Ruthless Amnesia

POV: Matteo "Repeat after me," the elder said, and I opened my mouth before my brain caught up with the words. "I, Matteo Rocha, take this bond—" My voice came out steadier than I felt. Good. Let it. The great hall was packed shoulder to shoulder, every pack elder and council member and Callahan cousin twice removed crammed into seats that used to be my brother's to fill. Candlelight everywhere. Too much of it. I could feel the heat of it on my neck, could feel two hundred pairs of eyes doing the math on me — the spare, the understudy, the one who filed the correspondence while his brother learned to be Alpha-consort. Rhys stood across from me, close enough that I had to tip my head back to hold his eyes. I hated that I noticed him. Not the marriage. Not the hall, not the elder's droning voice. Him. The way he filled the space he stood in without needing to move. Broad through the shoulders in a way that made the ceremonial robes look like they belonged to him and not the other

POV: MatteoI put the photograph back exactly where I'd found it, hands steadier than I felt, and Rhys walked out without another word. That was the last real thing he said to me for almost a month.By the second week I'd stopped waiting for him to bring it up."You reorganized the correspondence," he said one morning, not really a question, staring at the neat stack of letters on his desk like they'd rearranged themselves."Someone had to," I said. "Half of it was three months overdue."He nodded once and left for the council chamber. That was the whole conversation. I told myself it counted as progress.By six months in, I wasn't just organizing his letters. I was deciding things. Which invitations to accept, which border patrol reports needed his eyes and which didn't, which elders needed handling with patience and which needed handling with steel. I'd bring him a decision already made, and he'd read it, sign it, and hand it back without comment."You changed the seating for the tr

POV: Matteo Dave didn't move. Didn't look away either, that untouched drink still hanging in his hand like a prop he'd forgotten he was holding. "Councilwoman Ashworth had one too many," he said, when I finally crossed to him, my question still burning in my throat. "You shouldn't put much weight on drunk talk." "I didn't ask you," I said. "No," he agreed. "You didn't." He walked away before I could push further, and I was left standing there with more questions than I'd started the evening with, and no one left in the room willing to answer any of them. That was two weeks ago. Tonight was the full council gala, the biggest one of the season, and I hadn't found a single answer since. "You look beautiful," Rhys said, low, close to my ear, his hand settling at the small of my back the moment we stepped into the hall. I nearly missed a step. Two years of gala nights, and he'd never once opened with a compliment before the cameras even found us. "That's new," I said. "What is."

POV: MatteoHe was gone before I woke.I found the empty space in the bed first, sheets cold, and then the note on his desk, three lines in his own hand, giving me nothing. Called away. Don't wait up. Handle the council correspondence in my absence. Not even his name at the bottom, like he couldn't spare the effort of signing it.I stood there holding that note longer than it deserved, and something in me that had bent quietly for two years finally didn't bend the same way."He just left," I said to Sofia later that morning, my voice flatter than I meant it to sound. "No explanation. Not even to my face. A note telling me to handle correspondence, like I'm his secretary and not his husband.""You are kind of his secretary," Sofia said, careful, testing whether I could take the joke."I know what I am," I said. "I built it myself, remember? I just didn't think two years in he'd still be treating me like the job description is the whole relationship."She didn't argue that. She just ref

POV: Matteo"Talk to him," Sofia said, guiding me into the chair beside the bed, her hand steady on my shoulder even though her own eyes were red-rimmed and raw. "Sometimes it helps. Even if he can't hear you."I didn't answer her. I just stared at the man in the bed like I was seeing a stranger wearing Rhys's face.He looked wrong lying there. Small in a way I hadn't known his body could look, tubes and monitors tracking every breath like his life had been reduced to numbers on a screen. The broad set of his shoulders that used to fill a doorway, still now, slack against the pillow. No stillness-like-a-weapon left in him. Just stillness."How bad," I said, my voice coming out thin."Bad," Sofia said, no cushioning left in her tonight, too exhausted to soften it. "He lost a lot of blood before they got him back here. The next few hours matter more than anything I can tell you right now.""But he'll—""I don't know, Matteo," she said, gentler now, sitting on the edge of the other chair