What He Meant By Again

‎POV: Rhys

"Sit down," I said, closing the study door behind us, my hands unsteady in a way they hadn't been since the hospital bed. "Please. There's nothing left to protect by standing at the door like you're ready to leave."

Matteo stood there anyway, arms crossed, exhaustion and fury both written plainly across his face after everything the council had put him through tonight. "Why now, Rhys. Why is it suddenly the moment for honesty, when an hour ago you still wouldn't look me in the eye and admit how long you'd known."

"Because it doesn't cost me anything anymore," I said, and watched the words land, sharp and true, exactly as ugly as they sounded. "That's the honest answer. The council already knows. Dave already exposed it. There's nothing left for me to lose by finally telling you the truth, and that timing is its own kind of failure, and I know it."

He didn't answer that. He just watched me, waiting, some of the fight draining out of his posture as exhaustion took its place.

"My memory returned three weeks ago," I said. "Almost exactly. Not fragments. Not pieces surfacing slowly the way I let you believe. All of it, arriving over the course of maybe two days, sharp and complete and utterly unwelcome."

"Three weeks," Matteo repeated, quiet.

"I remember the wedding," I said. "Every word I said to you, low enough that only you could hear it. I remember two years of cold mornings, deliberate distance, every small cruelty I told myself was necessary at the time. I remember all of it, Matteo, in perfect, unbearable detail."

"Then why," he said, his voice breaking slightly, "why let me believe you were lost. Why let me sit beside your bed explaining your own marriage back to you like a stranger."

I sat down heavily across from him, my hands pressed together, trying to find some way to explain something I barely understood myself.

"Because the amnesia was the only version of me that ever let itself be gentle with you," I said. "Do you understand what I'm saying. Not the injury changing who I was. The forgetting itself, becoming a kind of permission I'd never given myself before. I could hold your hand without the weight of two years of guilt sitting behind it. I could ask if I'd been good to you without already knowing, with total certainty, that the answer was no."

"That's not an excuse," Matteo said, though something in his voice had softened, listening now instead of only defending.

"I know," I said. "I'm not offering it as one. I chose the lie because the truth meant admitting I wanted you before I ever deserved to. That's the whole of it. That's the ugly center of everything I've done these last three weeks."

The room went quiet, my own confession sitting raw and unguarded between us, nothing left to hide behind now that the council had already stripped away every careful excuse I might have used to soften it.

"There's more," I said, before I could lose whatever fragile courage had brought me this far. "The word. The one I said the day you told me about the baby. Again."

Matteo went very still.

"You noticed," I said. "I saw it on your face, even then, though I don't think either of us understood what it meant yet."

"I've been turning it over for weeks," he admitted. "Trying to understand what it meant. Whether you remembered something from before, some threat I didn't know about."

"It wasn't about a threat," I said. "I need you to understand that clearly. It wasn't the ambush, or the rival pack, or anything external at all."

"Then what was it."

I took a breath, the confession sitting heavy and unavoidable now, three weeks of careful evasion finally collapsing under the weight of what I owed him.

"I already lost you once," I said. "Not to danger. To myself. Two years of deliberate coldness, watching you build an entire life around being useful because I never once gave you a reason to believe you could be loved instead. I watched you disappear into competence, into correspondence, into every quiet task I gave you instead of my attention, and some part of me understood, even then, even while I was doing it, that I was losing you slowly, one cold morning at a time."

Matteo's eyes had gone wet, though he hadn't moved, hadn't spoken, just listening.

"When I woke up in that hospital bed," I said, "and something in me had shifted, had softened somehow, the injury gave me an excuse to try to get you back. Not honestly. Not by owning what I'd done. By pretending none of it had happened at all, and starting fresh, and letting you believe the gentleness was new instead of understanding it was simply the first time I'd allowed myself to stop punishing you for a choice you made when you were grieving and desperate and twenty-two years old."

"Rhys—"

"I won't let anything take you from me again," I said, quoting my own words back to him, my voice rough now, barely holding together. "That's what I meant. Not a stranger's threat. My own cruelty. I'd already taken you from yourself once, watched you disappear into someone smaller and more careful than you ever should have had to become, and I was terrified of doing it twice."

Matteo sat down slowly across from me, the anger in his posture finally giving way to something rawer, something closer to grief.

"You should have just told me," he said, quiet. "All of it. From the beginning."

"I know," I said. "I'm telling you I chose the lie because the truth meant admitting I wanted you before I ever deserved to, and I'm sorry, and I know sorry means nothing measured against three weeks of watching you fall for a version of honesty I built out of convenient forgetting."

Neither of us spoke for a long moment, the weight of everything finally sitting plain and unguarded between us, nothing left to manage or control or curate.

"I don't know what to do with this," Matteo admitted finally. "You're finally telling me everything, and I don't know if it changes anything, or if it's just one more thing I have to carry now, alongside everything else."

"I don't expect it to fix anything," I said. "I just couldn't let another day pass without you hearing it honestly, whatever you decide to do with it."

A sharp knock sounded at the study door, urgent, cutting through the fragile quiet we'd finally managed to build.

"Alpha Callahan," a runner's voice called, breathless. "Forgive the intrusion. It's urgent."

I stood, exchanging a look with Matteo before crossing to open the door. The runner stood there, young, out of breath, dread plain across his face.

"What's happened," I said.

"Beta Bane has called an emergency session," the runner said. "For dawn. And the scouts, they've confirmed someone crossing onto Callahan land just now, at the northern gate. Authorized under Beta Bane's own seal."

"Who," I said, dread already curling cold in my chest.

"They don't know yet," the runner admitted. "Only that Beta Bane authorized the crossing personally, and whoever it is, they're already being escorted toward the estate."