My Stepbrother's Dirty Little Secret novel Chapter 423

Chapter 423

I laughed softly, “You really don’t see it?”

Raphael leaned back against the seat, “No.”

I shook my head slowly, “Of course you don’t. You never do.”

His eyes turned into two slits. I knew my words were hitting a nerve. I could tell I was hurting his pride,

but not because he cared about losing me. He was just mad because he couldn’t understand why I was reacting like this.

To him, this was just a business deal that had run its course and needed to be canceled. To him, it was just a bad idea that didn’t work out.

But to me? To me, it felt like the most humiliating, heartbreaking mistake of my entire life. I was dying inside because I loved him, and he was treating it like a broken contract.

My throat tightened again, “I think I finally see how ridiculous this whole thing looks.”

I looked down at the soft black fabric of his oversized shirt drowning my frame. The anger had drained right out of me, leaving nothing but a vast, hollow ache that made my bones feel heavy. I didn’t want to say anything anymore. I didn’t have the breath for it.

I lowered my eyes to the shirt hanging off my shoulders. His shirt. The fabric still carried traces of his scent. I stared at the loose fabric gathered in my lap. At the shirt, that was far too big for me. At all the small reminders of him that seemed impossible to escape.

Then I swallowed hard, “I don’t just want to end whatever this was between us. I want to end all of it, Raphael,” the lump in my throat grew painfully larger, “I want everything between us to be over.”

1 pressed my lips together afterward, holding back the rest, holding back the truth that hurt too much to say aloud because the real problem wasn’t being with him.

I took a slow, deep breath, forcing my hands to stay completely still in my lap so he wouldn’t see the tiny tremors in my fingers, “It means I don’t want you in my life. At all. Not in any way.”

He frowned, his forehead wrinkling as he tried to process the words, “We live in the same house. Our parents are married.”

“I don’t care,” I whispered, looking back out at the dark garage wall. “It only complicates things. It makes everything messy, and I can’t live like this anymore. I don’t want you as a stepbrother. I don’t want you as my family. I don’t want the platonic version of you, and I don’t want the version of you that looks out for me. I just want it over.”

Raphael leaned in a fraction of an inch closer, his large frame casting a long shadow over my side of the car.” Gianna, you’re not making any sense. We can’t just pretend we don’t know each other.”

“Yes, we can,” I said, finally turning my head to look right back into his eyes and I remembered the first time, I looked into them. The same light, piercing brown, like clover honey held up to a flame, “You will ignore me, and I will ignore you. When we pass each other in the hallways, we look away. When we sit at the dinner table with qur parents, we don’t speak. For you, I do not exist anymore. And for me, you are completely gone.”

A small, hard line formed between his eyebrows. He let out a short, rough breath through his nose, shaking his head just a fraction, “You’re overreacting right now. You had a rough night, you heard things that you shouldn’t have, and now you’re letting your head spiral.”