The Understudy

POV: Matteo

I 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 trade dinner," he said once, frowning at the chart.

"Lord Ashford can't stand Councilwoman Reyes. You'd have spent the whole night breaking up an argument instead of closing the deal."

He looked at me a beat too long. "Fine," he said, and signed it.

No thank you. No good work, Matteo. Just fine, like I'd corrected a typo.

I learned exactly how he took his coffee — black, no sugar, but only before council meetings, sweet after them, like his body needed something soft once the performance was over. I learned the specific set of his shoulders when a meeting had gone badly, the way they climbed toward his ears before he caught himself and forced them down. I knew him the way you know a house you've lived in for years and never once been invited to call home.

He runs the whole household now, I thought, more than once, standing in a doorway watching him work a room full of council elders, playing every angle without breaking a sweat. And I let him. Because it's easier than admitting I need him there.

The gala for our first anniversary was the clearest picture of what we'd become. Cameras everywhere. Rhys's hand at the small of my back, correct and warm and utterly practiced, the exact pressure a devoted husband would use for a room full of people who mattered.

The second the last camera turned away, his hand dropped like I'd caught fire.

I went home that night and sat in the little reading room I'd spent three weeks decorating, cushions and shelves and a rug I'd picked out myself for a life I apparently wasn't going to get, and I cried without making a sound, the way you learn to when you grow up sharing walls with a brother everyone loved louder than they loved you.

"You always were the practical one," my mother wrote that same week, her handwriting careful and fond and completely blind to what I actually needed from her. "I'm so glad Rhys has someone sensible running things now."

Sensible. Practical. The understudy who'd finally found her role.

Sofia found me in the garden a few days later, sleeves rolled up, hands stained green from the herbs she grew for the pack's healing stores.

"You look like someone who hasn't slept," she said, not unkindly, dropping onto the bench beside me without asking.

"I sleep fine."

"You lie fine," she said. "There's a difference."

I laughed before I could stop myself, first real laugh I'd had in weeks, and something in my chest loosened just slightly at having one person in this whole compound who talked to me like I was a person and not a function.

Matteo runs everything now, I thought, watching him from the study window one evening while he stood in the courtyard with Dave Bane, heads bent close, voices too low to carry. He never asked me to. He never had to. I gave it to him because it was the only language I had left that he'd actually receive.

Rhys watched Matteo cross the courtyard below without meaning to, the same way he always seemed to end up watching him lately, cataloguing details he had no right to keep. The exact line his shoulders held when he was tired. The small furrow between his brows when he was concentrating on something that mattered to him.

He hated how competent Matteo had become. Hated it because some traitor part of him was proud of it, and pride wasn't a feeling he'd built any room for in two years of careful distance.

Don't, he told himself, the way he told himself most days now. You don't get to want this.

Then he turned back to Dave and made his face go still again.

Dave Bane was still talking when I stepped into the courtyard, close enough to catch the tail end of it.

"—and if the border patrol reports don't match what the council's been told," Dave was saying, voice low, "someone's going to start asking why."

Rhys's jaw went tight. "Not here."

I hadn't meant to interrupt. I'd only come out to bring him the seating chart for tomorrow's dinner, the one he'd expect finished before he asked for it. But something in the way they both went quiet the second they clocked me told me I'd walked into the middle of something that wasn't finished being said.

"Everything alright?" I asked, holding the chart out like an excuse for existing.

"Fine," Rhys said, taking it without looking at it.

Dave's eyes found mine instead, and held there a beat longer than a stranger's eyes had any business holding.

Then he smiled.

It reached exactly nowhere near his eyes.