What Sofia Knows

POV: Matteo

"He remembers," I said, the second Sofia's door closed behind me, no preamble left in me to spare. "Everything. He's known for weeks, maybe. He's just letting me believe otherwise."

Sofia didn't look surprised. That was the first thing that struck me, standing there in her doorway with my whole world tilted sideways. She just sat down slowly on the edge of her workbench, her face gone careful and still.

"Tell me what happened," she said.

I told her everything. The greenhouse, the words he shouldn't have known, the flicker of panic before he buried it. She listened without interrupting, her hands folded tight in her lap, something building behind her eyes that looked less like shock and more like confirmation.

"You already suspected," I said, when I finished. "Didn't you. Since the hospital."

"Since the doorway," she admitted. "That day I walked in and saw him holding your hand like he'd done it a thousand times. Trauma amnesia doesn't work that way, Matteo. The gaps don't stay that convenient. They don't line up so neatly with exactly what he'd need to forget."

"Then why didn't you say something."

"Because I needed to be sure," she said. "And because saying it out loud meant admitting I was watching for something I've been afraid of finding for a very long time."

Something in her voice made me sit down across from her, my own crisis quieting just enough to notice hers.

"Sofia."

She was quiet for a long moment, her fingers picking at the edge of her sleeve, a nervous habit I'd never once seen from her in all our years of friendship.

"I had a brother," she said finally. "Older. Kind. Everyone loved him the way people love easy things."

"Sofia, you don't have to—"

"I want to," she said, cutting me off gently. "You've never once asked me to carry this alone. I think it's time I stopped making you the only one who does the telling."

I nodded, letting her have the space she needed.

"He was bonded young," she said. "To someone powerful. It was arranged, the way things sometimes are, and everyone called it an honor. I was the only one who thought something about it felt wrong from the start. The way his match looked at him. Too careful. Too controlled."

"What happened," I asked, quiet.

"The bond was manufactured," she said, her voice flattening in the way voices do when they've told a story so many times in their own head that the words have worn smooth from repetition. "Forced, using old rituals nobody should still know how to perform. My brother didn't choose it. He was made to believe he had, somewhere along the way, that the feelings were real and his own. By the time I understood what had actually happened to him, there was nothing left to save."

"I'm so sorry," I said, and meant it more than the words could carry.

"He died believing he'd chosen a life that was never actually his to choose," Sofia said. "That's the part I never got over. Not that he was hurt. That he never even knew he'd been hurt."

The silence between us stretched long and heavy, the weight of her grief settling into the room alongside my own fear.

"That's why you've been watching Rhys so closely," I said slowly, understanding arriving all at once, cold and clear. "This isn't just professional caution for you. You've been terrified of watching it happen again."

"Every single day," she admitted, her eyes finally meeting mine, raw in a way I'd never seen from her. "Watching him wake up gentle and devoted after two years of coldness, watching you fall for it despite everything you know, it's been like watching the same story unfold from a different angle, and I couldn't tell if I was seeing history or seeing something new."

"And now?"

"Now I think it's worse," she said. "Because at least my brother's bond was a lie from the outside, forced on him by someone else's hand. What Rhys is doing, if what you're telling me is true, that's a lie he's choosing every single day, with his eyes wide open. That's not manufactured. That's deliberate."

I sat with that, the full weight of it settling into my chest alongside everything else I'd been carrying since the night before.

"I don't know what to do," I said. "I don't know if I confront him, or wait, or—"

"You're not carrying this alone anymore," Sofia said, reaching over to grip my hand, fierce in a way that steadied something in me even now. "Whatever you decide, I'm not letting you decide it by yourself. Not after everything."

I opened my mouth to answer her, some fragile gratitude working its way up through the fear, when a sharp knock sounded at the door.

Sofia's assistant stood in the frame, slightly breathless, glancing between the two of us with obvious unease.

"I'm sorry to interrupt," she said. "There's a message for Matteo."

"From who," I asked, my stomach already tightening with a dread I couldn't quite explain.

"Dave Bane," she said. "He's requesting a private audience with you. As soon as possible."

Sofia's hand went rigid around mine.

"He's never once asked to see you alone," she said, quiet, careful, the same dread I felt now written plainly across her face. "Not once, in two years."