Chapter 2My Stepbrothers Became Darkly Obsessed

Serena and I are identical twins.

We share the exact same face. We share absolutely none of the same personality traits.

Serena reads obscure French poetry; I devour double cheeseburgers. Serena is the picture of poise; I’m a walking hurricane.

We only have one thing in common.

We are both incredibly pretentious.

To prove how "different" and deep we were, Serena and I would camp out at the local artisanal coffee shop with our MacBooks, looking brooding and intellectual for ten hours straight.

Because we thought adopting a dog or a cat was too basic, I bought a ball python, and she bought an iguana.

Beyond that, our daily routine consisted of viciously competing with one another. We competed over who could eat more, who could fail an exam more spectacularly, who had a better metabolism, and who could curse someone out more creatively.

Our mother, trapped between us, had a miserable time trying to keep the peace.

Finally, after one too many nights of being forced to choose whether the snake or the iguana was "cuter" before we went to bed, our mother snapped.

She decided she wasn't going to suffer alone anymore.

She was going to find a husband to draw some of our fire.

Enter Richard.

Richard was a widower of many years, dragging along two grown sons. In the high-society dating market, he was considered damaged goods.

Our mother took one look at his bank accounts and zeroed in on him.

Serena and I took one look at him and zeroed in on... his sons.

Devin was twenty-seven. Kieran was twenty-five.

Devin was ice-cold, impossibly arrogant, and ruled by logic. He was the quintessential, untouchable CEO from a romance novel.

Kieran was the gentle aristocrat. Soft-spoken, warm, yet shadowed by the tragedy of his paralyzed legs, which gave him an air of fragile melancholy.

I stared at Devin, practically salivating.

"I want to see that ice-king lose his mind. It would be intoxicating."

Serena stared at Kieran, her eyes dark.

"I want to pin him down and make him cry."

Like I said, Serena and I are family. We have the exact same twisted DNA running through our veins.

We were creatures of impulse. If we wanted something, we took it.

I was the action-taker. I immediately drafted a battle plan to conquer the older brother. I bought him absurdly expensive watches, sent him texts, ambushed him for lunches and movies. I studied his coffee orders, his habits, trying to dismantle his defenses brick by brick.

After a year of this, my progress was exactly zero.

Serena believed in the slow burn. She thought love should seep in like water into soil. Whenever she had a free moment, she was pushing Kieran’s wheelchair through the gardens. She talked to him about art, the moon, life, and philosophy. She listened to him talk about the trauma of losing his mother and the agonizing pain of losing his legs.

But Kieran’s heart was apparently made of Kevlar.

"Kieran said I'm too young, and that I'm just confusing pity for love," Serena complained to me once.

"Devin said my constant presence is a sign of deep-seated attachment issues," I grumbled back.

"Kieran said legally, it's frowned upon."

"Devin said he has a corporate image to maintain and won't involve himself in a scandal."

We both sighed heavily.

This was the first time either of us had seriously pursued anyone. We just assumed we hadn't tried hard enough, hadn't dug deep enough into their souls.

The more we failed, the harder we pushed. The more they pushed us away, the more obsessed we became.

It grew into a sickness. A total fixation.

But it turned out, we were just living inside the pages of a novel.

Serena and I were the cannon fodder. The evil stepsisters. Devin and Kieran were the male leads.

Their entire universe was meant to revolve around the heroine. Serena and I were just the pathetic catalysts meant to push the main characters closer together. We were flat, one-dimensional tools. We were never, ever going to get a text back.

Under the invisible hand of the plot, we had slowly been driven insane, pushed toward making unforgivable choices, destined to die penniless and ruined.

I looked down at the powder dusted across my knuckles.

A cold sweat broke out over my entire body.