Bedside

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 like her legs had finally given out too. "I wish I could give you something better than that."

She left an hour later, called away to another patient, and it was just the two of us in that small, too-quiet room. Machines beeping in a rhythm that should have been soothing and wasn't. His hand resting on top of the blanket, unmoving, the same hand that had trembled against mine on our wedding day.

I reached out and held it before I let myself think about whether I had any right to.

"You're an idiot," I said, my voice cracking on the second word. "You know that. Going out there two days after coming back hurt already. You didn't even let yourself heal before you ran back into it."

Nothing. Just the steady, mechanical beep marking out each second he was still alive.

"I spent two years telling myself I didn't need anything from you," I said, quieter now, the words coming without my permission, like something in me had finally stopped guarding the door. "I got good at it. I told myself the correspondence and the household and the decisions you never thanked me for were enough. That being useful was its own kind of belonging."

I ran my thumb once over his knuckles, careful, like he might break.

"It was never enough," I said. "Not for one single day."

The room stayed silent around me, nothing to answer back, nothing but the low hum of machines and my own voice finally saying the things I'd swallowed since the day the elder pronounced us bonded.

"I used to lie awake some nights," I said, "furious at myself for wanting you to look at me the way you looked at the cameras. Furious that some pathetic part of me would have taken the performance over nothing at all. I told myself that made me weak. I don't think it made me weak. I think it just made me honest, finally, in the one place nobody could hear me admit it."

I laughed, short and humorless, more breath than sound.

"I should be angrier at you," I said. "God knows you've earned it. The wedding night. Every cold morning after. Two years of a marriage that only ever looked real when someone was watching. I have every right to sit here hating you instead of holding your hand like an idiot."

I looked at his face, slack and pale against the white pillow, none of the sharp intelligence or careful control that usually lived behind his eyes. Just a man. Just a body fighting to keep breathing.

"But I don't hate you," I said, and my voice finally broke all the way open, two years of holding it together coming apart in one small hospital room where nobody but an unconscious man could hear me fall apart. "I never did. Not even that first night, when you told me I was nothing but a debt paid. I hated what you said. I never hated you."

My throat closed around the next words, but I forced them out anyway, because some part of me understood I might not get another chance to say them, not like this, not with nothing standing between us but a slow, steady heartbeat monitor.

"I need you to know something," I said, "and I need to say it now, while you can't argue with me or shut me out or go cold on me the second it's inconvenient. I don't regret it. Taking my brother's place. Standing at that altar in his place while everyone called me selfless for it."

I gripped his hand tighter.

"I never once regretted it," I said, "not for a single day, even at your cruelest, even in your coldest mornings, because it meant you were mine to lose. Mine to sit here terrified over. Mine to want, even when wanting you cost me everything I had left to give."

The confession hung in the quiet room like something too big for the space it had been said in, my chest heaving with the effort of finally letting it out into open air after two years of burying it under competence and correspondence and careful, practiced distance.

"I don't know what that makes me," I whispered. "Maybe it makes me pathetic. Maybe it makes me exactly the fool everyone always assumed I was, taking scraps and calling it enough. I don't care anymore. I just need you to survive tonight so I have the chance to hate myself for it later."

His hand twitched under mine.

I froze, certain I'd imagined it, certain grief and exhaustion were playing some cruel trick on my mind. Then his fingers moved again, weak, uncertain, curling faintly against my palm.

"Rhys?" My heart slammed hard against my ribs. "Rhys, can you hear me?"

His eyelids fluttered, slow, heavy, fighting against whatever pulled at him from underneath. I stood so fast the chair scraped hard against the floor, leaning close, my whole body gone rigid with a hope too fragile to trust yet.

"Rhys," I said again, softer now, my hand tightening around his. "I'm here. You're safe. You're going to be alright."

His eyes opened.

Dull at first, unfocused, searching the ceiling before finding my face hovering just above him. I watched something struggle behind his gaze, some flicker of effort trying to place me, trying to find the shape of a memory that should have been right there waiting for him.

It didn't come.

His brow furrowed, confusion pulling tight across features gone slack with exhaustion, his eyes moving over my face like he was looking at a stranger who'd wandered uninvited into his hospital room.

"Who are you?" he asked.