Trapped With My Husband's Cruel Brother

The fire popped once, and then the cabin went quiet again.

I was still staring at his forearm. At those silver lines catching the amber light, neat and parallel and old. My throat was doing something I couldn't control — tightening, releasing, tightening again — and I kept my eyes on the scars because if I looked at his face I would fall apart completely.

"What time?" he asked.

The question was so simple it almost didn't register.

"Three months ago," I said.

"How many times?"

"Once." I swallowed. "Once was enough."

"Colton."

"Doesn't know."

Silence. The fire hissed. Outside the blizzard pushed against the windows with a low, sustained moan.

"Mine started at seventeen," Sterling said. His voice was completely level. Not careful, not gentle — just even, like he was reading off facts about someone else's life. "Stopped at twenty-three. Seven years of it. Then I stopped."

He pulled his sleeve back down.

I finally looked at his face. He wasn't watching me with pity. He wasn't watching me with horror. He was watching me the way he'd watched me since I walked out of the tree line with my suitcase — like I was an equation he'd already mostly solved and was waiting on the last variable.

"Can I see?" he asked.

Two syllables. That was all. And something in the way he said it — no pressure underneath, a door held open that I could walk right past — made my heart clench harder than anything that had come before it.

My rational mind lined up its objections in quick, clean order. I'd known him for less than a day. He was my husband's brother. I didn't know anything about him, not really, not the parts that mattered. This was too fast. Too much. Too dangerous.

But that other part of me — the part that had sat in the baby's room we'd already half-furnished, the night after I came home from the hospital, and pressed a broken razor against my own skin just to feel something other than nothing — that part was so tired of being alone with it.

I reached down and folded back the leg of my sleep pants. Slowly. Past the knee, up along my inner thigh.

The scar was there. One. Pale against my skin, four inches long, higher than anything a skirt hem or a swimsuit would ever reveal. I'd been deliberate about that too.

Sterling slid off the couch.

He knelt in front of me on the floor, and the firelight fell across his face from below, and for a moment he looked like something from a painting — all shadows and sharp lines and the kind of stillness that isn't absence but attention.

He looked at the scar. He didn't flinch. He didn't say *oh, Harper* in a voice soft with horror. His expression was recognition. That was the only word for it. The look of someone who knew the exact road that had led there.

His hand lifted toward my leg. He stopped with his fingers an inch above my skin.

"Okay?"

I nodded.

The moment his fingertips touched the scar I shuddered — full-body, involuntary. Not pain. Nothing like pain. It was the shock of being touched somewhere that had never been touched by another person, a place I had kept sealed off and secret for three months while I smiled at dinner parties and answered emails and slept beside my husband like a woman who was completely fine.

His touch was barely there. Feather-light. His fingers traced the length of the scar slowly, like he was reading it, learning the exact shape of it. The fire popped and I held my breath.

Then he lowered his head.

His lips pressed against the scar.

Not a kiss. That's not what it was. It was something older than a kiss — quieter, more serious. His mouth just rested there, warm and still, and I felt it travel up through my skin and into my ribcage and settle somewhere near my throat.

My hand moved on its own. My fingers found his hair.

I didn't push him away. I curled my fingers into the dark strands and held on, and the fire crackled and the wind screamed and neither of us moved for a long moment — him kneeling with his lips against the worst thing I'd ever done to myself, me with my hand in his hair holding on like it was the only solid thing in the room.

Then a log in the fireplace collapsed. Sparks scattered against the grate, bright and sudden, and the spell broke.

Sterling lifted his head.

His eyes in the firelight were amber, nothing like Colton's pale blue. He looked at me and I looked at him and we were both breathing a little harder than made any sense.

"Your husband," he said. His voice was low. Careful. "After the miscarriage. What did he do?"

I blinked. The shift was jarring — from that silence into words, into Colton's name hanging in the air between us.

"He was there," I said. "He took a week off work."

"And then?"

"Then he went back."

"You were still bleeding."

Not a question. I looked away. "More or less."

"Did he touch you?"

"What?"

"After." His voice stayed even. "Did he hold you. Put his arms around you. Anything like that."

I opened my mouth to say *of course he did* — and then I stopped. Because I was looking for the memory. Searching for it the way you search for something you've misplaced, checking the usual spots, and finding them empty.

Colton bringing me water. Colton making calls from the hallway. Colton on the couch with his laptop while I lay in the bedroom and stared at the ceiling.

Colton not touching me.

Not once.

"Two months," Sterling said quietly. "He didn't touch you for two months after."

I stared at him. "How could you possibly—"

"Because I know him." Something in his voice went flat. "Did it start after the miscarriage? Or was it before?"

The tears came without warning. Not slow and dignified — just there, sudden and hot, rolling down my face before I could do a single thing about it. I pressed my palm against my mouth.

Because the answer was *before*. It had started before. I had just been too busy convincing myself it was stress, work pressure, the exhaustion of trying for a baby, to call it what it actually was.

A man sitting two feet across from me, a man I'd known for less than twenty-four hours, had just dismantled two years of careful lying in less than five minutes.

Sterling stood. He didn't say anything. He walked to the kitchen and I heard the pour of bourbon, two glasses. He set one beside me without a word and carried the other to the window, standing with his back to me, looking out at the white wall of the storm.

His silhouette was still. The glass in his hand caught a faint orange reflection from the fireplace.

"You want to know why Colton sent you here," he said. Not a question. "Or you want to know why he pushed me out of this family seven years ago."

He turned. The bourbon light moved in his glass.

"The answer is the same."