Chapter 50 #2
I don't wait for follow-ups. I turn, and my mates close ranks around me without a word, without a signal. It's instinct for them now, this protection.
Ridge and Colter flank me, walls of muscle and menace that clear our path through the crowd. Kylian walks backward, watching for threats with a predator's patience, while Luka guides me with a hand at my elbow, his touch light but insistent.
We make it to the limousine. The door seals with a heavy thunk that sounds like the closing of a tomb.
And then—
I break.
The sob tears out of me, violent and ugly, ripping through the careful facade I've maintained for days. It's not graceful. It's not cinematic. It’s not pretty. Crying your heart out normally isn’t, despite what movies want you to believe.
I collapse, folding inward like a dying star consuming itself, grief and terror and exhaustion finally winning the war they've been waging against my composure. I don't just cry; I wail, a sound I've never heard myself make, animalistic and raw.
Strong arms catch me before I hit the floor. Ridge pulls me into his lap and cradles me like something precious and fragile, his new beard scratching against my temple as he murmurs nonsense—"I've got you. I've got you."—over and over like a prayer.
Colter strokes my hair, his skin cool against my fevered skin. Luka presses a water bottle into my hand, practical even in crisis. Kylian… Kylian wraps himself around us both, his face buried in my neck, and I feel the wetness there that tells me he's crying too.
“I need—” My voice cracks, splinters, reforms. “I need to see him. I need to see Teddie.”
No one argues. No one reminds me of protocols or appearances or the receiving line I'm supposed to attend, where foreign dignitaries will offer condolences I don't want and expect gratitude I can't give.
Colter taps the partition and gives directions to the driver, his voice rough with emotion he won't show. The car changes course, tires squealing against wet cobblestones, heading not toward the palace but toward the medical center Teddie’s been transferred to, reserved exclusively for politicians and royalty.
Doctor Tamara herself is overseeing his care.
The waiting room is surprisingly small, with fluorescent lights buzzing like angry insects overhead. It smells of despair and industrial cleaner, the scent of places where people come to pray for miracles and settle for survival.
And there, in the hard plastic chair by the window, is Caran.
He looks terrible. Not just tired—ravaged. Pale as paper left in the rain, dark circles carved beneath his eyes like trenches, his omega pheromones sour with stress and sleeplessness.
He was beautiful once, all golden skin and sharp cheekbones and smiles that could light up ballrooms. Still is, technically—but grief has hollowed him out, scraped him clean like a pumpkin at harvest, left him a shell of the man who'd once smiled at my brother across a crowded room and changed both their lives.
My chest aches with complicated pain, a Gordian knot of emotion I don't have the energy to untangle. He betrayed me, technically. Sold secrets, compromised security, all to save Teddie.
Yes, it was technically Sam who got his hands dirty, but Sam wasn’t acting alone. Caran was the one who knew everything about me, about Teddie, about our parents. He simply fed the information to Sam, who, in turn, gave it to the Noths in exchange for medicine.
I should hate him. Part of me does—a hot, bright coal of rage that glows in my gut.
But looking at him now, watching his hands shake as he clutches a coffee that's probably gone cold hours ago, I understand too well what desperation does to a person.
It twists love into something ugly. It makes monsters of mothers and traitors of friends.
I cross the room. My heels click against the linoleum, too loud in the hushed stillness.
He looks up, startled, and something breaks in his expression when he sees me—not just breaks, shatters.
The coffee cup slips from his fingers and hits the floor with a plastic clatter that no one moves to clean up.
I sit beside him. The chair creaks under my weight, protesting the intrusion. For a moment, we just breathe—his inhales ragged and wet, mine steadier but not by much. The silence stretches, elastic and tense.
Then I reach out.
He falls into me like a man drowning, his thin frame racked with silent sobs that shake us both. I hold him because he's holding Teddie in his heart, just like I am, and right now, that's enough. That's everything.
We cling to each other like shipwreck survivors, two people who love the same dying boy, bound together by guilt and hope and the terrible understanding of what we'd both sacrifice to keep him breathing.
“He's going to be okay,” Caran whispers against my shoulder, but it sounds like a prayer rather than a statement, like he's trying to convince himself by repetition.
“We don't know that.” My voice is sandpaper, rough and honest.
I won't lie to him. We've had enough lies.
“I do.” He pulls back and wipes his face with trembling fingers that leave red streaks across his cheekbones.
His eyes meet mine, red-rimmed and desperate, pupils blown wide with exhaustion. “Brylee, I need to tell you. The whole story. You deserve to know why—why I did what I did.”
“You don't have to—” I start, but he cuts me off with a shake of his head that looks painful, like it costs him something.
“I do.” He grips my hand, his fingers ice-cold, trembling like leaves in a storm. “When I first learned Teddie was sick, when the doctors said there was nothing they could do, I was desperate. So I went to my brother. Sam.”
He swallows hard, Adam's apple bobbing. “Sam said he knew people. Said he could get the medicine. Said he could help. I didn't ask questions. I just wanted Teddie to live. I would have sold my soul. I would have sold yours, at least at first, before you became more than just ‘Teddie’s sister’ to me.” His voice cracks on the admission, shame dripping from every word. “And I did. God, I did.”
He takes a shuddering breath, turning fully in the chair to stare at me. The anguish in his eyes is a punch to the gut, knocking the wind out of me.
“It was… It was my idea to have him as your roommate at Eros. Not because I thought he would betray you. Never that. But because I knew you would need someone to look after you. I'm good at technology. You know that. I had already changed Sam's last name to grant him entrance a year prior.”
A self-deprecating smirk tugs at his lips, there and gone, a ghost of the man he used to be.
“I pretended he was the son of a rich noble and manipulated a few school websites, writing up archived posts about Sam’s achievements.
That's the only way those pretentious bastards would allow a beta in the academy. Of course, that guy I chose doesn’t actually have a son, but no one knows that.
He keeps to himself and lives on the other side of the country.
“I thought…” He takes a stilted breath. “I thought Sam would protect you. Have your back.”
Phantom claws wrap around my lungs. Every breath scrapes against my rib cage, sharp and insufficient.
“Are you saying he knew? Sam, I mean. He knew?” I whisper, blinking away the barrage of tears that threatens to blind me.
I'm belatedly aware of Ridge taking a step forward in my periphery, drawn to my misery like a compass needle to north, but I wordlessly shake my head.
This is between me and Caran.
“That you were a girl? That you were Princess Brylee?” Caran scrubs at the blue-black skin beneath his eyes, evidence of his lack of sleep, of his suffering. “Yeah. He knew.”
He takes another shuddering breath, and when he speaks again, his voice is barely audible, a confession whispered into the void.
“I didn't know he was planning to sell you to the Noths.
I swear to God, Brylee, I didn't know. I never would've agreed to that. Not… Not even for Teddie. Not when I know losing you would destroy him. Destroy both of us.”
The pieces click together with terrible clarity, a puzzle I never wanted to solve.
Caran's betrayal wasn't malicious. It wasn't power hungry or greedy.
It was love, twisted and desperate and catastrophic, the same love that has him sitting in this waiting room now, wasting away while his mate fights for his life.
He broke the world to save one person, and now he's watching that world crumble anyway.
I look toward the closed doors of the ICU, where machines beep in mechanical rhythm and my brother's chest rises and falls with mechanical assistance.
I think of my parents in the ground, finally agreeing on something—the permanence of silence.
Of peace that might be real or might be a lie wearing diplomacy's mask.
Of cures that don't cure and brothers who might not wake up and traitors who loved too hard.
I squeeze Caran's hand, feeling the bones beneath his skin, fragile and human and breakable.
And we sit together in our shared agony, waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the clock to strike midnight, for the miracle that might never come—two people bound by the boy sleeping down the hall, holding on to hope by our fingernails, bleeding but refusing to let go.