Possessive Stepdaddy's Baby Girl

1. Jordan

JORDAN

The sidewalk cracks under my boots like split bone. Someone's car alarm screams three blocks over, never stops. A dog barks behind a chain-link fence rusted thin enough to see through. The streetlight ahead flickers—on, off, on—throwing shadows that move wrong.

My body catalogs it all: too many sounds, no buffer, nowhere to move if someone comes at me fast. Years on the ice taught me to read a room in the time it takes to blink.

This neighborhood reads like a penalty box with the door welted shut.

I pull the hood lower. Tug the mask higher.

The cap's already doing everything it can.

Six-six doesn't hide. Doesn't matter how much black fabric I wrap myself in—my shoulders are a signature, my walk is a signature, and if one person clocks me, I've got forty minutes before TMZ pulls up with cameras and this quiet favor turns into a headline.

My ex-wife, Erin, called me four days ago. The ringtone cut through a post-game cool-down like a whistle. First time she's ever asked me for anything.

We were married three months. Nobody knew—not the press, not my team, not my agent who would've had a stroke if he'd found out.

It ended the way it started—quiet, mutual, no mess.

No lawyers fighting over what we both knew didn't matter.

She went back to her life, I went back to mine, and we stayed on terms that don't require maintenance.

No hard feelings because there were no feelings at all. We both knew what it was. Clean.

So when she called from Europe—her voice tight in a way I'd never heard, the kind of tight that means someone's holding something back because saying it out loud makes it real—and said I need you to check on my daughter, I listened.

Lost her job five months ago. Company went under, took her salary with it.

Twenty-one years old, graduated early, can't find work.

Living in a place Erin wouldn't name but I could hear the worry under the silence.

Too proud to take money from me, Erin said, and I caught the echo of the woman who'd married me without telling anyone because asking felt like losing.

Won't even talk to me about it. I'm worried, Jordan.

Erin doesn't worry. Erin handles things. If she's calling me, it's bad.

The building's ahead. Four stories, red brick gone gray with grime, no security camera above the door, no buzzer system—just a walk-up where the paint peels in long strips like dead skin and the front door hangs crooked on hinges that don't quite hold.

I pass a woman smoking on the stoop, her cigarette cupped against the wind, face turned down.

She doesn't look up. Doesn't register me at all.

A kid on a bike weaves past, handlebars nearly clipping my hip—close enough I could reach out and stop him cold if I wanted.

He doesn't care that I'm here. Doesn't see me.

That's good. That's what I need. I adjust the mask higher, tuck my chin, and push through the door.

Inside, the hallway smells like cooking grease and something chemical I can't name—cleaner, maybe, or something rotting underneath the floors.

The air's stale, thick, like it hasn't moved in years. The carpet's stained dark near the stairs, the fibers matted flat, edges curling where the baseboards have pulled away from the wall. Water damage, maybe. Blood, maybe. I don't want to guess.

The stairwell light buzzes overhead, fluorescent and dying, flickering every few seconds like it's trying to decide whether to quit. I take the stairs two at a time because my body doesn't know how to slow down, even when there's nowhere to go fast.

My pulse is steady. My breathing's even. I've walked into worse—hostile arenas, playoff games where twenty thousand people wanted me dead on the ice. This is just a building.

But my jaw's tight.

Third floor. The hallway's narrower than the one downstairs, walls pressing in, doors spaced too close together like they ran out of room halfway through the build.

A door to my left is held shut with duct tape stretched across the frame, gray and peeling, like someone decided a lock wasn't worth the effort.

Another door has a deadbolt installed crooked, screws stripped, the whole thing hanging at an angle like someone tried and gave up halfway.

My hands curl into fists. Someone should fix this. Someone should've fixed it years ago. This isn't a place anyone should live. This isn't a place Erin's daughter should be sleeping at night.

Jessica Hamilton. 3F.

The door's at the end. I stop in front of it. Plain wood, scratched near the handle, scuffed at the bottom like it's been kicked open more than once. The lock looks like the kind you buy at a hardware store when the original breaks—cheap, flimsy, the kind that wouldn't stop anyone who wanted in.

A hard shoulder would take it down. One hit. Maybe less.

I knock.

Silence. Then footsteps—light, uneven, like someone's walking on legs that don't want to hold them. The lock clicks. Once, then again—a deadbolt, a chain, something else. She's got three locks on a door that wouldn't stop a decent shove.

The door opens.

And everything I walked in here expecting dies in my chest.

She's small. Five-three in bare feet, strawberry blonde hair plastered to her face in damp, tangled streaks that cling to her cheeks, her neck.

Blue eyes—red-rimmed, glassy, unfocused—like she's been crying for hours and hasn't slept in days. Her shirt's soaked through the front, dark wet patches spreading from both breasts, fabric plastered to her skin in a way that makes it impossible not to see.

She's shaking. Full-body tremors. Hands wrapped tight around herself like she's trying to hold something in, hold herself together, and failing at both. She looks up at me and her face is pale and wrecked and exhausted and something in my chest caves in.

My heart kicks. Hard. Once, then again, then it doesn't stop—just keeps slamming against my ribs like I've been checked into the boards at full speed. My hands go still at my sides, fingers curling into my palms because I don't trust what they'll do if I don't.

My vision tunnels. Sound drops out. The hallway, the peeling paint, the broken lights—all of it disappears. She's the only thing. The only thing in this building. The only thing in the city. The rest of the world goes static.

Heat floods through me. Low in my gut, spreading fast, unwanted, unstoppable.

I'm looking at her—really looking—and my body's already decided something my brain hasn't caught up to yet.

The way the wet fabric clings. The curve of her hips in those jeans.

The hollow of her throat where her pulse is visible, fast and frantic.

I shouldn't be noticing. I can't be noticing.

But I am. Every detail. Every line. I'm hard before I can stop it.

I don't understand it.

I don't have time to understand it.

She stares at me. Fear flickers across her face—sharp and immediate—because I'm a stranger in a mask, because I'm six-six in a hood standing at her door, because she's alone and small and has no reason to trust me. Her breath hitches. She takes a half-step back.

"Who are you?"

Her voice cracks. Raw. Like she's been screaming or crying or both. The sound of it hits me in the sternum—something broken trying to hold itself together.

I pull the mask down. The elastic catches on my ear before it slides free.

I tug the cap off. My hair's damp with sweat from the walk up.

My face is out. No barrier. No protection.

Just me, standing in this hallway that smells like mildew and fried food, watching her brain try to process what she's seeing.

Her eyes go wide. The blue goes brighter when her pupils contract—shock doing its work. She knows me. Not as her stepfather—she doesn't know about that yet. She knows me as me.

Jordan Scott. The actual Jordan Scott. Seven Cups. Three MVPs. Two hundred million in endorsements. The guy on the cereal box and the billboard on I-90. The face that shows up on sports networks and morning talk shows and grocery store tabloids.

Her mouth opens. Closes. Opens again. Nothing comes out. Her throat works like she's trying to force words past something stuck there.

I can see the exact moment her thoughts catch up. The recognition hits in layers—that's him, that's Jordan Scott, why is Jordan Scott at my door, why is Jordan Scott in this building—and her expression shifts from fear to confusion to something I can't name yet.

"I'm Jordan," I say. My voice sounds too loud in this narrow hallway.

The walls throw it back at me. "Jordan Scott.

I—" There's no smooth way to say this. No script I practiced on the way over.

"I was married to your mother. Briefly. A few months.

She called me from Europe. Asked me to check on you. "

The shock on her face shifts. Deepens. Not just a famous person is at my door shock.

Something rawer. Something that looks like betrayal cutting through the exhaustion and fear.

Her jaw tightens. Her hands ball into fists at her sides, then release, then ball again like she can't decide what to do with the anger.

"My mother got married?"

The disbelief in her voice is sharp enough to draw blood. Not you got married. Not when did this happen. Just the fundamental impossibility of Erin Hamilton doing something this significant without telling her daughter.

"Nobody knew," I say. The explanation feels thin even as I say it. "It was quiet."

"Clearly."

She says it flat. Sarcastic. The word lands like a slap. Even with her hands shaking and her eyes red-rimmed and wet, even with her shirt soaked through and her breath coming too fast, there's a spine underneath.

Steel wrapped in exhaustion. I register that—the defiance, the reflex to bite back even when she's barely standing. The instinct to make the joke, deliver the line, keep her guard up even when everything else is falling apart.