Old Letter

POV: Matteo

Rhys sat alone in the family archive long after the household had gone quiet, boxes of his mother's old belongings pulled down from storage he hadn't opened since before the injury, not that he remembered opening anyway. He didn't fully know what he was looking for. Only that Matteo's face in the study earlier that day, the hurt buried under careful composure, had lodged itself somewhere in his chest and wouldn't let him rest.

I would rather you hate me and be safe than love me and be gone. He'd meant every word of it when he said it. He still meant it now, sitting alone in the dark archive. That frightened him more than anything else about the whole exchange.

Where does this come from, he thought, running his hand over a stack of his mother's old letters, bound in faded ribbon. This certainty that control is the same thing as care. I don't remember learning it. I only know it's there, sitting under everything I feel for him, sharp and immovable.

He found the letter near the bottom of the second box, his mother's handwriting unmistakable even after all these years, the ink faded but legible.

He read it twice before he understood what he was holding.

I found him there an hour later, when he hadn't come to bed and the staff mentioned seeing lamplight still burning in the archive. He sat hunched over a small desk, papers scattered around him, his face pale in a way that made my anger from earlier soften despite everything.

"Rhys?"

He looked up, and something in his expression stopped me cold in the doorway. Raw. Undefended. Nothing like the calm, reasonable man who'd stood in the study explaining away my restricted letters just hours ago.

"I want to show you something," he said, his voice rough.

I crossed the room and sat down across from him, my earlier fury still sitting close to the surface, tangled now with a wariness I didn't fully understand yet.

"This is my mother's," he said, holding out a single sheet of paper, careful, like it might tear apart in his hands. "I don't remember finding it before. I don't know if I ever read it, before the injury. But I needed to understand something tonight, and I think this is part of the answer."

I took the letter and began to read.

It was dated years before Rhys was born, addressed to someone whose name had been carefully cut away from the page, the edges rough where scissors had done their work long ago. His mother's voice came through clear and desperate even across the distance of decades, describing a marriage she had never wanted, arranged the way so many pack bonds were arranged, for alliance, for advantage, for reasons that had nothing to do with her own heart. She wrote of asking to leave it once, early, before resentment had calcified into something permanent. She wrote of being denied.

They told me duty matters more than feeling, the letter read, and that a Luna who cannot bear the weight of her own unhappiness has no business bearing the weight of a pack at all. I have stopped asking. I understand now that asking was never going to be enough.

My chest ached reading it, the echo of my own marriage sitting uncomfortably close to the surface of every line.

"She never left," Rhys said, watching my face as I read. "She stayed, and from what I understand, whatever love might have existed between her and my father curdled into something else entirely over the years. Something cold. Controlling. I grew up watching it happen, even if I don't remember the specifics anymore."

"Rhys, I'm sorry."

"I've spent my whole life terrified of becoming him," he said, and something in his voice cracked open, raw and unguarded in a way I hadn't heard from him since the hospital bed. "Terrified of loving someone the way he loved her, which was to say not really loving them at all, just owning them, managing them, deciding for them what was best because asking felt too much like losing control."

"And today," I said carefully, "with the letters. With Sofia."

"I heard myself say it," he admitted, his voice barely above a whisper now. "I would rather you hate me and be safe than love me and be gone. And some part of me recognized the shape of those words even as I said them. I just didn't understand where they'd come from until I found this."

I sat with the letter still in my hands, torn between the compassion rising in my chest and the sharper, colder knowledge sitting underneath it, the knowledge that this same man had been lying to me about his memory for weeks, choosing silence over honesty in a way that had nothing to do with fear of becoming his father and everything to do with protecting a version of himself he wasn't ready to let go.

"I don't want to become him," Rhys said. "I would rather die than become him. But I'm terrified that the only way I know how to love someone is the way he loved her, and I don't know how to fix that, Matteo. I don't even know if it can be fixed."

"It can," I said, quiet, meaning it despite everything else sitting unresolved between us. "But not by deciding things for me. Not by controlling what I hear and who I see. That's not protecting me, Rhys. That's just his coldness wearing a gentler face."

He flinched at that, but didn't argue, his eyes dropping back to the scattered papers on the desk.

"There's more," he said, after a long moment, pulling another page free from the stack. "About the end of her life. Who was with her, near the end, when my father had already withdrawn from most of the household."

I looked down at the page he offered, my eyes scanning the careful, faded handwriting.

I write this only to record my gratitude, his mother's letter read, for the young man who has sat with me these final months when no one else in this house could be bothered. Dave has been more of a comfort to me than my own husband ever managed to be, and I hope, when I am gone, that someone remembers his kindness for what it was.

I went very still.

"Dave," I said slowly. "Your Dave. The Beta."

"It has to be," Rhys said, frowning at the page like he was seeing it fresh all over again. "There's no one else it could refer to. But Dave's only been Beta for a few years. This letter is decades old."

"He would have been young," I said, my mind racing now, pieces sliding together in patterns I didn't yet fully understand. "A child, maybe, or barely more than one, if this dates back that far."

"Why would a child be sitting with a dying Luna," Rhys said, "unless his family already had some connection to mine that goes back further than either of us knew."

I sat there, the cold dread I'd carried since Dave's confession in his study rising fresh and sharp again, tangled now with this new, unexpected thread.

Dave's connection to this family didn't begin with Rhys. It didn't even begin with this marriage, or the border patrol logs, or the ambush that had nearly killed the man sitting across from me.

It went back a generation, into a house already fractured by the same cold, controlling love Rhys had just confessed to fearing in himself, and neither of us had the faintest idea yet how deep those roots actually ran.