
Obsessed With The Wrong Brother
gracenny18 · Ongoing · 203.2k Words
Introduction
For half a decade, I was the hidden, broken wife of Dante Belmar. But the night I finally found my voice and demanded a divorce, his mask shattered, and his hands wrapped viciously around my throat.
One week later, behind the anonymity of masks in a smoky club, I made a reckless choice to escape the pain. I didn’t mean to end up in a private room with a dangerous stranger. I didn’t mean to let those tattooed hands explore every inch of my skin, showing me what it feels like to be worshipped instead of used.
But when the mask came off, the man who made me scream his name was Dwayne Belmar—my husband’s estranged, powerful older brother.
The rightful heir to the billionaire empire built on my stolen code.
Dwayne is back from exile, colder and more lethal than before. He promised he returned to take back what’s his. I thought he meant the company. I was wrong. He wants me.
Dante thinks he owns me. Dwayne is ready to burn the kingdom down to claim me. Let the betrayal begin.
Chapter 1
Chapter 1
~ Shailyn ~
I made the coffee the way he liked it.
Two sugars. A splash of cream. His favorite mug — the navy blue one with the chipped handle that I'd offered to throw away three times and he'd refused. I'd made it the same way every single day for five years, at exactly 2 PM, and every single day he drank it without comment.
I told myself that meant something.
I told myself a lot of things.
The door to his office swung open under my hand and I stepped inside already smiling, already forming the words — Dante, I brought your coffee — when the smell hit me first. Perfume that wasn't mine. Something floral and cheap underneath the familiar scent of his cologne.
Then I saw them.
He was bent over his desk. Pants around his ankles. Vanessa — the new one, the one with the long legs and the way of laughing too loudly whenever Dante spoke — was spread across his desk like she owned it, her skirt shoved up around her waist, her blouse torn open at the buttons.
Everything stopped.
The coffee mug trembled in my hands. The smile was still on my face. I could feel it, frozen there, because my face hadn't caught up with what my eyes were seeing.
They both froze when they noticed me.
For one horrible, suspended moment, nobody moved. The office was dead silent except for the low hum of the air conditioning and the sound of my own blood rushing in my ears.
Then Dante's face twisted.
Not with guilt or shame.
With rage.
"Get OUT, Shailyn! Who the hell told you to walk in here without knocking?"
His voice hit me like a physical thing. I stumbled backward, my hip catching the door frame hard enough to bruise. The coffee sloshed over the rim and scalded my hand, and I made a small, stupid sound — not from the burn, but from something else entirely. Something that lived deeper than skin.
"I — I'm sorry, I just—"
"OUT."
I pulled the door shut.
I stood with my back pressed against it, both hands wrapped around the mug that was still burning my palm, and I breathed. In. Out. In. Out. The hallway was bright and ordinary around me — beige walls, grey carpet, the distant sound of keyboards and low conversation from the open floor.
Normal. Everything out here was completely normal.
It's fine. He was stressed. He didn't mean it like that.
That was what I told myself.
That was always what I told myself.
Then I heard them start up again.
I stood there and I heard it — the rhythm of it, the sounds of it — and I understood in some dim, half-conscious way that he had not stopped. That the interruption had barely registered. That I had walked in, been shouted out, and he had simply... continued.
Like I was a fly he'd brushed away from his food.
The mug was still burning my hand. I didn't move.
"Mrs. Belmar?"
Jessica was watching me from her desk with that expression I'd learned to recognize — the wide eyes, the carefully neutral mouth, the hunger underneath it. She was the kind of woman who collected other people's humiliations like souvenirs.
I set the coffee mug down on the edge of her desk.
I don't know why. I just couldn't hold it anymore.
“You can have that,” I said. My voice came out completely steady. I was always surprised by that — how calm I sounded when everything inside me was white noise.
I walked to the elevator. I pressed the button. I waited.
It's fine. Marriages go through rough patches. This is just a rough patch.
The doors opened. I stepped inside. I pressed the button for my floor.
And then, only then, in the small silver privacy of the elevator, I let the tears flow because I just couldn’t hold it back anymore.
Five years. Five fucking years of being married to Dante Belmar, and he just wouldn’t change.
I collected my bag from my desk without speaking to anyone, signed out for the day, and drove away from the building with the radio off and both hands very carefully on the wheel.
There was a podcast I'd started listening to three weeks ago. A woman with a warm, certain voice who said things like you are worthy of being chosen and your silence is not the same as peace.
I'd found it by accident, searching for something else entirely. I'd listened to the first episode in my car in a parking garage, engine running, and I'd sat there for twenty minutes after it ended without moving.
I put it on now.
"Sometimes we stay not because we are happy," the woman said,
"but because we have confused endurance with love."
I turned it off.
I wasn't ready for that one yet.
My phone buzzed on the passenger seat.
Dante: [Don't you ever walk into my office without knocking again. I mean it.]
I read it at a red light. I put the phone face-down. How he had no guilt putting me through hell.
I pulled into the hospital parking lot and cut the engine and sat for a moment in the silence. My reflection watched me from the rearview mirror — mascara tracked down both cheeks, hair escaping from its pins, eyes that looked like they belonged to someone much older than thirty-one.
Pathetic.
The word arrived in Dante's voice, as it always did. Because he'd said it exactly once, two years into our marriage, during a fight I'd started by asking him why he hadn't come home the night before. He'd looked at me with something like contempt and said you're pathetic, do you know that, and then he'd left the room, and I had stood there and decided he was right.
I grabbed my purse.
I had to see my mother.
✦ ✦ ✦
She was asleep when I came in, the way she usually was in the afternoons — her face slack and peaceful, her chest rising and falling slowly under the pale hospital blanket. Another stroke scare, another round of monitoring, another bill that would take three months to work through.
Aunt Patricia was in the chair beside the bed with her coat already on, bag already on her shoulder. Waiting.
"Finally," she said, before I'd fully crossed the threshold.
"I know. I'm sorry."
"I need more money, Shailyn." She stood, arms folding across her chest. "The medication costs have gone up again, and I've been managing your mother for twenty-eight years. You're married to one of the wealthiest men in this city. Stop acting like I'm asking for something unreasonable."
Guilt moved through me, automatic and deep-rooted. Patricia had taken me since childhood. She had fed me and clothed me and made sure I went to school. I owed her a debt I could never fully name.
"I'll transfer something tonight," I said quietly.
"Good." She pulled on her coat. "Oh — before I forget. Your mother wrote you something."
She held out an envelope. Thick. Slightly worn at the edges, like it had been handled many times before being handed to me.
My breath snagged.
"She wrote this?"
"One letter at a time. She's been working on it for almost a year." Patricia shrugged, as though this were a minor administrative matter. "I'm going to the market. Lock up when you leave."
The door shut behind her.
I stood in the middle of the room holding the envelope in both hands. My mother's handwriting was on the front — slow and uneven, each letter an enormous effort, the letters of my name taking up almost the entire width of the paper.
SHAILYN.
She had been trying to speak to me my whole life. Her first stroke had taken her voice before I was born, leaving her inside a body that wouldn't cooperate, that turned every word into a battle. I had grown up watching her fight to communicate — the slow spelling out of words on a board, the single-word answers, the exhausted silences.
She had spent a year writing this letter.
My hands were shaking. I started to open it—
—and felt the familiar dull ache low in my abdomen that told me my cycle had started.
The timing was so absurd I almost laughed.
I tucked the envelope carefully into my bag and went to find the bathroom.
✦ ✦ ✦
There were two women inside, mid-argument, their voices bouncing off the tile.
"—did you see Chantel's new bag? The Birkin? Please. We all know Dante bought that."
I stopped just inside the door.
"Dante buys everyone things," the second voice said, bored. "It doesn't mean anything special."
"It means he's sleeping with her."
"Dante's sleeping with half of Kington. That's not news."
I stood very still. There was a stall directly in front of me. I went into it and locked the door and sat down on the closed lid and breathed.
They're not talking about my Dante. It's a common name. It doesn't mean anything.
Then one of their phones rang, and the pitch of the argument changed completely.
"Are you SERIOUS? Why is Dante calling you right now? Why does he even have your number?"
"Let go of me…"
The sound of a slap. A gasp. Then suddenly both of them were shouting, the sound of a real fight — bodies colliding with the counter, someone's shoes squeaking on the tile.
"He's MINE, Priscilla…"
"Yours? He gave me syphilis! YOUR ex-boyfriend gave YOU syphilis and you gave it to Dante and now I have it because of YOU, you absolute…"
The word hit me somewhere behind my sternum.
Syphilis.
My prescription. In my glove box. The one I'd been filling every time Dante came home from a business trip for the past three years.
I sat on the closed toilet lid in a hospital bathroom and understood, slowly and completely, something I had been choosing not to understand for a very long time.
It wasn't a rough patch.
It had never been a rough patch.
I didn't know how long I sat there. Long enough for the fighting to stop, for one of them to start crying, for the other to slam the door on her way out.
Long enough for the silence to become unbearable.
‘Face your fears.’
That was from the podcast.
‘The longer you hide, the smaller you become.’
I unlocked the stall door. I pushed it open.
The one who remained — the one who'd been crying — was standing at the sink, mascara destroyed, and she looked up when she heard me and went completely still. She recognized me as the wife of the man she and her friend had just fought about. I could see the exact moment it happened — the way the color drained from her face, the way her mouth formed a small, horrified O.
I walked to the sink beside her.
I turned on the tap. I washed my hands. I pumped the soap dispenser twice and worked it into a lather and rinsed it away, and I did all of this with the methodical care of someone who was holding herself together through sheer attention to small tasks.
In the mirror, I could see her watching me. Frozen. Waiting for me to scream, perhaps. Or cry. Or collapse entirely.
I dried my hands.
I took out my compact and fixed my makeup. I'd gotten very good at this over the years — filling in the smudges, smoothing out the evidence. There had been a photo, two years ago, of me jogging near our building. Someone had taken it without my knowledge and posted it online with the caption: when you marry for money but can't afford mascara. It had gone mildly viral in certain circles. Dante had mentioned it once, at dinner, with a small smile.
Since then, I never left the house without being put together.
I snapped the compact shut.
I left without speaking.
In the hallway, I let out a breath that felt like it had been building for hours. My legs were unsteady. My hands wouldn't stop trembling.
But I had not hidden. I had not cried in front of her. I had not apologized for being there.
It was such a small, ridiculous thing to be proud of.
My phone rang as I walked back to my Mom’s room. It was Tyler, my amazing father in-law.
"Shailyn, darling! You'll be at dinner tonight, yes? Seven o'clock at the manor. The whole family."
My stomach tightened. "I didn't know about…"
"Dante didn't tell you? Oh, that boy." He clicked his tongue. "Can you pick up some of that ginseng drink on your way? The herbal blend, you know the one."
"Of course," I said. "I'll be there."
I ended the call.
Of course Dante hadn't told me. Why would he? Telling me things required acknowledging I existed, and acknowledging I existed required a basic level of regard he hadn't managed in years.
I kissed my mother's forehead. She stirred but didn't wake. I tucked the envelope more securely into my bag — I would read it tonight, I promised myself, when I had privacy and quiet — and drove to the mall.
✦ ✦ ✦
The ginseng shop was small and warm, tucked into the corner of the mall's east wing, fragrant with dried herbs and something woody underneath. I found Tyler's brand quickly — I'd bought it enough times to know exactly where it sat on the shelf — and turned toward the register.
I didn't see him until I walked straight into him.
The collision drove the air from my lungs. The bottle flew from my hands and hit the floor and exploded — glass and amber liquid spreading in a wide arc across the tile, glittering under the shop's warm lighting.
"Oh God, I'm so…"
I looked up and the apology died completely.
The man I'd collided with was... breathtaking. Tall, broad-shouldered, with sharp cheekbones and dark eyes that seemed to look straight through me. Tattoos crept up from beneath his collar, wrapping around his throat like serpents.
He looked down at the broken bottle. Then at me.
Then he simply... walked away.
No apology or acknowledgment. Absolutely nothing.
Burning anger flared in my chest, I have been through enough for one day. Before I could stop myself, I shouted:
"Stop right there!"
The entire shop went silent. People turned to stare.
And to my shock... he stopped.
My heart pounded as he slowly turned around, one eyebrow raised. Those dark eyes fixed on me with an intensity that made my knees weak.
‘What now, Shailyn? What the hell do you do now?’
Last Chapters
#161 Chapter 161 #161
Last Updated: 5/20/2026#160 Chapter 160 #160
Last Updated: 5/20/2026#159 Chapter 159 #159
Last Updated: 5/20/2026#158 Chapter 158 #158
Last Updated: 5/20/2026#157 Chapter 157 #157
Last Updated: 5/20/2026#156 Chapter 156 #156
Last Updated: 5/20/2026#155 Chapter 155 #155
Last Updated: 5/20/2026#154 Chapter 154 #154
Last Updated: 5/20/2026#153 Chapter 153 #153
Last Updated: 5/20/2026#152 Chapter 152 #152
Last Updated: 5/20/2026
You Might Like 😍
He Never Loved Me, Until I Left
I put away the divorce agreement with a wry smile.
When he and my son completely disappeared, he finally panicked.
Three months later .
He knelt down on the streets of Chicago in despair, begging me to remarry him.
My six-year-old son looked coldly at his biological father and said, "Get lost, you bad uncle! You don't deserve to be my dad!"
Alpha Nicholas's Little Mate
What? No—wait… oh Moon Goddess, no.
Please tell me you're joking, Lex.
But she's not. I can feel her excitement bubbling under my skin, while all I feel is dread.
We turn the corner, and the scent hits me like a punch to the chest—cinnamon and something impossibly warm. My eyes scan the room until they land on him. Tall. Commanding. Beautiful.
And then, just as quickly… he sees me.
His expression twists.
"Fuck no."
He turns—and runs.
My mate sees me and runs.
Bonnie has spent her entire life being broken down and abused by the people closest to her including her very own twin sister. Alongside her best friend Lilly who also lives a life of hell, they plan to run away while attending the biggest ball of the year while it's being hosted by another pack, only things don't quite go to plan leaving both girls feeling lost and unsure about their futures.
Alpha Nicholas is 28, mateless, and has no plans to change that. It's his turn to host the annual Blue Moon Ball this year and the last thing he expects is to find his mate. What he expects even less is for his mate to be 10 years younger than him and how his body reacts to her. While he tries to refuse to acknowledge that he has met his mate his world is turned upside down after guards catch two she-wolves running through his lands.
Once they are brought to him he finds himself once again facing his mate and discovers that she's hiding secrets that will make him want to kill more than one person.
Can he overcome his feelings towards having a mate and one that is so much younger than him? Will his mate want him after already feeling the sting of his unofficial rejection? Can they both work on letting go of the past and moving forward together or will fate have different plans and keep them apart?
Omega Bound
Thane Knight is the alpha of the Midnight Pack of the La Plata Mountain Range, the largest wolf shifter pack in the world. He is an alpha by day and hunts the shifter trafficking ring with his group of mercenaries by night. His hunt for vengeance leads to one raid that changes his life.
Tropes:
Touch her and die/Slow burn romance/Fated Mates/Found family twist/Close circle betrayal/Cinnamon roll for only her/Traumatized heroine/Rare wolf/Hidden powers/Knotting/Nesting/Heats/Luna/Attempted assassination
Shattered Girl
“I’m sorry, sweetheart. Was that too much?” I could see the worry in his eyes as I took a deep breath.
“I just didn’t want you to see all my scars,” I whispered, feeling ashamed of my marked body.
Emmy Nichols is used to surviving. She survived her abusive father for years until he beat her so severely, she ended up in the hospital, and her father was finally arrested. Now, Emmy is thrown into a life she never expected. Now she has a mother
who doesn't want her, a politically motivated stepfather with ties to the Irish mob, four older stepbrothers, and their best friend who swear to love and protect her. Then, one night, everything shatters, and Emmy feels her only option is to run.
When her stepbrothers and their best friend finally find her, will they pick up the pieces and convince Emmy that they will keep her safe and their love will hold them together?
After the Affair: Falling into a Billionaire's Arms
From first crush to wedding vows, George Capulet and I had been inseparable. But in our seventh year of marriage, he began an affair with his secretary.
On my birthday, he took her on vacation. On our anniversary, he brought her to our home and made love to her in our bed...
Heartbroken, I tricked him into signing divorce papers.
George remained unconcerned, convinced I would never leave him.
His deceptions continued until the day the divorce was finalized. I threw the papers in his face: "George Capulet, from this moment on, get out of my life!"
Only then did panic flood his eyes as he begged me to stay.
When his calls bombarded my phone later that night, it wasn't me who answered, but my new boyfriend Julian.
"Don't you know," Julian chuckled into the receiver, "that a proper ex-boyfriend should be as quiet as the dead?"
George seethed through gritted teeth: "Put her on the phone!"
"I'm afraid that's impossible."
Julian dropped a gentle kiss on my sleeping form nestled against him. "She's exhausted. She just fell asleep."
Goddess Of The Underworld
When the veil between the Divine, the Living, and the Dead begins to crack, Envy is thrust beneath with a job she can’t drop: keep the worlds from bleeding together, shepherd the lost, and make ordinary into armour, breakfasts, bedtime, battle plans. Peace lasts exactly one lullaby. This is the story of an orphan pup who became a goddess by choosing her family; of four imperfect alphas learning how to be better. Steamy, fierce, and full of heart, Goddess of the Underworld is a reverse harem, found-family paranormal romance where love writes the rules and keeps three realms from falling apart.
The Prison Project
Can love tame the untouchable? Or will it only fuel the fire and cause chaos amongst the inmates?
Fresh out of high school and suffocating in her dead-end hometown, Margot longs for her escape. Her reckless best friend, Cara, thinks she's found the perfect way out for them both - The Prisoner Project - a controversial program offering a life-changing sum of money in exchange for time spent with maximum-security inmates.
Without hesitation, Cara rushes to sign them up.
Their reward? A one-way ticket into the depths of a prison ruled by gang leaders, mob bosses, and men the guards wouldn't even dare to cross...
At the centre of it all, meets Coban Santorelli - a man colder than ice, darker than midnight, and as deadly as the fire that fuels his inner rage. He knows that the project may very well be his only ticket to freedom - his only ticket to revenge on the one who managed to lock him up and so he must prove that he can learn to love…
Will Margot be the lucky one chosen to help reform him?
Will Coban be capable of bringing something to the table other than just sex?
What starts off as denial may very well grow in to obsession which could then fester in to becoming true love…
A temperamental romance novel.
The Pack: Rule Number 1 - No Mates
"Let me go," I whimper, my body trembling with need. "I don't want you touching me."
I fall forward onto the bed then turn around to stare at him. The dark tattoos of Domonic's chiseled shoulders, quiver and and expand with the heave of his chest. His deep dimpled smile is full of arrogance as he reaches behind himself to lock the door.
Biting his lip, he stalks toward me, his hand going to the seam of his pants and the thickening bulge there.
"Are you sure you don't want me to touch you?" He whispers, untying the knot and slipping a hand inside. "Because I swear to God, that is all I have been wanting to do. Every single day from the moment you stepped in our bar and I smelled your perfect flavor from across the room."
New to the world of shifters, Draven is human on the run. A beautiful girl who no one could protect. Domonic is the cold Alpha of the Red Wolf Pack. A brotherhood of twelve wolves that live by twelve rules. Rules which they vowed could NEVER be broken.
Especially - Rule Number One - No Mates
When Draven meets Domonic, he knows that she is his mate, but Draven has no idea what a mate is, only that she has fallen in love with a shifter. An Alpha that will break her heart to make her leave. Promising herself, she will never forgive him, she disappears.
But she doesn’t know about the child she’s carrying or that the moment she left, Domonic decided rules were made to be broken - and now will he ever find her again? Will she forgive him?
Alpha Twins' Mate's broken Human
A Lesson in Magic
Rise of the Banished She-Wolf
That roar stole my eighteenth birthday and shattered my world. My first shift should have been glory—blood turned blessing into shame. By dawn they'd branded me "cursed": cast out by my pack, abandoned by family, stripped of my nature. My father didn't defend me—he sent me to a forsaken island where wolfless outcasts were forged into weapons, forced to kill each other until only one could leave.
On that island I learned the darkest edges of humanity and how to bury terror in bone. Countless times I wanted to surrender—dive into the waves and never surface—but the accusing faces that haunted my dreams pushed me back toward something colder than survival: revenge. I escaped, and for three years I hid among humans, collecting secrets, learning to move like a shadow, sharpening patience into precision—becoming a blade.
Then, under a full moon, I touched a bleeding stranger—and my wolf returned with a violence that made me whole. Who was he? Why could he wake what I'd thought dead?
One thing I know: now is the time.
I have waited three years for this. I will make everyone who destroyed me pay—and take back everything that was stolen from me.
I Slapped My Fiancé—Then Married His Billionaire Nemesis
Technically, Rhys Granger was my fiancé now—billionaire, devastatingly hot, and a walking Wall Street wet dream. My parents shoved me into the engagement after Catherine disappeared, and honestly? I didn’t mind. I’d crushed on Rhys for years. This was my chance, right? My turn to be the chosen one?
Wrong.
One night, he slapped me. Over a mug. A stupid, chipped, ugly mug my sister gave him years ago. That’s when it hit me—he didn’t love me. He didn’t even see me. I was just a warm-bodied placeholder for the woman he actually wanted. And apparently, I wasn’t even worth as much as a glorified coffee cup.
So I slapped him right back, dumped his ass, and prepared for disaster—my parents losing their minds, Rhys throwing a billionaire tantrum, his terrifying family plotting my untimely demise.
Obviously, I needed alcohol. A lot of alcohol.
Enter him.
Tall, dangerous, unfairly hot. The kind of man who makes you want to sin just by existing. I’d met him only once before, and that night, he just happened to be at the same bar as my drunk, self-pitying self. So I did the only logical thing: I dragged him into a hotel room and ripped off his clothes.
It was reckless. It was stupid. It was completely ill-advised.
But it was also: Best. Sex. Of. My. Life.
And, as it turned out, the best decision I’d ever made.
Because my one-night stand isn’t just some random guy. He’s richer than Rhys, more powerful than my entire family, and definitely more dangerous than I should be playing with.
And now, he’s not letting me go.












