Marked, Not Wanted

POV: Matteo

"Congratulations," Mira Thornwood said, gripping both my hands like we were old friends. "You've done a brave thing, Matteo."

I smiled at her the way I'd been smiling at everyone for the last hour. Tight. Practiced. My hands still remembered the tremor in Rhys's grip, that one raw second where he'd looked at me like I was something to fear. I hadn't figured out what to do with it yet, so I'd folded it up small and tucked it away, same as everything else.

"Thank you," I said. "That means a lot."

It didn't. Not from her. Not from anyone in that hall who'd spent twenty-four years walking past me to get to my brother.

I looked for Rhys across the room, out of habit more than want. He was gone.

Not stepped out. Not in the corner talking to Dave Bane like he'd been ten minutes ago. Gone, chair empty, his half-full glass still sweating a ring onto the table like he'd left mid-sentence.

"He does this," said a voice at my elbow. One of the younger cousins, a girl I didn't know, watching me with the kind of pity that stings worse than cruelty. "Don't take it personal."

"I won't," I said, and meant the opposite.

I stayed another forty minutes, because leaving right after him would have told the whole room exactly how much it cost me. I laughed at the right places. I let three different elders tell me how selfless I was. By the time I finally slipped out, my face ached from holding it together.

The shared chambers were dark when I got there, lit only by the corridor light spilling in through the door. Rhys wasn't there either. Just his coat thrown over a chair, and silence, and me.

I didn't sit down and grieve it. That was never how I did things.

I found the boxes with my belongings stacked by the wardrobe and got to work, pulling out shirts, folding them the way my mother used to, lining shoes up by the door. My hands knew this job better than my heart knew how to feel anything else. Unpack. Organize. Make yourself necessary in a room that hasn't decided if it wants you in it.

I'd been doing this since I was eight years old, watching my brother get praised for existing while I got praised for being helpful. If I couldn't be loved, I'd learned, I could at least be useful. Useful got you fed. Useful got you a place at the table, even if nobody ever asked you to sit.

I moved to the desk to look for stationery, something to write my mother a letter she wouldn't read anyway, and pulled open the top drawer.

Everything in it was arranged the way my brother used to arrange his room. Straight lines. Everything squared to the edge, like disorder itself might get you disowned. I remembered standing in his doorway as a kid, looking at his perfect shelves, then going back to my own room where nothing matched and nobody cared enough to notice.

I pushed the thought down and kept looking. Pens. Ledgers. A stack of correspondence tied with string.

Then my fingers found something softer than paper had any right to feel.

I pulled it out before I thought better of it.

A photograph. My brother, maybe nineteen in it, laughing at something out of frame, sunlight catching the side of his face.

I sat there holding it longer than I meant to.

It wasn't crisp at the edges the way a photo shoved in a drawer and forgotten would be. It was soft. Worn thin at the corners, the kind of soft that only comes from being taken out, held, put back, taken out again. Someone had touched this photo. Recently. Often.

"What are you doing."

I hadn't heard the door.

Rhys stood in the frame of it, tie already gone, top button undone, looking less like the Alpha who'd stood over me an hour ago and more like a stranger I hadn't been given permission to know. And then his eyes dropped to my hands.

To the photograph.

"I was looking for paper," I said, too fast, too much like an apology. "I didn't mean to go through—"

"Put it down."

His voice didn't shout. It didn't need to. Something in it cracked clean down the middle, and for one unguarded second his whole face went raw, stripped of the stillness he wore like armor, like I'd caught him standing somewhere with no clothes on.

"Rhys—"

"Put that back where you found it," he said again, quieter this time, and it sounded like the words had cost him something to get out.