Chapter 321 - 0321: I Wanted You All To Myself

Chapter 321: Chapter 0321: I Wanted You All To Myself

Elena’s Point Of View

The silence that settled over the bedroom afterward wasn’t the light, airy kind. It was thick, heavy, and smelled like old bricks after a thunderstorm. The central AC gave a lonely, metallic shudder somewhere behind the wall, dropping the room’s temperature another fraction of a degree, but with me still straddling his thighs, the heat between us felt almost suffocating.

My skin prickled with awareness, every point of contact between our bodies a small fire. I could feel the rise and fall of his chest beneath me, each breath deliberate and measured, as though he were counting them.

Jaxx’s hands didn’t drop away from my shirt. Instead, his large, rough palms slid flat against the bare skin of my lower back, his fingers anchoring into the small of my spine. He started moving them in slow, heavy circles, pressing hard, dragging the heat of his skin against mine as if he were trying to physically anchor himself to the mattress or to the earth itself.

The pressure was grounded, almost desperate. Every time his calloused thumbs caught on the ridge of my spine, his chest would give a small, ragged hitch. I could feel his heartbeat through the thin fabric of his shirt, irregular and too fast, like a drum losing its rhythm.

I stayed completely still, my forehead resting right against his collarbone, my nose buried in the scent of his skin and the faint, bitter trace of the cold water we’d shared. My arms were still looped loosely over his massive shoulders, but my muscles felt like melted lead. The pure, bone-deep exhaustion from the last three days of hiding in my dark house was starting to creep back into my limbs, making my eyelids heavy.

Part of me wanted to sink into this moment, to let the warmth and weight of him pull me under into sleep. Another part of me knew that whatever was happening here was too important to miss, too fragile to let slip away into unconsciousness.

Then, out of absolutely nowhere, the rhythmic movement of his hands stopped. His fingers clenched into my skin, just enough to hurt a little, and he pulled me a fraction of an inch closer, his chin resting heavily on top of my head. I felt him take a deep breath, his chest expanding beneath me, then releasing slowly as if he were preparing himself for something monumental.

"I was born out of wedlock," he said.

The words didn’t fly out. They dropped into the quiet space between us like iron weights, heavy and final, sinking into the stillness with an almost audible thud.

My entire body went rigid. The breath I had been taking caught right in the middle of my throat, making me choke slightly. Of all the things I expected to come out of Jaxx’s mouth in the dark after a month of absolute radio silence, a family confession was at the very bottom of the list. He didn’t talk about his family. He barely acknowledged he had blood in his veins, let alone a lineage.

In all the years I’d known him, he’d built walls around that part of his life so high and so thick that I’d stopped trying to scale them. I’d assumed they were permanent, impenetrable. Now, apparently, he was tearing them down brick by brick, and I wasn’t sure I was ready for what lay behind them.

"My mother was Sebastian’s mistress," he continued, his voice dropping into a low, gravelly drone that lacked any of his usual theatrical sarcasm. It was just flat. Raw. Stripped of all the armor he usually wore like a second skin. "But the kicker is... she never knew he was married. Not for a long time. He lied to her from the very first day they met in Chicago. He told her he was completely single. Just a lonely businessman traveling on the oil dime, looking for connection in a cold city."

I felt a cold drop of sweat slide down the side of my neck. I didn’t want to hear this. No, scratch that, I did want to hear it, my brain was screaming with a decade’s worth of curiosity, but the sudden vulnerability coming off him was so intense it made my own chest feel tight and exposed.

It felt like watching a marble statue suddenly start to bleed, watching something I’d thought was invincible reveal its fragility. My fingers curled involuntarily against his shoulders, seeking purchase in something solid, something that wouldn’t crumble beneath my touch.

I pulled my head back, my palms flat against his chest, forcing him to look up at me. His dark eyes were completely blank, staring through me rather than at me, fixed on some old ghost on the ceiling. The shadows under his eyes seemed deeper in the dim light, carved into his face like permanent fixtures. He looked older in that moment, worn down by memories I couldn’t see but could feel radiating off him in waves.

"Jaxx," I said, my voice cracking slightly from the stuffiness in my throat. I shook my head, my loose hair sweeping across his cheeks. "Stop. You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to... okay? I’m serious. I am not forcing you to do this. You don’t owe me your childhood trauma just because I showed up here with a bad attitude and a chip on my shoulder."

Jaxx looked at me then, the dark pupils of his eyes focusing on my face with sudden clarity. A tiny, barely visible smile twitched at the corner of his mouth... not his arrogant smirk, but something small and tired and achingly genuine. He leaned up, his lips pressing against mine in a quick, firm, dry kiss that tasted like old salt, then he pulled back just an inch, his hot breath brushing my nose.

His hand came up to cup the side of my face, thumb tracing the curve of my cheekbone with unexpected tenderness, as though I were something precious he was afraid of breaking.

"I know," he murmured, his hands resuming that heavy, grounding rub against my lower back, his thumbs tracing my waistline over and over in a hypnotic rhythm. "I know you’re not forcing me, Bambina. But I want to. I actually want to because you deserve to know. If I want to do this... if I want to keep you in my life without you constantly looking at the door like you’re waiting for the floor to drop out from under us, I want to be clean. Clean and open. With you. Only you." His voice cracked on those last two words, and I felt something in my chest crack right along with it, a fissure opening up in the protective wall I’d built around my own heart.

I swallowed hard, the plastic taste of the bottled water long gone, leaving my mouth dry and my throat tight. I wanted to say something witty... something to break the heavy, heart-opening ache that was starting to form right behind my ribs, but the sheer look of exhaustion in his jaw stopped me. The vulnerability etched into every line of his face made any attempt at deflection feel like a betrayal.

This wasn’t the time for deflection or humor. This was the time to simply listen, to bear witness to whatever he needed to unburden himself of. I kept my mouth shut, lowered my hands back to his shoulders, and just allowed him to talk. My fingers traced small, soothing circles against the fabric of his shirt, a silent encouragement, a wordless promise that I was here and I wasn’t going anywhere.

"My mom found out about his real family when she came down to Texas," he said, his voice dropping into that rhythmic, storytelling register that suggested he’d rehearsed this moment in his head a thousand times but never found the courage to speak it aloud. "She thought she was coming here to build a life with him. She had packed everything she owned, left her family behind, burned bridges she thought she didn’t need anymore. She was completely heartbroken, Elena. Just shattered."

His voice grew rougher, thicker with emotion he was trying to contain, trying to keep from spilling over. "My grandfather... he was a powerful man back in the day, old-school Italian money. The kind of man people whispered about in restaurants and crossed the street to avoid. He wanted to completely ruin Sebastian. He had the paperwork, the leverage, the local connections to drag the Sinclair name through the dirt before it even became the empire it is now. But my mom... she begged him not to. She was too soft for the business, too gentle for the kind of war he wanted to wage. She didn’t want the war. She still loved Sebastian, even after everything, even after he’d destroyed her entire world with his lies. Can you imagine that? Loving someone who treated you like you were disposable?"

The question hung in the air between us, rhetorical but weighted with genuine bewilderment. I could hear the incomprehension in his voice, the way he still couldn’t understand his mother’s choice after all these years.

’Yeah, I can.’ I thought as the image of Graham flashed through my mind.

"So what happened?" The question slipped out before I could check myself, my curiosity overriding my intention to stay silent. My fingers tightened on his linen shirt, bunching the fabric in my fists, anchoring myself to him as though his story might pull me under if I didn’t hold on.

"When she had me, I didn’t stay in the Sinclair circle. I stayed with my grandfather," Jaxx said, his jaw clenching so hard a small muscle near his ear began to throb. I watched it pulse beneath his skin, a physical manifestation of the pain he was reliving, the anger he still carried like a stone in his chest. "Sebastian never wanted me. Not for a single second. Because he saw my mom as beneath him,,, just some girl from a different neighborhood he could play with and discard when he got bored or when she became inconvenient.

"He didn’t know the actual power her father held because my mom hid her identity from him too. She wanted to be loved for who she was, not her family’s ledger or her last name. So he treated her like garbage. Like a mistake he could pay to go away, a problem he could solve with a check and a cold shoulder."

His hands stilled on my back, fingers pressing hard into my skin as if he needed to hold onto something real, something present, something that proved he’d survived the past and made it to this moment. "And by extension, he treated me the same way. Like I was a stain on his perfect life, an inconvenient reminder of his indiscretion that he wished he could erase."

I released a ragged breath, my heart delivering a heavy, painful thud against my ribs. The complexity of it all left me dizzy. I’d known Jaxx for years... first as the terror of our high school halls, then as this shadow figure lurking in the city’s underbelly, but I had always assumed he was just another privileged, wealthy brat who chose the dark side out of sheer boredom. How wrong I’d been.

"By the time I grew up," Jaxx continued, his hands moving faster against my back now, his touch growing slightly more frantic as the memories caught up with him, "Sebastian wanted absolutely nothing to do with me. I was a liability. A walking reminder that he wasn’t the perfect, golden patriarch he pretended to be in the local papers." His voice dropped lower, tinged with old wounds that had never quite healed. "And then... there was Graham."

The mention of his name made the air in the room turn instantly freezing. I felt goosebumps rise along my arms.

"Graham and I went to the exact same school," Jaxx whispered, his eyes narrowing into cold, dangerous slits. The muscle in his jaw twitched. "You remember. You were there. But no one in those hallways knew we were half-brothers. Not a single soul." He paused, and I could see the bitterness etched into every line of his face.

"He carried Sebastian’s name... Sinclair, the golden boy, the heir to the oil and the real estate, the one the teachers smiled at and fawned over. While I carried my grandfather’s name. Moretti. My mom didn’t want me having any connection whatsoever with them. No money, no titles, no blood drama. She thought she was protecting me from the hate, from the scandal that would follow me like a shadow."

"But it didn’t work," I murmured, my heart breaking a little at the thought of sixteen-year-old Jaxx standing in the same cafeteria as his brother, completely ignored. Two boys who shared blood but nothing else, passing each other like strangers.

"No, it didn’t," he agreed with a harsh, cynical laugh that sounded like dry leaves scraping on concrete. "We ignored each other’s existence at school. Completely. If he walked into a room, I walked out. If I was at a party, he stayed near the door, as far from me as possible. I grew to absolutely resent them, Elena. Both of them. Sebastian and Graham." His fingers dug slightly into my skin, as if anchoring himself to the present.

"It was this dull, simmering acid in the back of my throat for years. Every day I saw Graham’s face, heard his name called with respect and admiration, it burned. But later on... after I left the state and started handling my own business, I discarded the thought of them. I told myself they didn’t matter. That they were dead to me." The words sounded hollow, like he’d never quite believed them himself.

He paused, his hands tightening on my waist, pulling my hips so hard against his that I could feel the sharp ridge of his hipbones pressing into me. The intensity in his grip spoke volumes about the emotions churning beneath his controlled exterior. He looked up at me, his dark eyes suddenly shifting from the past right back into the dead center of my face, locking onto mine with an intensity that made my breath catch.

"And then I saw you again," he whispered, his voice rough with something I couldn’t quite name.

My throat went completely dry. "Jaxx..."

"At first, when I saw you again after all those years after school... and you offered that ridiculous, desperate deal to make Graham jealous..." He let out a low chuckle, though there was no humor in it, only a dark, self-deprecating edge.

"I accepted it because some dark, ugly part of me wanted to take what was his. I wanted to watch him realize that the one thing he actually wanted... the perfect, pristine Elena was something he couldn’t have. I wanted to see the look on his face when he realized I’d taken it." His confession hung in the air between us, raw and honest.

I felt a sharp, painful prick of frustration in my chest. Heat flooded my face as anger and old embarrassment warred within me. I tried to pull back, needing distance from this revelation. "So I was just a pawn? A stupid little trophy for your family feud?"

"Let me finish, princess," he growled gently, his hands refusing to let me move even an inch away from him. The endearment softened the command. He leaned his forehead against mine, our noses brushing, his breath hot and frantic now against my lips. "Over time... I didn’t care about that anymore. The feud completely vanished. Because I realized... I wanted you." His voice cracked slightly on those last words, revealing a vulnerability I’d rarely seen in him.

"Not because of some stupid, childish deal. Not because of Graham. But because I am a selfish, greedy bastard, Elena. I didn’t want to share your time, your looks, your arguments with anyone else in the world. Every smile you gave someone else felt like a theft. Every moment you spent thinking about Graham instead of me drove me insane."

His thumbs traced small circles on my hips, a gentle counterpoint to the fierce possession in his voice. "I just wanted you entirely to myself. It became less about hurting Graham... and more about making you mine. Completely mine. Body, heart, and soul."