My Stepfather, My Ruin

Roxy The iron gates opened slowly as the car approached, and beyond them stretched an estate so vast I forgot to breathe for a second. I pressed my palm to the cool glass, watching the gates swing inward without a sound. A long driveway unspooled ahead of us, lined with trees clipped into identical shapes and stone lanterns spaced like they’d been measured. At the end of it stood a house that looked less like a home and more like a royal palace. “This is where he lives?” I asked quietly, my voice barely above a whisper. My mother smiled beside me, her eyes bright. “This is where we live now.” I turned to look at her. She looked happier than I’d seen her in years—happier, maybe, than I’d ever seen her. That should have been enough to settle me. Instead, something low and wordless sat in my stomach, refusing to move. “You really think this is going to work?” Her smile softened. “I do.” She reached across the seat and squeezed my hand. “Dorian’s given us a chance at a completely different life. All I’m asking is that you give him one too.” Dorian. Even in my head, the name sat strangely, too formal for a man I was apparently supposed to start calling family. I’d seen his face in magazines and headlines. A stranger with too many zeroes next to his name. I hadn’t expected to ever stand in his driveway, let alone move into whatever came after it. The car stopped at the base of the marble steps. Before the driver had even reached our door, the house opened itself—both doors at once, like it had been listening for the engine. Dorian stepped out onto the top step. He was older than the men I usually found myself around, but there was nothing soft about him for it. His black suit fit him perfectly, as though it had been tailored onto him. Silver touched his temples—the only sign, as far as I could tell, that time had ever found him. My mother was out of the car and across the gravel before I’d unclipped my seatbelt. “Dorian.” Whatever composed distance he’d held at the doorway dropped the second he looked at her. He came down to meet her, pulled her in, and pressed a kiss to her forehead like he’d been waiting all day to do it. I looked away, fixing my gaze on my lap, forcing myself to hold onto the quiet joy still on her face. Then I felt it—the weight of someone watching me. I turned, and his eyes were already there. He didn’t look at me the way a man looks at his new stepdaughter. He studied me the way you’d look at something you were deciding whether you wanted—slow enough that I felt every seam of my dress, every nervous angle of my own hands. “Roxy,” he said. His voice was deep, smooth, and commanding. I made myself step out of the car and hold his gaze. “Mr. Sinclair.” A faint, unreadable smile touched the corner of his lips. “Dad.” The word landed strangely, and I didn’t move for a second. Dad. I had one of those, once, a long time ago, in a small apartment with a radiator that clanked all winter—a man I still thought about at odd hours, whose face I was starting to lose the exact shape of. This was not that. This was a stranger in a suit that cost more than a year of our old rent, standing here and handing me a word like it was already his to give. “...Dad,” I forced out. “Good,” he said softly. Something in the lingering way he looked at me made the tiny hairs on my arms stand up. Then he stepped aside, gesturing toward the open doors. “Welcome home.” “Thank you,” I said, eyes down, and started up the steps after my mother—until his voice stopped me before I’d made it past him. “One thing, before we go in.” Dorian’s tone stayed light, almost conversational. “This house has rules, Roxy. Most of them exist to keep everyone comfortable. You’ll learn them as you go.” “What kind of rules?” “The kind you don’t need to worry about,” he said, “as long as you don’t go looking for reasons to test them.” It wasn’t a threat. Not exactly. But it felt like one hanging in the air. My mother laughed, a little too quickly, and hooked her arm through mine. It was almost like she was trying to pull me out of the awkwardness. “She’s just tired from the drive, Dorian. Aren’t you, sweetie?” I held his gaze a second longer than I should have. “Sure.” He held it right back, unbothered, almost amused. For some reason, it felt like he already knew exactly how this was going to go. He took my mother’s hand, lacing his fingers through hers, and led her inside. I followed a few paces behind them, my heart hammering against my ribs. The foyer alone could have swallowed our old apartment twice over. I’d thought the outside of the house was the impressive part. I was wrong. A row of staff stood waiting in the entryway, backs straight, heads bowing in unison. “Welcome home, Mrs. Sinclair. Welcome home, young miss.” Young miss. No one had ever called me that before. My mother’s hand rose to her chest, her breath catching, and I watched twenty years of double shifts and worn shoe soles dissolve into something like disbelief. “Thank you for your warm welcome,” she said, her voice trembling slightly. Dorian turned her gently to face him, one arm settling around her waist. “From today,” he said to the room, his voice carrying easily across the marble, “she is the lady of this house. My wife.” She pressed her face into his chest. He stroked her hair once, slow, like he had all the time in the world. Watching them, the tightness in my shoulders finally eased. He held her like a man with nowhere else he needed to be. “Mary.” He didn’t raise his voice, and a woman still stepped forward instantly, head bowed. “Sir.” “This is Roxy,” he said, his gaze shifting back to me. “She’ll need attending to.” I blinked, surprised to have been remembered at all. “Thank you, Dad.” The word came easier the second time. That, somehow, unsettled me more than the first. “Take her up,” Dorian said to Mary, already turning back to my mother. I followed Mary up a staircase wide enough to drive a car up, past hallways lined with art I didn’t recognize and probably couldn’t have priced if I tried. My bags were already waiting outside a set of double doors halfway down a corridor I hadn’t walked yet. I didn’t ask how they’d gotten there before me. “Your room, Miss,” Mary said, setting the bags by the closet. “Ring the bell if you need anything.” “Thank you.” The door clicked shut behind her, and only then did the air in my chest let go. The room was done in soft blush and cream, furnished the way a magazine spread is furnished—nothing out of place, nothing that looked lived in yet. It didn’t feel like mine. It didn’t feel like anyone’s. I crossed to the windows and pressed my fingers to the glass, looking down over the grounds—the trimmed trees, the lanterns, and the driveway stretching back toward a gate that had already closed behind us. Rules I didn’t need to worry about, as long as I didn’t go looking for reasons to test them. I didn’t know yet what those rules were. I didn’t know how far Dorian’s version of comfortable actually reached, or what happened to someone who crossed a line he hadn’t bothered to draw for her yet. But standing there, I understood. I’d just been warned. Politely, almost kindly. And I was already wondering how long it would take before I broke one anyway.