, thousand-dollar-an-hour Ivy League private tutoring every single day.

The elite tutors weren't hired specifically for me, of course. Roman was also in his senior year. I was just tagging along for the ride. But I was more than satisfied.

Roman looked down at me with disdain, scoffing. "Are you for real? Killing yourself just to get into college?"

I was for real. Very much so. I didn't have a trust fund or a powerful backer. The only way I was going to climb out of the mud and crush these people under my heel was to secure a full-ride offer from a top Ivy League school.

I didn't have the luxury of treating money like dirt the way the young master did.

But I kept my mouth shut.

Chapter 2

I flashed a sugary-sweet smile and slid right into Roman's lap, right under the elite tutor's nose. "I'm just trying to make myself worthy of you," I purred.

A flash of visible disgust tightened the corners of Roman's eyes. But with the tutor sitting right there, he swallowed whatever nasty comment he had loaded. He didn't even push me away. He just shot me a lethal glare and dropped his gaze back to his phone.

I slipped off his lap and turned my attention to the tutor, widening my eyes to fake a burning, desperate thirst for knowledge.

No teacher could resist a desperate overachiever. The guy who had been treating me like empty air finally started treating me like a human being.

The second the tutor walked out the door, Roman's true, rotten colors bled right back through. He crossed his arms and looked down his nose at me, a mocking smirk playing on his lips. His eyes tracked me like a predator sizing up a joke.

"Wren, did you forget something? Us hooking up is sick."

My spine locked up. My brain, fried from cramming, was moving at dial-up speed.

I blurted out the first thing I thought of. "We don't share a drop of blood. Besides, it's not like you've ever bothered to use a condom."

The smirk wiped clean off Roman's face. He stared at me for a long, heavy moment before spitting out, "Wren, you're so fucking shameless."

Shameless or not, Roman was addicted to the routine. The strict, suffocating upbringing of his elite family had molded him into exactly what he wasa polished golden shell hiding rotten guts. The more twisted and rebellious something was, the harder it hooked his attention. All that degrading dirty talk in bed was just his brain short-circuiting.

He was kneeling like a dog to his own lust while desperately trying to keep himself perched on some moral high ground.

In plain English? He was a massive hypocrite. Pathetic.

Everyone wants a piece of the top. I definitely wasn't the only one gunning for Roman. He was too damn blinding. The pedigree, the face, the absolute power.

He was the golden boy of the elite class. Set against the backdrop of our mundane high school, he practically glowed with untouchable privilege.

"Roman, I I like you!"

I rounded the corner right into the middle of the confession. The gorgeous school queen stood there in the dying sunlight, her cheeks flushed as she stumbled through her feelings. It was the picture-perfect scene of innocent first love.

The smile hadn't even fully formed on her face when Roman lifted his heavy eyelids and locked eyes straight with me over her shoulder.

I instantly dropped my blank expression, pasted on a smile, and shoved myself right between them. I planted myself like a guard dog, shielding Roman behind my back. "Can we help you with something?" I asked smoothly.

Aria froze, her fingers nervously crushing the edges of a pale envelope. "Roman, I wrote this for you. Please, you have to read it."

I waved her off dismissively with a breezy laugh. "Roman never takes love letters."

From what I knew, girls had been throwing themselves at his feet since freshman year. Without exception, he froze every single one of them out. Once I got my claws into him, I made damn sure no other girl got within breathing distance.

He got hundreds of letters a month. He usually just gave a faint shake of his head and turned them down with cold, flawless manners. He played the perfectly bred, untouchable heir to absolute perfection. I fully expected him to deliver his usual polite rejection.

But a second later, a low, amused voice drifted from over my shoulder. "Yeah. I'll make sure to read it."

Chapter 3

I whipped around, colliding with Roman's mocking gaze.

Aria stood there brimming with hope, her eyes sparkling, obnoxiously gorgeous. At that exact second, she looked like the living embodiment of every perfect word in the dictionary.

I stared blankly for a second. The threat alarm in my head blared.

Roman didn't even pull his eyes away until she disappeared around the corner.

I pressed my lips into a thin line. "Is Aria really that pretty?"

Roman slowly dragged his gaze over to me. He scanned me up and down, letting his eyes linger heavily on the curve of my waist and then my chest. He didn't say a single word. But the heavy weight of his stare stripped me down to the bone, leaving me exposed.

A short scoff escaped his lips. "She's the school queen. Obviously, she's gorgeous." Roman lifted the pale pink envelope to his nose and took a slow inhale. Then, he casually flicked it back and forth right in front of my face.

The scent hit mecrisp but warm, with an addictive, heavy amber-wood base note. He scoffed. "Dior Sauvage. Doesn't that have a little more class than that cheap, discount-store synthetic crap you wear?"

That night, I risked it all and slipped into Roman's room.

He had just stepped out of the shower. His desk was completely covered in his Ivy League early admissions application materials. The second he saw me, a deep crease formed between his brows. "Wren, I told you. Never in the house."

Deep down, Roman was disgusted by how sick this whole thing was. That was why we never crossed the line into anything other than step-siblings under this roof. We only ever checked into hotels when he needed to get off. The moment we stepped back into the estate, we played the part of a perfectly normal blended family.

But Aria had pushed me over the edge today.

I slowly let the heavy bathrobe slip off my shoulders, revealing the ridiculous, barely-there sailor outfit underneath. In the dead silence of the room, the only sound was the sharp hitch of Roman's breath. He didn't tell me to get out again. I knew exactly what I was doing.

The spoiled heir had never seen anything like these flimsy scraps of fabric before.

I took slow, deliberate steps toward his desk, hoisted myself up right onto his application papers, and stared dead at him. I finally dropped the first words of the night. "I'm not wearing anything underneath."

Roman was absolute animalistic chaos that night. But I welcomed every second of it.

Earlier that day, my counselor had told me my mock SAT scores were flawless, practically guaranteeing my shot at a top-tier school. The suffocating weight that had been crushing my chest for weeks finally evaporated. I desperately needed a release for all that pent-up adrenaline. I needed to blow off steam just as much as he did.

Right at the breaking point, a sound tore from my throata ragged gasp caught somewhere between sharp pain and pure ecstasy.

Roman completely froze above me. A single bead of sweat tracked down his sharp jawline. He looked wild, dangerous. A low, dark chuckle vibrated in his chest.

"What's going on with you today? Did someone get a little jealous?"

I shook my head against the desk. "You're leaving for the East Coast the day after tomorrow," I lied smoothly. "I'm just going to miss you."

The smirk vanished from Roman's face in an instant, replaced by pure ice. He leaned down and bit hard into the shell of my ear, sending a sharp, stinging pain shooting through me. He ground the words out, syllable by vicious syllable. "Don't. Make. Me. Sick."

But his pace didn't slow downit turned frantic, bruising. His fingers dug tighter into my hips, leaving dark, purpling crescents blooming against my skin.

I was an expert at surviving the world's malice. Roman's petty little insults slid right off my back. Poor Roman didn't even know how to throw a verbal punch that actually landed.

He flew to the East Coast to attend an Ivy League summer camp, with Aria right by his side.

Because the ultra-elite needed those padded resumes for their legacy applications. I didn't have to waste my time worrying about any of that. I just kept my head down and marched straight toward my single, brutal path to a full ride.

Chapter 4

For the rest of the week, I buried myself back into the suffocating grind of practice tests. Then, on a blindingly bright afternoon, my fingers brushed against a small tube of ointment shoved to the back of my desk.

A faint, woody amber scent drifted up. If I hadn't pressed the plastic right to my nose, I wouldn't have even caught it.

Dior Sauvage.

Yeah. It did smell damn good.

After Roman and Aria came back from their Ivy League summer camp, rumors about them suddenly blew up around campus. It was the usual high school gossip. They were doing the whole talking-stage routinetesting the waters with dates, grabbing food, going to the movies. The only thing they weren't doing was studying, as if the impending SATs didn't even exist in their untouchable universe.

I played completely dumb. I stayed out of Roman's way and made sure I was invisible whenever he was around. We just kept up our twice-a-week hotel schedule.

The only difference was how often I caught him staring blankly at his phone screen. I had a front-row seat to watch Roman fall hard for a girl who outclassed me in looks, pedigree, and character.

The fall semester wrapped up fast, throwing us straight into a precious fifteen-day winter break.

Over the Christmas holidays, I locked myself in my room, aggressively grinding through practice questions and drilling for the final SATs.

Even Lawrence, who usually treated me like a piece of furniture, actually stopped to compliment me. "Wren's doing great. She's definitely going to have a bright future ahead of her."

I knew he was just being polite, and I knew he didn't give a damn about my future. That was fine. I didn't need to own anything in this world. I just needed to use it.

Maybe the universe decided I needed a forced system reboot, because on New Year's Eve, my body officially crashed. I lay tangled in my bedsheets, a high fever burning away my grip on reality.

But my hearing was terrifyingly sharp. The sharp pops of fireworks outside, the muffled countdown on the TV, the roaring laughter echoing up from the living room downstairs.

And then, Serena's shrill, ecstatic announcement slicing through it all: "I'm pregnant, honey! We're having a baby!"

Wow.

How blissful for them. It was just a little too loud. I couldn't focus on memorizing my flashcards.

That was exactly when Roman pushed my door open.

Looking utterly impatient, he shoved a pill into my mouth and forced me to choke down a liquid medicine that tasted like pure battery acid. I knew for a fact there was a symptom-relief syrup downstairs that didn't taste like literal poison. There was only one explanation. Roman did it on purpose.

He stood over my bed, taking his time admiring how pathetic I looked. After a long, heavy silence, he finally spoke. "Wren. Come study abroad with me."

I stared into his eyes, looking for a punchline, but he actually looked serious. A dry laugh scratched its way out of my throat. "I haven't prepped a single thing for international applications. I wouldn't get into anywhere decent."

The tension between his brows instantly melted at my words. Even his tone softened up. "It doesn't matter. There are plenty of schools you can just buy your way into."

I dragged myself up and let my head drop onto his thigh with a smile, completely ignoring the way his muscles went rigid underneath me. "Roman, thank you so much."

Thank you for keeping those pay-to-play diploma mills in mind just for me.

Winter break was only supposed to last two weeks, but those rules didn't apply to Roman. He already had his Ivy League acceptance letters lined up on his desk. He was just taking an extended vacation at home.

I even bumped into him a few times heading out for dates.

Roman stiffened instantly, his thumb unconsciously rubbing the side of his nose. "I've got somewhere to be