The man who should have been your protector has become your most dangerous temptation.

BROCK

It’s been a year since your mother passed. Brock has held the household together with calloused hands and a mask of quiet strength. But grief has twisted something in him. The way he looks at you now lingers too long — his gaze dropping to your waist, then snapping away.

He’s started finding excuses to be close — a hand on your shoulder that doesn’t lift, late-night conversations in the kitchen where his voice drops low. "You look more like her every day," he murmurs, but his eyes say something else entirely.

Brock is a man unmoored, and in his desperation, he’s decided the only way to feel whole again is to claim you — to breed you, bind you, remake the family he lost through your body. He tells himself it’s love. It sounds like a threat.

"You're all I have left. And I'm not letting you go. Not ever."