No Trespassing! My Aloof Brother

The first thing people notice about him is the silence.

In the hallways, in the car, at the dinner table—Maya Spencer’s brother is all sharp lines and cool answers, the kind of man who can freeze a whole room with one bored glance. Teachers call him composed. Strangers call him distant. His friends, when they’re being honest, call him untouchable.

Maya knows better.

She’s seen the cracked phone screen from the night he punched the wall because someone made her cry. She’s tasted the midnight hot chocolate he pretends he doesn’t know how to make, always waiting on her desk after a bad day. She’s watched him burn through his carefully controlled mask the second someone crosses a line that reads, very clearly in his eyes: no trespassing.

To everyone else, he’s an iceberg.

To Maya, he’s something far more dangerous—heat contained in human skin, a quiet, relentless devotion that never seems to run out when it comes to her. The world gets frost. She gets the fire that lives under it, the kind that scorches anyone who tries to hurt her and spoils her so thoroughly it almost feels like a sin.

But when the walls he’s built start closing in on them both, Maya has to decide how close she can stand to that hidden blaze. Because loving a brother who lives like a locked gate means accepting one truth: if that fire ever spills over, it won’t just warm her. It could burn everything they’ve built to the ground.