Chapter 80 The Most Hated Brother
First came the immediate recoil, the instinctive no that came up before conscious thought. Then the slower, more honest recognition underneath it.
She'd known. Not with certainty, not with proof, but she'd known that something was wrong. She had stood next to Enzo and watched him not talk about Matteo and had filled the silence with every possible explanation she could construct that made him less guilty, and she had done that because the alternative was something she hadn't been ready to look at directly.
He had saved her life. Multiple times. He had put himself between her and danger and looked at her and something in his eyes had been real, she was almost certain something in his eyes had been real, and none of that changed what Maddox had just told her, and the combination of the two things was something she didn't know what to do with.
She took a step back without meaning to. Her hand came up and pressed flat against her sternum.
"He killed him," she said. Not asking. Confirming.
"Yes," Maddox said.
"How? Why?”
"It doesn't matter right now."
"It matters to me."
Maddox looked at her with an expression she couldn't fully read. "They fought," he said carefully. "Enzo was there. Matteo didn't survive it. I’m sorry.”
Grace thought about the morning Enzo had left without saying anything. The morning she had woken up and found him gone. She had constructed so many explanations for that too, had given him the benefit of every doubt she had available, and she was starting to understand that she had a habit of doing that with people who did not deserve it.
"Why are you sorry?" she said. "You said sorry when I mentioned Matteo before. Why?"
Maddox was quiet.
"He raised you," she said. "He was your family. It makes sense you'd grieve for him, I'm not asking about that." She watched his face.
Maddox looked at her for a long moment, then he said, "You should go home, Grace."
The subject had been closed. She could feel it close.
She narrowed her eyes at him. “I told you," she said. "I don't have a home to go to."
"Grace."
"I need to find my birth parents." She said it directly, looking at him. "That's the thing I keep coming back to. Everything else and whatever is happening with my body, all of it is tangled up in not knowing where I came from and why they left me. I need to know that before I can figure out anything else."
Maddox looked at her steadily. "You don't have any leads."
"I know I don't. That's why I'm telling you." She held his gaze. "You were always better at finding things than I was. You always knew where to look."
"That was for lost keys, your missing homework and… you."
"The skill could be more flexible then. Remember you found me when I was about to drown.”
He made a sound that was not quite a laugh. He looked away from her into the trees, and she watched him think about it.
"If I help you find what you're looking for," he said, "you go somewhere safe after. Away from here, away from the everything, somewhere they're not looking for you."
"Agreed," she said.
"I mean it. You don't come back anywhere close to all these, you don't insert yourself into anything that's happening between the rogues and the packs."
"Maddox."
"Do you agree or not?"
"I agree," she said.
He looked back at her then, the deal settled between them. She felt the relief of it, small and clean amid everything that was still unresolved.
Suddenly, there was a small twitch of his nose, “You smell different.” Grace frowned at him and sniffed herself.
“You jerk, I don’t smell—” He stepped into her space, cutting off her sentence and his expression shifted again, the negotiations set aside, replaced by something more present and less guarded.
His eyes moved to her shoulder.
Specifically, to the left side of her neck, just above the collar of her shirt where the marking sat. She had grown so accustomed to it that she sometimes forgot it was there.
She watched Maddox's face as he looked at that spot on her neck before quickly moving and pulling open her collar, revealing the mark.
“Maddox!” She gasped at the sudden intrusion before pushing him though he didn’t budge.
She looked up at him, his expression had gone blank, kind of the way it was when he first appeared at the clearing but this time, she could see he was trying to control something that moved behind his eyes.
He lifted his eyes from the mark to her face.
"Enzo marked you," he said. His voice was different from how it had been a moment ago, stripped of emotion.
It wasn't a question. He was looking at the mark as if his stare could burn it to nothingness.
Grace met his eyes and said nothing, because there was nothing to say that the mark hadn't already said.
Maddox looked at it for another moment. His jaw was tight. His eyes, when they came back to hers, held something she recognised from years of knowing his face, something he had rarely directed at her so openly, so hurt.
Enzo had marked his mate.