What the Dead Brother Wanted

POV: Matteo

"Say it out loud," Sofia said. "Whatever it is. I can see it sitting on you."

We were in her workroom, jars of dried herbs lined up on every shelf, the smell of mint and something sharper underneath it. She'd pulled two stools close together and handed me a cup of tea I hadn't asked for, the way she always did when she meant business.

"Say what," I said.

"You've had a face on you since the courtyard. Since Dave." She raised an eyebrow at me. "Or since before that. Pick your poison."

I turned the cup in my hands instead of answering right away. Sofia didn't fill the silence for me. She never did. She just waited, patient as stone, until I ran out of places to hide.

"I keep thinking about my brother," I said finally.

"That's not new."

"No," I said. "But I keep thinking about the part I never say out loud."

She set her own cup down. "Go on, then."

"Everyone calls it a sacrifice. What I did. Stepping in." My voice came out rougher than I meant it to. "My mother writes to me like I'm some kind of saint. The elders praise me for it at every dinner like I gave something up."

"You did give something up."

"Not the way they think." I made myself keep going, because if I stopped now I never would again. "I grew up watching him get everything without asking for it. Love, attention, the whole family orbiting him like he was the sun. I got noticed for filing his correspondence. For being useful. That's it. That's the whole ledger of my childhood."

Sofia didn't flinch. She just watched me, steady, letting me have the space to say the ugly part.

"When he died," I said, "some part of me didn't just feel grief. Some part of me felt a door open. For the first time in my whole life, a room was going to actually need me for something that mattered, instead of something practical." My throat tightened around the next words, but I pushed them out anyway. "I didn't take his place because I'm selfless, Sofia. I took it because I wanted, for once, to be the one people couldn't overlook."

"That's not a crime," she said quietly.

"It feels like one."

"Wanting to matter isn't the same as wishing him dead," she said. "You didn't do this to him. He was already gone. You just didn't correct people when they called it sacrifice instead of the truth."

"That's its own kind of lie though, isn't it."

"Maybe," she said. "But it's a human one."

I let out a breath I'd been holding since I sat down, and something in my chest eased just slightly, the way a held muscle finally lets go after being tensed too long. It was the first time I'd said any of it plainly, out loud, to another living person, and the world hadn't ended for hearing it.

"Thank you," I said. "For not looking at me like I just confessed to something monstrous."

"You confessed to being human," Sofia said. "Different thing entirely."

The council dinner that night was the same as every other one, candlelight and careful conversation and Rhys two seats down performing warmth he didn't feel toward me the moment the cameras weren't watching. I'd gotten good at tuning it out.

I was refilling my glass near the far table when Councilwoman Ashworth appeared at my elbow, sherry in hand, the kind of loose, unbothered look on her face that comes after several glasses too many.

"You did well tonight," she said, patting my arm. "Better than we all expected, honestly."

"Thank you," I said, the reflex worn smooth from two years of practice.

She looked past me toward Rhys, something calculating flickering behind her eyes.

"Convenient, wasn't it," she said, almost to herself, almost careless, "that he never made it to the altar."

I went still. "What?"

But she was already turning, already drifting back toward the crowd like she'd said nothing more remarkable than a comment on the wine.

"Councilwoman," I said, following a step. "What do you mean by that?"

She didn't answer. She didn't even turn around, swallowed up by a cluster of guests near the fireplace, her sherry glass raised in greeting to someone else entirely.

I stood there with the question burning a hole straight through my chest, my brother's face rising up in my mind uninvited, the official story I'd never once questioned suddenly sitting wrong in my mouth. Convenient. Not an accident. Not a tragedy. Convenient.

I pushed through the crowd after her, scanning every face, every cluster of guests near the windows, near the door, near the fire. She was gone. Vanished into the noise and candlelight like she'd never spoken at all.

I turned in a slow circle, my pulse loud in my own ears, and that was when I found him.

Dave Bane. Across the room, half in shadow near the far wall, a drink untouched in his hand.

Watching me.

Still. Unreadable. Like he'd heard every single word.